Coffee's gone! Woot!

I just managed to finish off an entire 12-oz. bag of Counter Culture’s Finca Mauritania all by myself. Well, unless you’re counting the 80 grams or so that I froze at 4 days post-roast for future enjoyment, but I have no doubt I’ll polish that off as well. This is truly cause for celebration—for me, personally, at least—because I can’t remember the last time it happened. It’s also a testament to how much I enjoyed the beans, I suppose. But enough back-patting; I’d rather focus on the reasons why I hardly ever get through a batch of coffee before it stales. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. I’m the only coffee drinker in the house.

2. I’m too eager to taste what’s out there to settle for plowing through just one coffee at a time.

3. Quantities available for purchase are too large (see below for more on this particular point).

4. I’m picky about freshness.

5. I’m easily bored.

6. I only drink 2 cups per day, on average.

7. Freezer space is limited.

8. I have single-serve options (pods, mainly) that I mix in now and then, especially when I’m in a rush in the morning and/or distracted by meeting my kids’ needs.

The result of this perfect storm of coffee-related facts is that I tend to share beans with friends or, when that option isn’t available, simply toss them periodically. With the weather changing, I’m not all that inclined to make cold coffee concentrate anymore with the leftovers. So, there you go. While I do feel a twinge of guilt over my wastefulness, the sensation isn’t unpleasant enough to motivate me to change my ways.

Sometimes I think I must be strange, but I know from reading comments by other community bloggers that I’m not alone in combining restlessness/voracious curiosity and a small appetite with respect to coffee buying. Which brings me to the end of my little commentary, where I make a simple request of coffee roasters everywhere: how about offering smaller bags for purchase? 8 oz. would be nice, for example. I feel pretty confident that this amount would fit in a small USPS Priority flat rate box, and I’d be happy to pay $5.20 for postage on it—especially since the cost of the coffee itself would presumably be lower than usual given the downsized quantity. I don’t see how doing 8 oz. rather than the usual 12 oz. would cramp roasters’ styles or cause problems, though perhaps it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. Anyway, who’s with me? Should we start a quirky little revolution here? Occupy the third wave?!