Well, obviously I’ve had to drink A LOT of coffee to arrive at an answer. And based on my personal preference for a 14g double-shot espresso, I’ve arrived at the following numbers:

250g — 17 cups
500g — 35 cups
1kg — 70 cups

The only real way to know is to try it for yourself. I’d love to hear back from you about how long your bag lasts. Drop your own numbers in the comments below.

If this is you, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

“Coffee: It’s Not Rocket Science” written by Sébastien Racineux and Chung-Leng Tran takes an exhaustive look at more or less everything to do with coffee culture. From the basics of being a coffee lover, spending time on making the perfect cup, and all the way through to the finer points of growing and the origin characteristics, the depth of detail is made easy to take in with non-technical explanations backed up with easy-to-understand illustrations.

While this book is all you’ll need to break yourself in gently, it’ll equally expand your deeper knowledge beyond the basics.

If you need this book on your coffee table, you can grab it from all major online retailers. But I do recommend buying from bookshop.org to directly support your local bricks and mortar book shop.

But they’re all wrong. Including this one.

You see, they’re not coffee beans at all.

How to explain this… think about a cherry. The stone inside is the seed. And that’s what a coffee bean actually is — a coffee seed. But it looks like a bean.

I can’t find a reference to explain when and why this happened. But it did.

Now you know.

So Eclectic Coffee is sold not by origin (although it’s always listed), but by four different roasts — light, medium, medium dark, and dark. And after far too much testing, there’s also a dedicated espresso blend.

And not being tied to a particular origin means that the source can be changed on a regular basis. If I find a new one that I like, you can be sure that you’ll be able to try it too.

Each roast has been developed to suit different bean origins. A light roast may well offer a better flavour than the same bean dark roasted. And I’ve drunk life-threatening amounts of coffee just to make sure.

Ready to start? 

It’s easy — think about how you like your coffee and you’ll find a roast, size, and grind to suit.

I must admit, I lack both a scientific and artistic mind, although over the last 18 months my grey matter has swollen tremendously, with much education, reading, training, and tutorials. I’ve immersed myself in the world of coffee roasting.

When I chose to turn the idea of Eclectic from an idea to a scary reality, I knew I would have to get my “FBI Mike” (a moniker I’ve had for many years) hat back on and research the art of coffee roasting and coffee roasters themselves to at least the nth degree.

In this modern world supplying ethical, environmentally friendly, and sustainable products is seen as a prerequisite and all should strive for this from day one and not as an afterthought.

Another hat colour of choice I’ve worn for close to a decade is a green one, a renewable energy one. I’ve been a co-founder of two organisations whose prime focus has been to bring light and power to Sub-Saharan Africa, working in the likes of Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to name a few. Over the years we’ve powered off-grid rural schools and health clinics and lit up many communities with our solar street lights, so green credentials have always been close to my heart.

Coffee roasting is generally done via gas. Over the last few years however, cleaner and more environmentally friendly electric roasters have come onto the market, focusing on home roasters and smaller commercial operators.  My first foray into coffee roasting came via the way of a 300g Gene Cafe roaster, and from here on I got bitten by the roasting bug.

To proceed in my quest, I knew I had to find a roaster guru, and found this in the way of James Adams of Jo Wolfe Ltd. Finding a roaster engineer and innovator in the UK is rarer than hen’s teeth, and James has helped me enormously with my roasting journey.

James himself scoured the globe, looking for a quality electric coffee roaster that he could import to the UK and innovate, to offer the highest possible roasting experience to the user. He found an experienced, solid, trustworthy manufacturer that offered flexibility, first-class customer service, and of course well built and reliable machines.

I’ve opted for Jo Wolfe’s 2kg roaster. This is deliberately small, deliberately electric. The build quality is bulletproof, offers excellent value for money, and it looks really cool — a blend of old school meets new school. This roaster is durable and reliable, and for a not-so-tech-savvy guy like me, it’s easy to maintain. Also, with James’s wizard-like innovation, it can offer some future hush-hush, top-secret customisation and upgrades that can really take the roaster to the next level.

So there you go — my weapon of choice is a 2kg low-emission electric drum roaster. If I get busy, I can even upgrade to a 3kg roaster, but that however that’s my limit. I’m starting deliberately small and staying deliberately small.