jpender wrote:Region based? Are sneaky add-on fees prohibited in your state?

Onyx says that the fee goes towards their employees and that they hope that an add-on fee that many might overlook during the checkout process will be "easier to understand and more transparent than raising coffee prices".

Seems like the opposite of transparent to me. The 2lb bag of coffee is listed at $58 but it turns out it actually costs $59.45. Why not an add-on fee for the bag it comes in? Or the roasting process? Or just break it all down like an accountant would and make every piece of the puzzle a separate fee. The "coffee" could then be listed on the main page as going for $12 with fees tacked on during checkout that total an additional $47.45.

Fortunately there are lots of other roasters out there.

I'm not quite sure what is going on but it seems to have to do with more than forcing a tip for online orders to fund their baristas. A service fee for a bag packaged in a roastery to fund baristas seems like a stretch. Curiously that 2.5% aligns closely with a credit/debit card processing fee WHICH my state has legislation to prohibit.

A service fee is separate from a tip in Ca. even if it looks exactly like it should be a tip.
I think you're on the money. It appears more of a credit card processing fee they are passing on to the customer instead of being forced to eat the cost themselves. Much the same way several gas stations around the state of Ca charge more for credit card customers than cash customers. They just aren't as flowery with their language.

Bizmark wrote:I've been using a roast colorimeter for some time to help narrow the starting point for dialing in new coffees, and I just noticed that Onyx is now listing the Agtron level for its offerings. One case in point is their Monarch, which is currently at 64.3 (the upper end of medium dark), and which I have previously measured as 77 (upper end of medium) and 82 (lower end of medium light at different times.

I would bet Onyx is using the Agtron Gourmet scale, not their commercial scale.

There are a lot of "interpretations" of the Agtron Gourmet Scale. This is the actual scale from the Agtron website.

64.3 is medium light. 82 will likely break your grinder.



https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... ++++++.pdf

jpender wrote:Region based? Are sneaky add-on fees prohibited in your state?

Onyx says that the fee goes towards their employees and that they hope that an add-on fee that many might overlook during the checkout process will be "easier to understand and more transparent than raising coffee prices".

Seems like the opposite of transparent to me. The 2lb bag of coffee is listed at $58 but it turns out it actually costs $59.45. Why not an add-on fee for the bag it comes in? Or the roasting process? Or just break it all down like an accountant would and make every piece of the puzzle a separate fee. The "coffee" could then be listed on the main page as going for $12 with fees tacked on during checkout that total an additional $47.45.

Fortunately there are lots of other roasters out there.

I've no interest in this coffee but I wanted to verify that I am seeing the same $1.45 service fee as well when I go to checkout. I have grown tired of this nickel and diming these days myself.

jpender wrote:I didn't see it either, not at first. Look again, it's kind of under the hood. There's a down arrow you can click that shows you detail. Whether the shipping is free or not they add a little something extra.

I'm the last person to tell anyone how to run their business, but this statement implies that coffee prices are dictated solely by the green market. That is an odd statement and a quirk of this transparency trend in the coffee biz. Personally, I don't get it.

My coffee prices are dictated by the coffee market, shipping costs, the area I do business (rent), the amount I choose to compensate employees (payroll), utilities, process efficiency, etc. I don't see the sense in separating out a line item for a 2.5% service fee instead of just adding $3 to a $120 2lb bag of coffee. But I'm also not in the business of selling 10oz bags of coffee for $38 either, so what do I know?

I wonder if assessing it as a "fee" changes the tax consequence of Onyx's business. Maybe in their area these types of disclosed fees can be untaxed and bolster a businesses bottom line (which I find a stretch but hey).

Or maybe that's one of the joys of the Onyx experience, crowdfunding a virtue signaling campaign.

@Almico
color meters are a subject that is not too much developed yet and people around the world do their own thing when it comes to taking samples and giving numbers.

It has been discussed that if you have finer grinds, then the light produced by the sensors will not escape between the grinds and a bigger total of the refracted beam will come back and the reading will be closer to reality.

SCA and old literature like the one you linked above uses an extremely coarse grind size, it's close to the SCA cupping protocol where most of the grinds are in the 650-800 microns window. Out of curiosity a few weeks ago I goy myself some lab sieves and did some trials to take values in that interval, and the values were low.

Grind Specification
The coarseness /fineness of the grind will determine the amount of effective analytical surface area. It is important to have a grind similar to the CBC standard for auto-drip. A screen specification is included for reference below. If you do not have access to screens, you can adjust the grind by observing the surface of the coffee during sample preparation. When particles form waves during a final pass, the grind is too coarse. If the surface compacts, compresses and cakes, the grind is too fine.
AGTRON ROAST ANALYZER SAMPLE GRIND SPECIFICATION
WEIGHT OF COFFEE RETAINED ON SCREEN #10 & #14: 3.5% (0.0% - 3.5%)
WEIGHT OF COFFEE RETAINED ON SCREEN #20 & #28: 71.5% (65.0% - 75.0%)
WEIGHT OF COFFEE PASSING THROUGH SCREEN #28: 25.0% (25.0% - 35.0%)


Here is an example so you can understand what i'm talking about, it's exactly the same coffee the only difference is that one is in the recommended protocol between screen 20 to 28 while the other one is finer than espresso. The numbers are in agtron gourmet scale.

So? what's the good value?

DenisSabou wrote:@Almico
It has been discussed that if you have finer grinds, then the light produced by the sensors will not escape between the grinds and a bigger total of the refracted beam will come back and the reading will be closer to reality.

Find some technical details here: Understanding Roast Color

DenisSabou wrote:@Almico
color meters are a subject that is not too much developed yet and people around the world do their own thing when it comes to taking samples and giving numbers.

I first started measuring my coffee a few years ago with a RoastRite color analyzer. It works well for my needs and, most importantly, gives consistent results. It is supposedly aligned with the Agtron Gourmet scale, but I take that with a pinch of salt. It was immensely valuable when I moved up from a 5kg roaster to a 30kg. It can get pretty costly burning through 65# of coffee at a time learning to match roasts by cupping.

I noticed very quickly that careful and consistent preparation of the sample to be measured is required for consistent results. For example, quakers need to be culled from whole bean samples and ground coffee needs to be purged of excessive chaff. Finding the right grind is key as well. Too coarse is not good, nor is too fine if the goal is to get usable data for bean to ground ratios at different roast levels and profiles. I'm not sure what value there is in measuring coffee to 10ths of a point, since a few pieces of chaff will skew the number as much as a full point or more.

Like you say, I don't think there is very much standardization yet in coffee roast color and not many small to mid-size roasters are going to spring for a $15,000 USD Agtron. And in my world, small to mid local roasters is where the best and freshest coffee is coming from. For my purposes I just need a tool to ensure I'm hitting benchmarks to maintain consistency.

If the industry is still discovering what these numbers mean to coffee brewing and flavor, what chance does John Q Public have in making sense of them? So other than being able to say, "We have an actual Agrton roast analyzer", I'm not sure what the value is in posting the number on a bag label for the vast majority of end users.

Almico wrote:If the industry is still discovering what these numbers mean to coffee brewing and flavor, what chance does John Q Public have in making sense of them? So other than being able to say, "We have an actual Agrton roast analyzer", I'm not sure what the value is in posting the number on a bag label for the vast majority of end users.

First, colour is one of the most important drivers of result in the cup. It's probably the most important data a roaster can give. Morten Munchow has various articles on this, here's the first one I could find:

https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5710/6/2/29

I don't think it's fair to say "the industry" is "still discovering" what this means. For many in the industry, this is important and they are already au-fait with it to some extent. Others ought to catch up.

Second, John Q Public isn't the right frame of reference, at least not for Onyx. They are charging premium prices, using fancy packaging and trying to position themselves as a high quality offering. (This isn't meant to be an endorsement of Onyx; I don't buy it much and I haven't liked the roasts that I've had, though I thought the green was great.) If they want to position themselves at the pointiest end of the market, the correct frame of reference for them is the pointiest end consumer, who is knowledgeable and willing to pay the most. Now, coffee is jaw-dropping in how ignorant many professionals are, let alone consumers, so it's a fair question whether or not such consumers really even exist. You would have to think that for the majority of their consumers, they are probably buying based on marketing, brand, packaging, reputation, etc. For those consumers, it's just more technical sounding crap that adds to the marketing. For knowledgeable consumers, they know what the information means.

(I want to pause here to acknowledge that Onxy discloses a fairly industry-leading amount of information about how much they pay for the green coffee.)

Third, you say what value is there beyond saying that they have a colour meter? Well that in itself is actually a lot of value. There are tonnes of roasters out there ... the majority, probably, that minimise capital expenditure, don't do much QC and are shockingly inconsistent. Big and small roasters. So even just having some inkling that they actually have a relevant QC step is actually quite valuable.

Fourth, yes, there are difficulties in sample preparation and measurement, but at least if they are internally consistent, then, even if consumers don't use the info to compare across roasters, the measurement is useful for comparing offerings from Onyx. Say you buy a coffee from Onyx and you think it is too dark for you. Or too light. Well, you have the agtron reading for it now, so now you can compare it with their other agtron numbers to save yourself wasting money on other roasts that are highly likely to be the wrong roast level for you. Or, conversely, if it was just a tad too dark and you think that you might have enjoyed their coffee if it was just a tad lighter, now you have a way of figuring out if they have another roast that you might enjoy more.

Finally, generally speaking, it's usually in the consumer's interests for roasters to provide more information rather than less, even if the consumer doesn't read it or understand it. The information can be provided in an unobtrusive way so that really it only affects enthusiastic consumers. The reason why I say usually, rather than always, is because sometimes (99% of the time?) there's "information washing", where roasters copy paste their supplier's information dump and dump it on consumers to seem more knowledgeable. But here the information is something very specific to the roast and the roaster and is something the roaster can be held to, that directly relates to quality. It's only going to be in the consumer's interests for it to be disclosed. Like I mean now Onyx will be open to accountability like "I bought X because your website said it was 10 agtron lighter than Y, but here is a photo of X and Y next to each other and you can see that X is darker than Y". Yes, I agree that much high quality coffee comes from smaller coffee roasters. This is, I'd say, in part because larger roasters have to roast darker, or more baked, and to a price point, to grow. But it's absolutely not true that small roasters are any guarantee of quality. Small roasters can rent facilities and not have much skin in the game, gussy up their webpage with copy pastes from an importer that would have you think that the small roaster has been trotting the globe, white-saviouring ignorant farmers from poverty, and create the impression of competence, when they have no clue and botch every single roast. Having this sort of information is a nice way for consumers that care to winnow out those guys.

To be blunt, coffee roasters know that they can gaslight consumers and that they don't have to provide much information to be held accountable against. This is an effort we should be praising, not questioning. Saying that it's out of step with the market is exactly the point. The market could do a far better job in professionalism than it does. Roasters that have invested capital and time in equipment and processes like colour logging and optical sorters should be vocal about that and market it as a competitive advantage.