Our roaster left us We had signed on, built a menu around their beans, and trained our team in Big Lake on their espresso. Not long after, they were gone. We spent a few weeks calling around and pulling shots with whatever we could get, apologizing at the counter to people who had come in for a drink we could no longer make the same way. Nobody at that company was cruel about it. We were an account number, and account numbers get closed. So when Fresh Cup ran a piece in August called 10 Things Your Wholesale Roaster Wants You To Know, But Is Afraid to Say, we read it twice. Garrett Oden had surveyed thirty roasters, from six thousand pounds a year up to five hundred thousand, and asked them what they wished their cafes understood. Most of them answered anonymously. Of course they did. The roaster and cafe relationship runs on goodwill, and it is hard to tell someone who pays your invoices that the invoice is late. We would have thought about it too. We would rather say ours out loud, before you order anything. The coffee was paid for months ago We buy our green coffee through Cafe Imports in Minneapolis, and our Colombia comes through Samaria. Both are importers. We are not standing in a wet mill in Huila shaking hands with a grower, and we are careful never to say that we are, because the paperwork behind our coffee is an importer position sheet. We would rather you know that than hear a nicer story. We pay about six dollars a pound for green coffee, roughly three times the commodity price, because we are buying a few bags at a time from lots we have tasted rather than buying containers. That money leaves months before the coffee reaches our roastery in Big Lake, and long before any of it reaches your shop. By the time you place your order, that coffee has already been chosen, paid for, and carried across an ocean. The invoice you see is the last step, not the first. A dollar a pound is about a nickel a cup One roaster in the Fresh Cup survey did the arithmetic that most of us have never had the nerve to do in front of a partner. A one dollar per pound increase on wholesale coffee works out to about five cents per drink. Here is the same math with a pound of ours. A pound is 453 grams. A double shot pulls about 20 grams, which gives you 22 drinks. A dollar more per pound costs you four and a half cents on each one. Round a latte up by a dime and you have covered the increase twice, and nobody standing at your counter will notice. We say that gently, because the dime is not the hard part. The hard part is being the person who changes the menu board. Prices move, and you hear it from us Green coffee is an agricultural product traded on a commodity market, so its price moves whether anyone wants it to or not. In the same Fresh Cup survey, 52% of roasters said they will raise prices in 2027, 45% said they will hold, and one said they will come down. We will not pretend we can sit outside that. What we can promise is how you find out. You will hear about a price change from us, in advance, with the reason attached, and never as a surprise line on an invoice you have already committed to. Perhaps that sounds like a low bar. It was not cleared for us when we were the shop on the other end of it. Net 15, and the call we would rather get early Our standard wholesale terms are Net 15. Distributors run on Net 30. If you would rather pay by card at the time of the order we will set you up that way instead, which carries a three percent card fee, and delivery is free on anything over $200 net. Two of the roasters Fresh Cup surveyed put late invoices near the top of their list. One of them put it plainly: Pay your bills on time. We're not your bank. Financing is the most expensive part of this. Anonymous roaster, 150,000 lbs per year, Fresh Cup, August 2026 We are not going to put it that sharply, because we have been the shop that was short in February and we remember exactly how that felt. So here is the version we would rather you hear. If an invoice is going to be late, call us before it is late. We can nearly always work something out in advance. After the fact it gets harder for both of us. Roast-to-order has a schedule behind it We roast to order and ship the same week. Nothing sits in a warehouse waiting for someone to want it, which is the reason your first bag tastes the way it does. It also means we cannot make coffee appear on a Tuesday afternoon because the count came up short on Monday. Coffee needs to rest, too. Beans keep releasing gas for a few days after they come off the roaster, and espresso pulled the morning after a roast behaves differently from espresso pulled four days later. Coffee ordered on the day you run out arrives technically fresh and practically awkward. We have found that the shops who keep a spare week on the shelf almost never call us in a panic. It is the cheapest insurance in the building, and it sits right there next to the flour. What we will and will not print on your bag We can build a blend for your shop and put your name on the front of it. Twelve of our partners already sell one. Brigitte's Cafe has a house blend with their logo on the label and our coffee inside, and every bag someone carries out the door is their name going home with a regular. The minimum on a custom label is 25 bags. We carry certified organic coffees and Fair Trade Organic coffees, and we carry coffees that hold neither certificate. 10,000 Lakes is certified organic. Our Ethiopia Yirgacheffe is certified organic. Others are grown clean and carry no paperwork at all, because certification costs money and we have not paid it on every lot we buy. So if a seal matters on your menu, ask us about the specific coffee you want and we will tell you plainly what that one holds. We would rather answer per coffee than wave a word across the whole shelf. We also will not tell you we buy direct from farmers, because we buy through importers. Cafe Imports handles most of it and Samaria handles our Colombia. It is a less romantic sentence, and it is the accurate one. What we will do is put the farm, the region, the elevation and the variety on the bag. Pick up one of ours and look at the front. The farm printed there is the farm the coffee came from. We test for mold and mycotoxins as well. Coffee is a crop, and crops can pick up mold somewhere between the farm and the bag. It is a flavor problem before it is anything else. We test because we will not hand our own kids something we have not checked ourselves. If you are thinking about roasting your own Five roasters in the survey used their answer to talk cafes out of roasting. We are not going to do that. If you want to roast, roast. It is a good craft, and some of the best shops we know roast their own coffee. What we would ask is that you look clearly at what you are picking up, because sourcing green is a separate business from running a shop. It arrives with agronomy, logistics, a commodity market you do not control, and a machine that needs somebody standing in front of it on a Tuesday morning when you would rather be on the floor with your team. If you decide to go and do it, tell us. We will help you think it through. We would rather lose an account cleanly than have someone leave us quietly. What you are buying The coffee is the easy part to describe. It is air-roasted on a fluid bed rather than a drum, which keeps it smooth and low in acid, and it has been voted Minnesota's best coffee four years running in the Star Tribune Minnesota's Best reader awards. We roast from more than fifteen origins and we will build a blend around your menu. The rest of it is a phone number that gets answered. Jeff coaches our partners on growing the business side of their shop. Elisa trains counters on how to offer a second drink without anybody feeling sold to. If you are dialing in a new espresso at seven in the morning, you can text us, and one of us will pick up or start a video call and watch you pull the shot. Matt Taus at The Hen & The Hog in Albertville moved to us from a national roaster. Duluth's Best Bread up in Duluth, Jill's Cafe in Richmond, Brigitte's Cafe in St. Cloud and Olde Main Eatery in Elk River order every few weeks. Not one of them is an account number here. You can see the rest of the shops pouring our coffee on our Find Ember Near You page, and the terms and ordering side lives on our wholesale coffee page. Existing partners reorder through the wholesale portal. If you would like to taste it first, we will send three coffees chosen for your shop. We call before we ship, so that we send you the right ones. The call is free, and so is the coffee.

It's Saturday morning. In two days we'll unlock the front door on a Monday, and for the first time ever there will be people on the other side of it. That might not sound like much. One more day a week. We've kept Mondays dark since we opened, though, and every time somebody asked when that would change I gave the same answer. When we can do a Monday the way we do the rest of the week, we'll open on a Monday. We wrote about that decision here when we finally made it. Monday clears the bar now. The coffee will be roasted on air in our own roastery, same as always. The pastries will be made from scratch that morning. The syrups will be the same ones we pour every other day. Nothing about the day gets thinned out to make it possible. If you want the hours and the address, they're on the shop page. Why we waited We've never been good at doing everything at once. Crawl, walk, run is about the speed we move, and some weeks that's generous. Adding a day before we could staff it properly would have meant a Monday that was a little worse than a Tuesday, and people notice. They always notice. So we waited. We built the bones first. For a long stretch, though, the reason I stared at that closed Monday was fear. There's a big coffee chain a couple of units down the same street from us. When we opened, I thought about them constantly. I did the math on what a dark Monday was handing them. I pictured the cars in their line that could have been in ours, and I let it sit with me longer than it deserved. Their coffee comes out of a machine at the push of a button. That's a real service for a real need. If you've got four minutes before a meeting and you need something hot in your hand, that's where you should go, and I mean it. I wouldn't pick it for myself. Plenty of mornings call for exactly that, though, and there's a place for everything. What changed is that we stopped keeping score. We've found that when you measure yourself against the shop down the street, you start making decisions about them instead of about your own counter. The better questions turned out to be smaller ones. Is this cup good? Did that person leave a little better than they came in? We've answered those six days a week for years. Now we get to answer them on a seventh. A word about Elisa, from me Starting a small business is not for the faint of heart. I don't think anyone can understand the size of the sacrifice until they've signed for something themselves and watched what it asks of their family. Elisa carried a lot of those years. She was here early and here late, and she absorbed most of the parts nobody saw. This year she's been able to step back from the day to day, and watching that happen has been the most rewarding thing of the whole season for me. She reads again. She's deep into Jeeves and Wooster, and she'll read a line out loud and start laughing before she gets to the end of it. She putters around outside. Her garden at home is doing well this year. I'd take a slower version of this business every time if that's what it costs to get her afternoons back. The team We're grateful for the people who run this place. They're the reason Monday is possible at all. The calendar turns twice on us every year. Summer into the school year, school year into summer, and each turn takes some of our team with it. We said goodbye to a few people this season we'd have kept forever if life worked that way. We also brought in some good new faces, and they've picked things up faster than I expected. One spot is still open. The roastery has grown to where we need another full-time roastery technician. If you know somebody who'd be good at it, send them to embercoffeejobs.com, or just tell us in the shop. The light changed this week There are a couple of days every year where it almost flips over, and I catch it every time. The sun goes golden, a little earthy, and that's fall. It's a good coffee season. We have a strong run of Roaster's Choice lined up over the next few months, and since it rotates every month, it's worth keeping an eye on. The rest of the shelf is where it always is if you already know what you like, and if you're still deciding, we put together our honest answer to what we'd hand a first-timer. We're also working on something for the holidays, and honestly I'm as pleased about the timing as I am about the thing itself. Every other year we've thrown the holidays together at the last minute, out of necessity rather than choice. This year we started early enough to think it through. That's the part that feels like health to me. I won't spoil it. Watch our social media over the next few weeks and we'll start showing pieces. If you're the one who has to win a Secret Santa or a white elephant this December, we've got you. There are a few other things on the horizon too, about where Ember shows up and who gets to find us. We're not ready to talk about those yet. Thank you None of this works without you. You're the people who came on a Tuesday because Monday was closed. You buy the bag, you bring a friend in, you ask how the roastery is going and then actually listen to the answer. You're how this got built. There's no ask today. On Monday the door opens, and we'll be on the other side of it, glad you're still here. Matt and Elisa Big Lake, Minnesota

A mom stood at our counter in Big Lake this spring holding her phone. She'd read something about mold in coffee, and she wanted to know whether the pot she'd been making her husband every morning for nine years was a problem. She wasn't being silly. She'd read the same things everyone reads. What are mycotoxins in coffee? Coffee is a crop. It's picked wet, dried in the sun, bagged, shipped across an ocean and stored, and every one of those steps is a chance for moisture to sit where it shouldn't. When it does, mold can grow. Some molds leave behind compounds called mycotoxins, and the mycotoxin in coffee that people mean is almost always ochratoxin A. That much is real. Mold in coffee is a quality-control problem, and it's been studied for decades. Is there mold in coffee? The number you've probably seen If you've gone looking, you've run into a figure. Ninety-one point seven percent of samples contaminated. Ninety percent of store-bought coffee. Half of everything. Those numbers come from real studies, and they get used in a way the studies don't support. The 91.7% figure traces back to a survey of green coffee, the raw unroasted beans before anyone has done anything to them, and it counted mold presence rather than toxin in a finished cup. Detectable and dangerous are different words. Almost every alarming version of this you'll read online quietly swaps one for the other. Pooled surveillance of coffee people actually drink finds ochratoxin A detectable in roughly 53% of samples, often at parts per billion. Samples that exceed the legal safety limit are a small minority of those. Where mold in coffee comes from Mold needs moisture. Below about 0.65 water activity, which measures how much moisture is free for something to live on rather than how damp a thing feels in your hand, mold doesn't get going at all. The particular molds that produce ochratoxin A want conditions considerably wetter than that, and they want warmth with it. Coffee that's dried on schedule and held dry afterwards gives them very little to work with. Coffee that sat wet in a heap for three days gives them a great deal. What predicts contamination better than anything else is defects. When researchers separated defective beans out of Brazilian arabica lots and tested them on their own, the black beans averaged 25.7 micrograms per kilogram and the sour beans 11.3, against low single digits for the lots they'd been sitting in. The problem concentrates in the beans you can see are wrong. Every bag we roast carries a roast date on the front. See what's fresh this week. Arabica vs robusta Which one has more mycotoxins? You'll read that robusta is the problem and arabica is safe. Surveillance does find ochratoxin A somewhat more often in robusta, roughly 37% of samples against 26% for arabica in one comparison. The gap is real, it's smaller than the framing suggests, and the reason for it has little to do with the bean itself. Robusta is more often dried with the fruit still attached, grown at lower and more humid elevations, and strip-picked, which sweeps ripe, unripe and overripe cherries into one bag. Every one of those practices raises risk in arabica too. Brazilian arabica that's strip-picked and dried in the fruit behaves much the same way. How a coffee was grown and handled tells you more than which species is printed on the bag. Does roasting destroy mycotoxins? Roasting destroys most of them. Published reductions of ochratoxin A run from about half to essentially all of it, depending on how dark the roast goes and where the coffee came from, and darker roasts destroy more. You'll still see it claimed that roasting does nothing to mycotoxins in coffee. That one's easy to check, and it doesn't hold up. Is coffee mold dangerous? What the limits say The European Union caps ochratoxin A in roasted coffee at 3 micrograms per kilogram. The United States sets no limit at all, which sounds alarming until you look at why. The FDA tested 514 coffee samples between 2008 and 2022. One of them came back above even the internal threshold the agency uses to decide whether a sample needs a closer look. We're not going to pretend the science sits still, either. European regulators moved to a more cautious framework in 2020, stepping away from a single safe-intake number and toward a method that pays closer attention to people at the high end of exposure. Coffee is one of several everyday foods that contribute, alongside grains, wine, dried fruit and spices, and in most studies it isn't the largest one. Anyone telling you the matter is entirely settled in either direction is ahead of the evidence. Why we test for mycotoxins We've found that the flavor arrives before the risk does. The Specialty Coffee Association's green grading standard counts a single fungus-damaged bean as a full primary defect, the same weight as a full black or a full sour bean, and enough on its own to keep a lot out of specialty grade. The tasting notes for it read like a warning label: fermented, moldy, earthy, dirty, phenolic. Those are the same beans the researchers found carrying the highest readings. Buying to a specialty grade throws them out before anyone gets to the question of toxins, which is the plainest reason we buy the way we do. Coffee with a mold problem tastes wrong long before it becomes a health question. We also send samples out. Ours go to IEH Analytical Laboratories in Seattle, an ISO 17025 accredited food-safety lab that runs ochratoxin A and aflatoxins by HPLC and LC-MS/MS. We name them because a testing claim you can't check isn't worth much. If you want coffee bought to a specialty grade and sent out for testing, ours is here. Browse our coffee, or set up a subscription so it arrives fresh instead of sitting on a shelf. What we're not going to tell you We won't tell you that anything we sell is certified mold-free. No such certification exists. The phrase isn't defined by the FDA, the USDA or anyone else, which means any company can print it on a bag. We won't tell you that your coffee is the reason you're tired. A lot of people tell us Ember sits easier on their stomach, and we hear it often enough to pass it along without dressing it up as a medical finding. Air roasting lowers acidity. That part we can stand behind. Keeping mold out at home The useful moves here are unglamorous. Buy whole bean and grind it as you go, since pre-ground sits around longer. Keep it sealed somewhere dry and out of the fridge, where it picks up moisture every time the door opens. Drink it within a few weeks of the roast date, and buy from anyone willing to print that date on the bag. Then stop worrying about it. Back to the counter She asked one more thing before she left. She wanted to know whether we were telling her all this because we wanted her to buy our coffee. Partly, yes. We'd have told her the same thing if she'd walked out with nothing. Ready to taste the difference? Shop our air-roasted coffee. Every bag is roasted in our own roastery in Big Lake, Minnesota, and dated the day it comes off the roaster.

This is not a sales email. It is a note from the two of us about where Ember is headed this fall, a couple of things we are proud of, and a thank-you that is about four years overdue. We are opening on Mondays For the last few years we have been closed on Mondays. Starting this fall, that changes. We are opening the Big Lake shop on Mondays, and we could not be more excited about it. Judging by how often it comes up at the register, a lot of you feel the same way. Here is why it matters to us. From the start, Ember was meant to be more than a place that sells coffee. We wanted a place of connection, a hub where people meet, work, read, and actually talk to each other over something good in a cup. Being closed one day a week always sat a little sideways with that idea. Opening on Mondays gives the week one more day to be that place. Keep an eye on our social media for the launch date. Once it is set, start thinking about what you want to do with the extra day. The standing meeting. The book club. The Monday-morning work session. The catch-up with a friend you keep meaning to see. That is exactly what the room is for. A word about our roaster In June, Sivetz named us their Roaster of the Month. Sivetz builds the fluid bed roaster we roast on, and they have been building air roasters longer than just about anyone in the business. They pick one shop a month out of everyone running their equipment, and this time it was us, in a town of thirteen thousand people. We are honored by it, and we genuinely love working with them. Their commitment to innovation is a real part of why our coffee tastes the way it does, and the whole journey with them has been a good one. You can read Sivetz's write-up for their side of it, or our own explanation of why we roast on air if the mechanics are your kind of thing. Who we are, and where we are headed Since we are being reflective, it is worth saying plainly what we are trying to build. Our mission is to turn strangers into friends, serve the best coffee anywhere, and be a place that cultivates creativity and good works. That is not a line on a wall. Every person we hire learns it, because we tell them the same thing on their first day: you do not serve coffee, you serve people. Coffee is the reason someone walks in. Belonging is the reason they come back. The name comes from right here. Big Lake was once called Humboldt, and it was a gathering place, somewhere people traveled to spend the day by the water. That era faded over the years. We named the company Ember because we believed a coal of that was still here, and it only needed someone to blow on it. We put all of this to the test on paper this summer when we applied for Roast Magazine's Micro Roaster of the Year. That meant answering a stack of essay questions about our mission, our sourcing, and our people. Win or lose, the exercise made us put a real number or a real name behind every claim, and it clarified where we are going: better sourcing, real jobs for real people, and a shop that stays a community first and a business second. New this fall in the cup A few things are making their way to the menu. Our banana bread latte has been a hit at the farmers markets all summer, to the point where people keep asking us to put it on the board at the shop. This fall, we are doing exactly that. It joins our Bramble Berry matcha, an original recipe we came up with that has quietly turned into a favorite. Every espresso drink we make is built on our El Jefe espresso, and that brings us to something we want to do more of. Let us be your barista at home We want to be more than the company that ships you beans. If you are pulling shots at home and something tastes off, or you want to build one of our drinks in your own kitchen, email us at hello@embercoffee.co. Our team will walk you through the recipe or help you dial in your grinder. Think of us as your at-home barista coach, because that is genuinely how we see the job. If you want a running start on espresso, we wrote a full guide on pulling a light roast shot without it going sour or thin. Four years in One last, more personal note. This summer, Elisa and I took a real vacation for the first time in about four years. We went to Mexico. It was the first stretch in a long time that we were not within arm's reach of the business. We mention it because it is easy to walk into a coffee shop and assume it runs itself. Getting Ember to a place where we could step away for a week took years of sixteen-hour days and a long list of hard decisions, a lot of them personal, most of them made so we could hire the right people, source the right coffee, and still keep the doors open. Starting a coffee shop is the easy sentence to say. Building one that lasts, and that supports real jobs for real people, is the part nobody sees. Four years later, we are still here, still growing, and still meeting people who found us for the first time this week. We do not take a minute of that for granted. Thank you for being part of it. Come see what we are roasting, and we will see you on a Monday. Written by Matt and Elisa Berry, co-founders, Ember Coffee Company, Big Lake, Minnesota.

In June, Sivetz named us their Roaster of the Month. They build the machine we roast on, they have been building fluid bed roasters longer than anyone in the business, and they pick one shop a month out of everybody running their equipment. This time it was a coffee company in a town of thirteen thousand people. We are not going to pretend that was a normal morning. The part worth explaining is why we roast on air instead of on a hot drum, and why we have never done it any other way. The problem every roaster is trying to solve Michael Sivetz, who wrote the book much of the industry still cites, laid out the difficulty in about two sentences. Heat has to reach the bean quickly and evenly. Too hot and the beans scorch, not hot enough and they never really roast, and if the beans are not moving the whole time you get uneven color and a few burnt ones per batch. A drum roaster answers that by tumbling beans against a heated metal wall, and it answers it well. Most of the coffee you have loved came off a drum, and there are drum roasters in this state doing better work than we do. There is a place for everything. Fluid bed roasting answers it a different way. The beans never touch a hot surface. They are suspended in a column of hot air, floating and turning over each other, so every bean sees the same heat at the same moment and nothing rests against metal long enough to scorch. What that tends to give you is a cleaner cup. Less of the roasty edge that covers up what the coffee tastes like, and more of the fruit and sweetness that was in the bean when it arrived. We say "tends to" on purpose, because plenty of drum roasters make clean, sweet coffee too. We have just found this way easier to be consistent on, and consistency is most of the job. We started here, we did not arrive here Worth saying plainly, because the Sivetz write-up reads like a conversion story and it was not one. We have never owned a drum roaster. Our first machine was a Coffee Crafters Artisan XE that we hand-upgraded into an XL configuration, with a Hermethius module handling roast control, and that machine is a fluid bed roaster too. Jason Scott and the Coffee Crafters team deserve real credit for it. It is where we learned to roast, on air, from the first batch we ever sold. What moved us to the Sivetz was volume, not method. Eight to nine pound batches, one about every fifteen minutes, twenty to thirty hours a week of somebody standing at a machine watching it. That is a full job, and it was on its way to being more than one. What the bigger machine changed Same air, more of it. The roastery now runs larger batches with less labor in the same square footage. In practical terms, we pushed a building expansion we thought was a year out further down the road, and our roast-to-roast consistency got better. The consistency is the part we care about. Capacity is a problem you can solve by buying something. Two bags of the same coffee tasting the same in March and in August is a problem you solve by changing how you work. You can read more about how air roasting works if the mechanics are your kind of thing, or read Sivetz's write-up for their side of it. The other thing sitting on our desk In late July we also applied for Roast Magazine's Micro Roaster of the Year. Nine essay questions on mission, sourcing, sustainability, and staff, in a category covering every roaster in the country under 100,000 pounds a year. We doubt we will get the nod. But the questions made us put a number or a name next to every claim we wanted to make, which is a useful thing to be forced into whether you win or lose. The answer we are proudest of is not about coffee at all. If you buy from us and cannot get it to taste right, our head of coffee will get on a call and fix it with you. Not an article. A person, adjusting your grinder while you stand at it. That does not scale, which is exactly why most places stop doing it. Who this belongs to The recognition is the team's. Five golds in the 2026 Star Tribune Minnesota's Best, a machine that runs right because the people running it pay attention, and a wholesale bar full of shops who noticed before any magazine did. Our names are on the sign. The coffee is theirs. Taste what all of this is about. Written by Matt Berry, co-founder, Ember Coffee Company, Big Lake, Minnesota.

The Minnesota State Fair runs August 27 through September 7 this year, and for twelve days a lot of us eat things on a stick that we would never make at home. Mini donuts in a paper bag. A bucket of cookies that nobody finishes alone. Honey and sunflower ice cream from the ag building. Malts thick enough to bend a spoon. We are not at the Fair this year. We are here roasting, which gave us time to work out what those flavors taste like as coffee drinks on a Tuesday morning. Four recipes, all of them built on coffee you already have. First, make the one syrup everything uses Cinnamon simple syrup carries two of these drinks and keeps about two weeks in the fridge. Combine 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water in a small saucepan. Add two cinnamon sticks, or 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon if that is what you have. Simmer 5 minutes, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Cool completely and strain into a jar. For the brown sugar version used in the cold foam, swap in packed brown sugar and skip the cinnamon. 1. The mini donut latte The mini donut is cinnamon, sugar, and hot fried dough, and two of those three translate directly. 2 shots of espresso, or 4 ounces of strong moka pot or AeroPress coffee 1 tablespoon cinnamon simple syrup 8 ounces whole milk Cinnamon sugar for the rim Wet the rim of the mug and roll it in cinnamon sugar. Syrup in the bottom, then the coffee, then milk steamed or heated to 140 to 150°F. Past about 160°F milk starts to taste flat and scalded, which is the most common thing that goes wrong with a home latte. We wrote more about that in Mastering Milk Temperature. Iced version: skip the steaming, shake the coffee and syrup with ice, pour over cold milk. 2. Cookie bucket cold brew The cookie bucket is warm brown sugar and butter, and cold foam gets you most of the way there. 8 ounces cold brew, over ice 1/4 cup heavy cream 1/4 cup whole milk 1 tablespoon brown sugar syrup A pinch of salt Whip the cream, milk, syrup, and salt in a jar or frother for 20 to 30 seconds, until it thickens to the texture of melted ice cream. Pour it slowly over the back of a spoon so it floats instead of mixing. The salt matters more than it sounds like it should. It is what makes brown sugar taste baked rather than sweet. 3. Honey sunflower iced latte This one is a straight lift from the ice cream in the ag building, and it is the sleeper of the four. 2 shots of hot espresso 1 tablespoon honey 1 teaspoon sunflower seed butter 8 ounces milk, over ice Whisk the honey and sunflower seed butter into the hot espresso first, while it is hot enough to melt both. Thirty seconds gets it smooth. Then pour over ice and milk. Add the seed butter to cold milk instead and it seizes into little beads that never recover, so the order here is the whole recipe. 4. The state fair malt affogato 2 scoops vanilla ice cream 1 teaspoon malted milk powder 2 shots of hot espresso, pulled right before serving Stir the malt powder into the ice cream, then pour the hot shots over the top and eat it immediately. Malt does to vanilla what salt does to brown sugar. It makes it taste like a memory instead of a flavor. For a campfire version, pull the shots from Campfire S'mores, our seasonal flavored roast, and crumble a graham cracker over the top. It leaves when summer does. What to brew these with A darker, chocolate-forward coffee stands up better under sugar and dairy than a bright one does, because milk and syrup will bury a delicate fruit note before you taste it. Dark Prairie is our pick for the cold brew, and Salted Caramel Bourbon does a lot of the work for you in the mini donut latte. Our own two signature drinks, the banana bread latte and the Bramble Berry matcha, are on Instagram rather than in this post, because both of them are easier to watch than to read. Or let us make them for you If four drinks is more project than you were looking for, the Big Lake shop is twenty-five minutes up Highway 10 from the north metro, and our espresso is already dialed in. You can also find our booth at the Monticello farmers market on Thursdays and Chanhassen on Saturdays through the end of summer. The market calendar has the dates. The Fair only lasts twelve days. Your kitchen is open all year. Shop coffee for these recipes. Written by the Ember Coffee team, Big Lake, Minnesota.

Almost everyone who puts a bright, fruit-forward bag into an espresso machine gets the same shot at least once. It runs in twenty-six seconds, the crema comes out thin and blond, and the first sip puckers your cheeks. The coffee is not broken. Light roast espresso asks for different numbers than the dark roast your machine was probably dialed in for. Here is what we change behind the bar, and why it works. Why a light roast fights you Roasting makes a coffee bean porous and brittle, and the darker the roast, the more porous it gets. A light roast is denser, so water has to work harder to pull anything out of it. The grind, dose, and time that made your last dark bag taste sweet will pull short on a light one, and a shot that has not extracted enough tastes sour, thin, and slightly salty. Every fix below is the same idea wearing a different hat. Get more out of the bean. 1. Start at 1:2, then stretch it Weigh both ends of the shot. Eighteen grams of ground coffee in, thirty-six grams of liquid espresso out, in 27 to 30 seconds. Weigh what lands in the cup instead of watching the volume, because crema only tells you two things: roughly how fresh the coffee is, and roughly how strong the shot is. If that shot still tastes sour, stretch the ratio before you touch anything else. Same 18 grams in, 40 to 45 grams out. More water through the same coffee means more extraction, and light roasts want it. 2. Grind finer, one step at a time Finer grounds pack tighter, water moves slower, and extraction goes up. Move one step, then purge the grinder by running a few grams through and throwing them away. Most grinders hold onto old grounds, so the first coffee out after a change is still ground at the old setting. If you adjust and nothing changes, you probably did not purge enough. 3. Run the water hotter Hotter water extracts more, so a light roast wants more heat than a dark one. If your machine lets you set a brew temperature, we have found the top of the espresso range works best here, somewhere around 200 to 203°F. If it does not, run a blank shot through the group head to bring everything up to temperature and then brew right away. A useful rule when you are stuck: persistent sourness usually wants more heat, and persistent bitterness usually wants less. 4. Give the bag a little more time Freshly roasted coffee is full of carbon dioxide, and CO2 gets in the way of a clean extraction under nine bars of pressure. Plenty of shops rest their espresso five to twenty days off roast for exactly that reason. Give a light roast at least a week before you judge it. If the first shot from a new bag gushes and tastes hollow, the coffee may just be young. Reading the shot What you taste What it usually means Try this first Sour, thin, sharp Underextracted Grind finer, stretch to 1:2.5, raise the temperature Bitter, dry, ashy Overextracted Grind coarser, shorten to 1:1.75, lower the temperature Fast and pale, under 20 seconds Grind too coarse, or dose too low One step finer, add a gram Slow drips, over 40 seconds Grind too fine One step coarser Sour even when the numbers look right Channelling Level the bed, tamp flat, stop tapping the basket That last row catches more shots than people expect. Tamping does not need to be strong. Push the air out, keep the bed level, and leave it there. Tapping the portafilter to knock stray grounds off the rim can crack the puck loose from the basket wall, and then the water runs around the coffee instead of through it. That tastes exactly like a bad grind setting. One more thing worth saying plainly. A very good grinder with a modest machine beats a very good machine with a modest grinder. What this looks like with Bramble Bramble is the blend we build for a machine. Ugandan naturals bring blackberry and caramel, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe brings blueberry and chocolate, and the beans are dense enough to hold up under nine bars without turning flat. Our starting point: 18 grams in, 40 grams out, about 28 seconds, water near 202°F, roughly ten days off roast. Adjust from there by taste, one variable at a time. The same density that makes Bramble good under pressure makes it good in a moka pot, an AeroPress, or a strong drip brew, so a machine is not the price of entry. For more background, read what light and dark roasts actually do differently, or our general guide to dialing in espresso. We pull these shots every day at our roastery in Big Lake, Minnesota, so these numbers come from how the coffee behaves on the bar rather than from a chart. Start at 1:2, change one thing, taste again. Sour is a setting, not a verdict. Shop Bramble or browse every coffee we roast. Written by the Ember Coffee roasting team, Big Lake, Minnesota.

There’s a Keurig on a counter in almost every house we have ever been welcomed into. It’s there for a reason. The baby is crying, the meeting starts in twelve minutes, the machine asks for one button press and gives you a hot cup back in under a minute. There’s a place for everything, and single-serve brewing has more than earned its place. And yet K-Cup coffee has a reputation, and quite honestly, some of it’s deserved. Flat, thin, a little burnt, a little watery. Here’s what we have found after years of making pods ourselves and coaching people through their machines at the counter: most of what makes pod coffee disappointing has nothing to do with the format. It’s a handful of small, fixable habits, plus the quality of what is inside the pod. This guide walks through both. Why does K-Cup coffee often taste flat or burnt? Four reasons cover nearly every complaint we hear: The coffee inside was stale before you brewed it. Most grocery-store pods are filled with commodity-grade coffee, ground months before you drink it. The machine has mineral buildup. Scale coats the water line and heating element, dulls the temperature, and adds off flavors. The cup size is set too large. The same small dose of grounds stretched across 10 or 12 ounces of water makes thin coffee. It’s arithmetic, not a defect. The water going in isn’t great. Your cup is mostly water. If the tap tastes like the tap, the coffee will too. Every one of those has a fix, and none of the fixes take more than a few minutes. Work down this list and you’ll taste the difference this week. Seven ways to make K-Cup coffee taste better 1. Fill the reservoir with filtered water This is the highest-return thirty seconds in this whole guide. Use a pitcher filter or your fridge dispenser, and skip distilled water, which makes flat coffee because there are no minerals left for the flavor to hold onto. Filtered water tastes cleaner going in and it slows down the mineral buildup inside the machine, so this one fix pays you twice. 2. Run a clean or descale cycle If you can’t remember the last time you descaled, that’s your answer. Old buildup dulls the flavor of everything the machine touches. Most brewers have a descale routine in the manual, and the job is mostly waiting. While you’re at it, wash the drip tray and the pod holder, and wipe the needle area carefully. A clean machine runs hotter and brews cleaner, and it seems worth saying that the fanciest pod in the world can’t brew well through a scaled machine. 3. Press the pod down until it clicks When you drop the pod in, press down until you feel a small click. That click means the needle has made a clean puncture, which lets water flow through the grounds the way it should. A half-seated pod brews unevenly, and uneven brewing is where a lot of mysterious bad cups come from. It’s the smallest habit on this list and we have watched it fix more cups than any other. 4. Brew the smaller cup size A pod holds a fixed amount of ground coffee, so the ounce button you press is really a strength dial. The 6-ounce button makes the fullest cup, 8 ounces is the sweet spot for most pods, and the 10 and 12-ounce buttons are how a decent pod ends up tasting like coffee-flavored water. If you want a big mug, we have found a better route: brew two pods at the smaller size, or brew 8 ounces and top with hot water to taste. You control the dilution instead of the machine deciding for you. 5. Warm the mug first Run a water-only brew cycle into your mug before the real one, dump it, then brew. A single-serve machine pours a small amount of hot water into a cold ceramic mug, and the mug wins that fight. Coffee that lands hot stays sweet longer. This also rinses the needle path between pods, which your first cup of the day will thank you for. 6. Store pods somewhere cool and dry A pod is sealed, but sealed isn’t the same as invincible. Heat is what ages the coffee inside. The cupboard above the stove and the sunny stretch of counter are the two worst homes for a box of pods. A cool, dry cabinet keeps the coffee tasting the way it did when the box was opened, and just like with a bag of whole beans, fresher is simply livelier. If pods have been riding in a hot car trunk since the errand run, expect them to taste like it. 7. Put better coffee in the machine The six fixes above will improve any pod you own. This last one raises the ceiling. A pod is just ground coffee in a sealed cup, so the coffee inside decides most of what you taste, and specialty-grade beans, meaning coffee good enough to be graded and scored rather than sold as commodity filler, brew a noticeably different cup through the exact same machine. Roast date matters here the same way it does for whole bean. So does the roast style, which brings us to ours. What we put in an Ember K-Pod We spent a long time saying no to making pods, because we didn’t want our name on a flat cup. What changed our mind was realizing how many of our own guests quietly kept a single-serve machine at home for the fast mornings. The same people standing at our counter on Saturday were drinking commodity pods on Tuesday. That felt like a problem we could actually solve. So our K-Pods are filled with the same air-roasted coffee we sell in bags. Air roasting means the beans float on hot air at around 550 degrees instead of tumbling against hot metal, which roasts them evenly and skips the scorched bitterness a lot of people assume comes standard with pod coffee. A lot of folks tell us it sits easier on the stomach, and while we’re not making a medical claim, we hear it often enough to pass it along. Most brands don't test for mold and mycotoxins. We do. It’s the same coffee that Star Tribune readers have voted Minnesota's Best four years in a row, sealed into a pod for the mornings that don’t have time for a kettle. If you have a Ninja system rather than a Keurig, we wrote a separate walkthrough for brewing our pods in a Ninja. K-Cup FAQ Why does my Keurig coffee taste burnt? Usually it’s the coffee, not the machine. Dark commodity roasts carry char into the cup, and scale buildup adds its own harshness on top. Descale the machine, then try a pod filled with a smoother roast. We have found that people blame the brewer for what the pod did. Why does my K-Cup coffee taste watery? The cup size is set too large for one pod. Drop to 6 or 8 ounces, or use two pods for a travel mug. See fix number four above. Can you use a K-Cup twice? You can press the button twice, but the second run is brewing through spent grounds, and it tastes like it. One pod, one cup is what the dose inside was built for. If budget is the concern, brewing the right size once beats brewing twice weak. Do K-Cups expire? Pods carry a best-by date, and they’re safe past it, but flavor fades long before safety does. In our experience a pod stored cool and dry drinks best within a few months of roasting. Fresher pods, brighter cup. Are K-Cups as good as brewed coffee? A well-made filter brew from fresh beans has a higher ceiling, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But a quality pod, brewed at the right size through a clean machine, gets closer than most people expect. On the mornings with time, we brew a pot. On the mornings without, the machine covers us. Different jobs, both worth doing. If you want the full manual-brewing routine, our guide to brewing filter coffee is the companion to this one. Start with the machine you already own You don’t need new equipment to fix single-serve coffee. Filtered water, a descale cycle, the click, and the smaller cup button will change what comes out of the machine you already have, probably by tomorrow morning. Then, when the box of grocery-store pods runs out, try a box of Ember K-Pods and taste what the same machine does with better coffee in it. The fast mornings deserve a good cup too.

Almost every Saturday, someone stands at our counter in Big Lake, takes a sip of whatever we handed them, and asks some version of the same question. How do I get my coffee at home to taste like this? They usually assume the answer is a machine they can’t afford or a skill they don’t have. Quite honestly, it’s neither. The answer is four small habits, and none of them cost much of anything. This is the guide we wish we could hand across the counter. It covers what filter coffee is, the gear you actually need, the four things that decide how your cup tastes, a step-by-step walkthrough, and the fixes for the three ways a brew usually goes sideways. Pour yourself whatever is left in the pot and settle in. What is filter coffee? Filter coffee is any coffee made by letting hot water pass through a bed of ground coffee and a filter, usually paper, into a pot or a cup below. Your countertop drip machine makes filter coffee. A pour-over cone makes filter coffee. The big airport urn makes filter coffee, for better or worse. Gravity does the work, the filter catches the grounds, and what lands in the cup is clean and clear. That clarity is the whole appeal. Espresso concentrates. French press leaves texture in the cup. Filter brewing shows you exactly what the bean has to offer, with nothing hiding the result. Which is good news and bad news. When the coffee is fresh and the brew is dialed in, a filter cup is a quietly great thing. When something is off, there’s nowhere for it to hide. What you actually need We have found that most people already own everything required for a genuinely good cup: A brewer. A basic drip machine is fine. A plastic cone and a carafe are fine. You don’t need to replace what is on your counter. Fresh whole-bean coffee. This matters more than everything else on this list combined. A grinder. A burr grinder is the one upgrade we would point you toward if you’re buying anything, because it grinds evenly. A blade grinder still beats pre-ground. Decent water. Filtered if you can. Your cup is mostly water, so the water gets a vote. A tablespoon or a small kitchen scale. Either works. Consistency is the point. No gooseneck kettle requirement. No thermometer requirement. There’s a place for all that gear, and some of it’s lovely to use, but none of it’s the reason a cup tastes good. The four things that decide how your coffee tastes 1. Freshness Coffee is a roasted food, and like most roasted foods it’s best in the weeks after it’s made, not the months. A bag that has been sitting on a shelf since spring will brew a flat cup no matter how carefully you do everything else. Buy coffee with a roast date on the bag, buy it in amounts you’ll finish in a few weeks, and store it somewhere cool and dark with the bag sealed. We wrote a whole piece on storing coffee beans if you want the long version. The short version fits in one line. Fresh beans, sealed bag, cool cupboard. 2. Grind Grind your beans right before you brew. Ground coffee starts losing its aromatics within minutes, which is why a bag of pre-ground never quite smells the way the grinder aisle does. For a drip machine or a pour-over, aim for a medium grind, somewhere around the texture of coarse sand or kosher salt. Finer than that and the water struggles through and over-extracts. Coarser and the water rushes past and leaves flavor behind in the grounds. 3. Ratio Here’s the number we coach in the cafe: about 2 tablespoons of ground coffee for every 6 ounces of water. If you weigh instead of scoop, that works out to roughly 1 gram of coffee for every 16 grams of water. Most weak, disappointing home coffee is simply under-dosed, because the scoop got smaller as the bag got lower. Measure the same way every morning and the coffee starts behaving the same way every morning. We break the math down further in our coffee-to-water ratio guide. 4. Water Use water just off the boil, around 200°F. You don’t need a thermometer to get there. Bring the kettle to a boil, take it off the heat, count to thirty, and pour. Water that’s too cool under-extracts and leaves the cup sour and thin. A drip machine handles the temperature for you, though older or budget machines sometimes run cool, which is one reason the same bag can taste different across two kitchens. The National Coffee Association's brewing guidance lands on the same range, 195 to 205 degrees, if you like seeing the standard written down. How to brew filter coffee, step by step Here’s the whole routine for a drip machine, start to finish: Start with a clean machine. Old coffee oil goes rancid and flavors everything brewed after it. Wash the basket and carafe like you would any other dish. Fill the tank with filtered water. Measure it. Six ounces per cup you want to drink. Grind your beans medium. Two tablespoons per 6 ounces of water, ground right before brewing. Put a fresh paper filter in the basket and add the grounds. Shake the basket gently so the bed sits level. A level bed brews evenly. Brew. Let the machine finish before you pour. The first half of the pot is stronger than the second half, so pulling the carafe early changes the cup you get. Drink it within the half hour. Coffee held on a hot plate cooks. If your morning runs long, a thermal carafe holds a pot honestly. For a pour-over cone the same four fundamentals apply, with your hands doing what the machine does. Wet the grounds, wait a moment while they puff up and release gas, then pour the rest of the water in slow circles. Our pour-over guide walks through it in detail. We have found that the drip machine gets treated like the pour-over's lesser cousin, and we don’t think it deserves that. The machine brews while you make lunches and find shoes. Different jobs, both worth doing. Troubleshooting: bitter, sour, or weak If your coffee tastes bitter, too much is being pulled out of the grounds. Grind a step coarser, make sure your machine is clean, and check that you’re not brewing more minutes than the method needs. Scorched, ashy notes can also come in with the roast itself, which we’ll get to below. If your coffee tastes sour, in the lip-puckering way rather than the pleasant fruit way, not enough is being pulled out. Grind a step finer, check your water is hot enough, and make sure the brew isn’t finishing too fast. If your coffee tastes weak, the fix is almost always dose. Go back to 2 tablespoons per 6 ounces and level scoops. Weak coffee and bitter coffee can even show up in the same cup when a too-coarse, too-small dose gets over-brewed to compensate. If you work through those three and something still tastes off, our piece on why a brew goes bad digs deeper. Where the roast comes in Everything above assumes the coffee in the bag is worth brewing carefully, so it seems fair to tell you how we handle our end of the bargain. Ember coffee is air-roasted. Instead of tumbling in a hot metal drum, the beans float on a bed of hot air at around 550 degrees, roasting evenly without ever scorching on hot metal. The result is a cleaner, smoother cup with less of the bitter char that many people assume is just what coffee tastes like. A lot of people tell us it sits easier on the stomach too. We’re not making a medical claim there, just passing along what guests keep telling us. We roast in batches of about 15 kilos at a time on our Sivetz roaster here in Big Lake, Minnesota, and we ship it fresh. Most brands don't test for mold and mycotoxins. We do. And Star Tribune readers have voted us Minnesota's Best Coffee four years running, 2023 through 2026, which still feels strange to type. If you’re curious how air and drum roasting compare in the cup, we wrote up the differences in air-roasted vs. drum-roasted coffee. Filter coffee FAQ What is the best ratio for filter coffee? About 2 tablespoons of ground coffee per 6 ounces of water, or roughly 1:16 by weight. Adjust a half tablespoon at a time until the cup suits you. Your taste outranks our chart. What temperature should the water be? Around 200°F, which is a kettle taken off the boil and given about thirty seconds to settle. The standard range is 195 to 205 degrees. Can I use pre-ground coffee? You can, and plenty of good mornings are built on it. Whole bean ground fresh will taste noticeably livelier, so if you’re choosing one upgrade from this whole guide, choose the grinder. How long does an open bag stay fresh? We have found that a sealed bag in a cool, dark cupboard drinks well for three to four weeks after opening. It won’t hurt you after that. It just gets quieter every week. Is filter coffee the same as drip coffee? Mostly, yes. Drip coffee is filter coffee made by a machine. Pour-over is filter coffee made by hand. Same family, same filter, different amount of your attention required. Practice on a bag worth practicing with None of this asks for more than a few extra minutes of care in the morning, and the ratio and grind will feel automatic within a week. The one thing this guide can’t do is make a stale bag taste fresh. If you want a coffee that rewards the effort, our best-selling blends are the bags we would start you on, air-roasted the week they ship. And if you’re ever standing at our counter in Big Lake with a question this guide didn’t answer, ask. That’s what the counter is for.

We are a small coffee shop in Big Lake, Minnesota. We lose the good scissors on a weekly basis. And somehow, in the 2026 Star Tribune Minnesota's Best, readers across the state handed us five Gold awards. Five. We counted on our fingers, ran out of fingers, and counted again. Here is what Minnesota gave us when the votes for the best coffee in the state came in, along with the small crisis of confidence that came with each one. Gold Winner, Central Minnesota. The 2026 Star Tribune Minnesota's Best. Gold, twice over, for Coffee House Ember took Gold for Coffee House in the Central Minnesota vote, and then Gold again in the wider vote, as if to double-check the first one was not a clerical error. We roast our beans on-site in small batches, right on Highway 10, and we built the shop to be a place people actually want to sit in. Latte flights, a reservable kids' room, and a counter where the regulars get called by name. We have always insisted Ember is more than a coffee shop. It is a strange relief to hear the state agree instead of slowly backing toward the door. Coffee House, Central Minnesota. Gold. Coffee House. Gold in the wider vote. Gold for Dessert This is the one that made us laugh out loud. Ember, a coffee company, won Gold for Dessert, standing shoulder to shoulder with actual bakeries and chocolate makers who presumably own more than one whisk. We pair small-batch, air-roasted coffee with house-made pastries, scratch bakery items, and ice cream, so a quick stop for coffee has a way of turning into a treat, then a small regret, then another treat. Apparently that lands. Dessert. Gold. Gold for Food and Drink Customer Service Of the five, this is the one we are quietly proudest of. A great cup can be dialed in with a scale and some patience. Service is harder, because it involves other humans and their mornings. Winning Gold for Customer Service means the welcome our team gives, the small kindnesses, and the way it feels to walk through the door all reached people, and they voted for it. To our crew, who somehow pull this off while also being the ones who find the good scissors: this one is yours. Food and Drink Customer Service. Gold. Gold for Made in Minnesota Ember won Gold for Made in Minnesota, Food and Beverage, which is a generous title for a company whose core equipment is a very hot drum and a lot of opinions. We air-roast fair trade, organic, specialty-grade beans in small batches, and we chase quality over volume. Low-acid, smooth, easy on the stomach, roasted right here. Being recognized as a Minnesota maker means a great deal for a roaster our size. Made in Minnesota, Food and Beverage. Gold. Thank you for voting Minnesota's Best is a readers' choice, which means these came from you. The people who filled out ballots, sent the link to a friend, and stopped in to say congratulations while we stood there turning slightly pink. We do not take that lightly. Five Golds is a big year for a shop that still runs on sticky notes, and we intend to earn it one cup at a time. Come taste the coffee that talked five categories of Minnesotans into this. Shop our best sellers.

Most homemade iced coffee tastes watery. It gets brewed hot at normal strength, poured over ice, and left to melt, and the ice waters it down into sad brown liquid. There are two ways to beat that. Take the heat out entirely with cold brew, or brew strong enough that the melting ice is part of the plan. Here are three methods, with the exact ratios, and a straight answer on which is better and which is easier. Method 1: Mason Jar Cold Brew (the easy one) Ratio: 1 cup coarse-ground coffee (about 85 to 100g) to 4 cups (32 oz) cold water. Use a coarse grind, about the texture of sea salt. Stir the grounds into the water in a quart mason jar. Cap it and steep 16 to 18 hours in the fridge, or 12 to 14 hours at room temperature. Strain through a fine mesh or a paper filter. Serve over ice. Add a splash of water or milk if you want it lighter. Keeps about a week in the fridge. Character: the smoothest, lowest-acid cup here. Almost no bitterness, because there is no heat. Verdict: the easiest to make and the most forgiving. The only real downside is the wait. Method 2: Cold Brew Concentrate (the flexible one) Ratio: 1 cup coffee to 2 cups water (roughly 1:4 by volume), same coarse grind. This makes a strong concentrate, not a ready-to-drink cup. Steep 16 to 18 hours in the fridge, then strain. To serve, dilute about 1:1 with water, milk, or oat milk over ice, to taste. It is the perfect base for an iced latte. Keeps up to two weeks in the fridge. Verdict: best for control, strength, and iced lattes, and it lasts the longest. You dilute each glass yourself, so you set the strength every time. Method 3: Strong Brew Over Ice, or Flash Chill (the fast one) Use your regular drip brewer, and fill your glass or carafe with ice first. That ice is part of your water. Ratio: brew at roughly 1.5x strength. Keep your normal amount of grounds, but brew with about two-thirds of the usual water, straight down onto the ice so it chills on contact. Worked example: for a 12 oz iced coffee, use the grounds you would use for a 12 oz hot cup, and brew with about 8 oz of water over about 4 oz (by volume) of ice. The melting ice finishes the dilution. Character: the brightest and most aromatic, because hot water pulls out aromatics that cold water leaves behind. A touch more acidic than cold brew. Verdict: the fastest, ready in about five minutes. Skip the ice math and brew normal strength over ice, and you are back to watery. Get the ratio right and you have a fresh, bright cup right now. Quick comparison Method Easiest? Best for Time Flavor Mason Jar Cold Brew Yes, easiest to make Everyday smooth, low-acid 16 to 18 hrs, hands-off Mellow, sweet, almost no bitterness Cold Brew Concentrate Medium Iced lattes, strength, keeps longest 16 to 18 hrs, hands-off Rich, adjustable Strong Brew Over Ice Fast to make, needs the ratio Right now, bright flavor About 5 min Bright, aromatic, a little more acidic Which one is better is a taste call. Cold brew runs smooth and mellow, and flash-chilled runs bright and aromatic. The easiest to set up is the mason jar. The easiest when you want it this second is the flash chill. The two Ember roasts that shine over ice We roast both in small batches at our Minnesota roastery, and both are built to hold up over ice. Dark Prairie is purpose-built for cold brew. Brazil natural brings chocolate and caramel sweetness, and Sumatra wet-hulled adds a syrupy body and earthy depth that stays rich in cold water. It is the best pick for Methods 1 and 2. Shop Dark Prairie. Peru Machu Picchu is a smooth single origin with caramelized sugar, graham cracker, and jammy fruit. Its brightness carries beautifully through the flash-chill method. It is the best pick for Method 3. Shop Peru Machu Picchu. Ready to brew the right way? Shop coffee for iced season.

The kitchen is quiet. You drop one of our pods in the machine, close the lid, press the button, and wait for the part of the morning that still belongs to you. For most people that is the whole story. But if you brew with a Ninja Pods & Grounds, once in a while the lid on the pod lifts partway through the brew, or you find a fine dusting of grounds in the bottom of your cup. It is a small thing. It is also easy to fix. First, a word about the Ninja A few things you should know before we get to the fix. The Ninja is a good machine. It makes a strong cup, it takes loose grounds and pods both, and a lot of people love it for exactly that reason. There is a place for a machine like that on the counter. Here is the one wrinkle. The Ninja brews at a higher pressure than a Keurig, and it pierces the pod a little differently. We have found that higher pressure is harder on any K-pod, not only ours. When the pod gets pushed harder than it was built for, the lid can lift and a few grounds can slip past. Nothing is broken. The pod and the machine just meet each other with a little more force than usual. Three small adjustments So here is what we have found makes the cup come out clean. Seat the pod holder until it clicks. Push the pod holder in until you hear it click. Not most of the way, all the way. A lot of the popped lids we hear about come down to a holder that was almost seated and not quite locked. The click is the machine telling you it has a good grip on the pod. Keep both needles clean, then run water through. The Ninja pierces the pod from the top and the bottom, and both of those needles pick up grounds and oil over time. Once a week, wipe both needles clean (carefully, they are sharp), then run one cycle with no pod and just water. The water flushes out anything left behind. A clean needle makes a clean hole, and a clean hole keeps the grounds where they belong. Brew a smaller size. Choose a smaller brew size than you think you need. A smaller size runs less water through the pod and puts less pressure on it, which is the whole game here. If you want a bigger cup, brew a small one strong and add hot water after. The coffee tastes better and the lid stays shut. None of this is a knock on the Ninja, and none of it is a knock on the pod. Two good things that need one small adjustment to sit well together. Do these three and the pod behaves. Clean needle, firm click, smaller cup. That is the whole trick. If you have tried all three and you are still finding grounds in your cup, send us a note at help@embercoffee.co and we will help you sort it out. We stand behind every pod we send out, and we would rather hear from you than have you pour a cup you are not happy with. Shop our K-Pods At Ember Coffee, we air-roast every batch in Big Lake, Minnesota. Browse our K-Cups, or learn about our fresh coffee.