FAQ
Here we will dive a little more in depth with how our coffee clubs work.
Subscription Questions
Sometimes specialty coffee can seem intimidating. There are so many little details to learn, but the secret is you only need to learn the details you’re interested in. Do you drink your coffee with cream and sugar? Maybe you like to reheat your coffee in the microwave throughout the day? Or maybe you just aren’t looking to drop a fortune on a bag of coffee. Our Everyman or Wanderer blend clubs are a great place to start. We vibrant and tasty coffees together to create unique flavors that will be sure to satisfy your needs. Our blends generally contain naturally process coffees from Brazil to both add body and sweetness while maintaining an affordable price. Our blends are a great place to get started in coffee or to find a reliable coffee you can come back to again and again.
Do you like bright, exciting, and exotic flavors in your coffee? If I told you the tasting notes of one of our offerings were, “blueberry, hibiscus, and red wine” would you just have to try it? Our Roaster's Choice single origin club is for you! We have selections from all over the world, focusing on small farms and farmers who produce big flavor. With these coffees we focus on flavor development and generally roast them light to medium to allow them to maintain the exciting flavors and acidity inherent to their origin. This club will feature rotating selections and may receive the same or similar coffees a few months in a row, but selections will change throughout the year. BROWSE OUR COFFEE CLUBS HERE
We get it. There are a lot of options and it may look confusing at first glance, however, we assure you it is actually pretty simple. You browse our coffee club options, read the descriptions and the available quantities, and select the one that works for you. The sign up form allows you to select the number of 12oz bags you would like to receive (1 through 6) and whether or not you would like it ground (whole bean, course grind, medium grind, or fine grind). If you aren’t sure about what grind size, check our handy breakdown in the FAQ. Once you have made your selections you simply enter payment information and finish your checkout. We will receive your order and set you up with recurring payments and shipments based on your specifications. We ship subscription club coffees once a month. If you go through a bag of coffee each week, you would select 5 bags and open one every week. The sealed bags will keep the rest of your coffee fresh until you’re ready to use it. If everything stays the same, you will continue receiving coffee each month for as long as you want. If something changes, say you move and need to change addresses or you are drinking less coffee and don’t need as much, you can log on to your account using your email and pause, adjust, or cancel your subscription at any time. As always our founder, Alex, is available to help with any questions that arise. Just email alex@hammerhand.coffee.
The grind size you select should be based on how you brew your coffee. Do you brew your morning cup in an automatic, electric coffee maker? Medium grind would be the best place for you to start. Are you brewing cold brew over night? You will definitely want to start with course grind. Are you joining the espresso coffee club to make espresso at home? Espresso should always be set at fine grind. Are you using a pour over device, such as a v60 or kalitta? Medium grind would be your choice.
We will be up front here. Grinding coffee yourself right before you brew will almost always produce better coffee, but we understand not everyone has or wants to buy a coffee grinder. If you are ordering coffee pre-ground some basic rules of thumb are:
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Fine grind is used in Turkish and espresso brewing methods. This grind size can also be used in Aeropress, depending on your Aeropress recipe.
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Medium grind is the most common selection. If you brew via percolation method, where water is passing through the coffee grounds such as in an electric drip coffee brewer or in hand brewed pour over devices, medium grind is almost certainly your best choice. One caveat, Chemex brewers sometimes do better with course grind, as they tend to get choked up when the paper filter forms a seal around the edges of the carafe and air has a hard time escaping as water flows in. If you aren’t quite sure which grind size is right for you, medium grind is probably the safest bet.
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Course grind is used for brewing methods where water soaks or steeps the grounds. Examples of this include overnight cold brew and french press. One thing to note, french press can definitely be brewed and taste great with medium grind coffee as well, it just depends on your preparation. As noted above, course grind might also be selected for Chemex, depending on your preparation.
If you have any questions about this you can reach out to our head roaster and founder at alex@hammerhand.coffee.
Everyone has different preferences, but over the years we have gotten pretty good at helping people figure out which coffee on our menu they will like best.
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Everyman medium roast club is our most popular club. The Everyman is a perfect middle-of-the-road coffee. We use Central and South American coffees to create a mellow and sweet profile that is great when taken black or when served with cream and sugar. Use it for drip coffee, french press, cold brew, or even as espresso. This is a versatile coffee just about everyone will be able to enjoy.
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Wanderer dark roast club is the perfect club if you love darker coffees. The full body and flavor of the Wanderer comes through very nicely when mixed with cream, sweeteners, and syrups. It also provides that bold wake-me-up flavor that dark roast coffee drinkers love when taken black. This coffee makes a great morning coffee and also a nice cold brew.
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Espresso Blend Club is the club to join of you make espresso at home. This blend is also great for cold brew and makes a mean drip coffee. Like the Everyman, our espresso blend is versatile and easy to work with. This is the blend we use in our cafe to make both espresso and cold brew.
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Roaster’s choice single origin club is made for those who love coffee in all its forms. If you want to experience the best single origins and small lots we have to offer, this is your club. We will send you coffees from all around the world. These coffees will be roasted light to medium and will focus on highlighting flavors inherent to the origin of each coffee.
Three things will affect the freshness of your roasted coffee: moisture, oxygen, and light. There is no real set time that coffee stays fresh as it all depends on storage. If you leave it open on the counter it will probably taste stale in a week or two. If you leave it in a sealed bag with a valve (like our bags), it will stay fresh for months. We pack our coffee in airtight, opaque, valved bags that allow gasses out but do not allow oxygen in. If left in these bags our coffee will stay fresh for about 3 months. Once opened, the coffee should be consumed within a couple weeks. If you have a way to store coffee away from light and oxygen, such as an AirScape canister or something similar, your coffee will stay fresh much longer. Keeping it in the bag and folding over the top is a pretty good method but it isn’t fully airtight so you’ll still want to consume the coffee within a few weeks. Ground coffee goes stale much faster and there isn’t a great way to avoid that. You can still use an airtight container to prolong it’s freshness but once you open the bag you’ll want to consume the coffee pretty quickly. Espresso actually benefits from being a few weeks older before you start using it. So freshness matters a lot, but it’s a bit more complicated than “fresher is always better”. In a nutshell, our bags preserve the coffees freshness for months when left sealed. Once opened, you will want to tightly close the bag or transfer the coffee to a better storage container.
One note: There are those out there on the internet who will tell you to store your coffee in the fridge or freezer. While it is possibly to preserve coffee in the freezer, it is very difficult and time consuming to do correctly. We do not recommend this method. When coffee comes in and out of the freezer, moisture condensates on the beans and freezes when placed back in the freezer. Repeated exposure of frozen beans to warm air will significantly decrease the coffee's freshness and quality. In order to freeze properly, coffee needs to be packaged in individual doses in vacuum sealed bags and thawed completely before being opened. It's much simpler and more effective to simply leave the coffee in it's sealed bag and store in a sealed container while you use it. That's actually the reason we only ship subscription coffees in sealed, valved 12oz bags.
One of the best parts about our clubs is that there is zero risk, zero commitment. If you are unhappy with a coffee we will ship you something different our refund 100% of your purchase. If you want to change your orders, pause them for a while, change the payment method, or cancel your subscription you can do so at any time with just a few clicks.
This is a great question. There are lots of coffee roasting companies out there and many of them offer subscription clubs like this. We can’t speak for other companies, but what we can tell you is that we take pride in caring for our customers. We will go above and beyond to make sure you are taken care of and happy with your coffee. We use top of the line technology to monitor roasts in real time and can go back and look at our roasting logs to compare roast quality and accuracy. We taste all of our coffees every week, we heat seal our coffee in valved bags to prolong freshness and we only ship freshly roasted coffee. We are a small business that has been a part of our community for years and we have thrived because we care about each and every person who visits us or shops with us. If you have any questions or concerns, our founder and head roaster, Alex, is always available to help. Be it questions about how to brew coffee, equipment suggestions to improve your quality at home, or concerns about a coffee you received. We are always here to help. Just reach out to alex@hammerhand.coffee.
Most people know around how much coffee they go through each month, but sometimes you end up going through more or less than normal. Maybe during the holidays you make extra coffee for visiting family or you go on vacation and need to skip a delivery. If you are going to run out, you can simply place an order on our main retail website. We roast coffee several times a week and usually have orders in the mail withint 2 or 3 days. If you get your order in on Sunday night we will almost always have it shipped by Monday afternoon and we usually try to get orders shipped out on Friday as well. If you need to skip a week, simply log in to your subscription portal (by clicking the icon located next to the shopping cart displayed on the top right of this screen) and pause your account. We will hold off deliveries until you unpause.
Gifting
Yes! Memberships to our coffee clubs make GREAT gifts. Giving a club membership allows you to give the gift that keeps on giving! Find out more about gift subscriptions HERE
Yes! When giving subscriptions as a gift you can select 1, 3, 6, or 12 months. You can also purchase an indefinite subscription that will continue until you pause or cancel. The membership will remain active and shipments will go out once a month to your giftee until the specified period ends or until you pause/cancel.
You sure can. During the checkout process you will be asked when you would like your gift subscription to begin. You can purchase today and set shipments to begin the week after Christmas, for example, or any day in the future. Your card will not be charged and shipments will not be sent until the specified time.
You can manage your gift subscription the same way you would manage a normal subscription. You can always log on to adjust, pause, or cancel anytime. If you gave an indefinite subscription and you would like to allow the giftee the ability to adjust or manage the account, simply give them the login details you used to set it up.
This is a good question. It's often hard to know what your friend or loved one likes, especially if they are really in to coffee and you aren't. If you'd like to give the gift of endless coffee but aren't quite sure which club to choose, you can give a gift voucher. The gift voucher will allow them to select their preferred club and use the voucher as payment. View our gift voucher options on our gifts page HERE