It all started back in 1994 in Long Beach California. A friend of mine, who by the way was terrified of all electrical kitchen appliances, introduced me to the fine art of grinding whole coffee beans. So……. Armed with a hand cranked grinder and a free 10 minutes I cranked and cranked and cranked until I was rewarded with two and a half ounces of fresh ground coffee. It smelled wonderful and looked just like the canned coffee I was accustomed to. Then it was off to the kitchen to boil the water and get the Melitta manual coffee maker ready. After ten more minutes of pouring boiling water slowly over the coffee grounds and watching it drip into the pot we had coffee!

The coffee was great and when faced with the alternative five dollar cup at the coffee house it was even better.

A week later I was buying whole bean coffee myself. Not being worried at all about electronic kitchen appliances I also purchased a grinder and a Krups coffee maker with a gold metal filter. Life was good for the time being. Good coffee but high prices. I attempted the budget coffee bean but the quality was very budget and the taste was terrible. When I had the money and purchased the beans in quantity they would go stale before I could use them. I tried freezing the beans and the taste went bad.

I had to find a better way………

When fishing out in San Francisco one week on vacation I stopped for a six dollar cup of coffee and was introduced to a coffee roaster, it was huge, I watched the beans come out of the drum and on to the cooling table, the fresh roasted beans permeating the air all around me, I watched the beans slowly being pushed around the table as they cooled. It was at that time I started to understand that roasting your own beans at home would be the freshest way to have coffee.

As soon as I got home I searched through the internet for a roaster for my kitchen. A friend of mine at work was using a modified hot air pop corn popper and explained to me how it worked. I was excited but at the same time I knew that I didn’t want to spend twenty minutes roasting, five minutes cooling and then removing the chaf from the beans so the coffee wasn’t bitter tasting. I settled in on a Hearthware Precision home coffee roaster. It was great I started buying green coffee beans and found that you could store them for two years without the beans going stale. I built a small shelf and started stocking green beans from all over the world. I started to understand what good beans were and what bad beans were. The Robusta bean and the Arabica bean, it all started to make since. I wanted to share this good coffee with everyone I knew. I would bring in a few pots worth of coffee to work and brew it up just to show people that coffee didn’t need to be expensive or served from a coffee shop to taste great. I started experimenting with blending different coffees to bring out the best taste and attributes. High caffeine, decaf coffee, blends from all over the world. The only thing holding me back was the ability to roast more than four ounces of coffee at a time………

Then in April 2002 I finally was able to purchase a commercial roaster, the birth of InsomniaJava. The name was simple, with all the blending and tasting I didn’t sleep much InsomniaJava Blend still gets my heart pounding and makes it difficult to try blinking. We started selling a pound here and there and now we are roasting coffee almost every day. The only day we don’t roast is on Saturday which is a day at the softball park watching our girls play ball. We roast coffee the day before shipping to always get your coffee to you the freshest it can be.

Thanks for hanging in there and reading this rather long winded history.