Hipsternomics of grinding your own coffee

I'm not entirely sure what a hipster is, but here's what I can surmise. This guy, let's call him Hipster Brad, who spent $120 on fake glasses, is definitely a hipster.

Brad is going to be a prime example of why, despite perfectly good pre-ground coffee available at the supermarket, you should be girding your own.

What makes Hipster Brad a hipster? Let's first assume that he's not an idiot. That he's like you and me and trying to make reasonable decisions with his money. Somehow, he has come to the conclusion that the best way to spend $120 is on a face decoration. Sounds crazy, right?

I mean after all, I can (and do) buy my own 100% functional glasses for $45: $10 for frames and $35 for lenses. If I really want to splurge, that might tick up to $55 for anti-scratch coatings.

This fact has been absolutely true for as long as I can remember - in third grade, my parents definitely took me to get some super cool glasses that weren't quite as cool as this kid's, but they were close.

However, this fact absolutely did not stop 22-year-old-me from purchasing $300 Ray Ban frames. With the same $35 lenses. I did this at a time in my life when a near-daily decision I made was whether or not to spend $1.65 on a cup of white bean chili from the National Geographic cafeteria (shout-out to #NatGeo for fair priced meals for the working class!) or save it so I could afford to take the bus home. To put this all in crystal clear perspective, I chose purdy glasses frames over 203 meals/not-walking-in-blizzards.

So what exactly is the difference between white-bean-chili me and Hipster Brad? Well obviously, Brad's eye-decorations lack non-aesthetic utility, whereas mine helped me see better. But also, Brad saved $200 more than me.

Even if you figure that I had to have glasses anyway, I was paying $290 more than I had to. This means that even if we subtract $45 for the cost of the actual part of the eyeglasses that do anything, Hipster Brad is coming out on top more than $150 over me.

You may be thinking that we've spent way too much time exploring decisions on eyewear. However, that is kind of the point. Brad thinks about fake glasses way more than you or I do. Or at least more than I used to. He's come to the conclusion that if 20-year-olds who can barely afford $1.65 chili are paying a $290 premium for aesthetics, there is nothing wrong with paying $120 for fake glasses. Yes, you could argue that all of these people, including Hipster Brad, are making poor decisions, but that would be missing the point.

Brad isn't making a stupid decision. This is pejorative and implies that he just bought his glasses because "it's hipster," (a.k.a., he doesn't care about cost and will spend any amount of money if he thinks it will garner him attention). No, Hipster Brad is buying these glasses because it is actually a bargain compared to the frames being bought by about 90 million people per year.

Using hipsternomic logic, it also becomes apparent that you should be buying whole coffee beans and roasting your own. But not at first glance.

On the economics, whole-bean coffee is almost always more expensive than ground coffee. While not very much - ground coffee costs about 16 cents per cup, while coffee brewed from $8 per pound whole beans costs approximately 18 cents per cup - more is more, and ground coffee is cheaper.

To add to expenses, whole-beans require a coffee grinder. And even worse, whole beans take time to grind, as opposed to ground coffee, which can simply be opened and spooned into a coffee maker.. Seems like an open and close case - ground coffee every day, any day. Simple, right?

However, simple it is not. Let's take care of some riff-raff before digging into the real meat.

First, the easiest: on time. If you have an automatic grinder, the time it takes to grind beans is literally less than a second. Unless you feel compelled to stand there and oggle your machine grind beans for you, then all you have to do is push a button and walk away.

OK, but that means we're committed to buying an automatic grinder! And those are expensive, m'right!? Well, no. A wide range of automatic coffee grinders can be bought for $20-40. Let's roll like a baller and say you spend $40 for sake of argument. Assuming your coffee grinder only lasts a standard warranty length of 18 months (pretty short), and assuming you make 5 cups of coffee per day (a common pot holds 10-12), you're paying 1.5 cents per cup of coffee. Let's call it 2 whole cents for convenience.

Now for the nitty gritty. If the goal is simply to save as much time and money as possible to get the benefits of coffee (and it's probably not), we first need to identify: what are the benefits of drinking coffee?

Coffee is rightly perceived as a pick-me-up for its energizing properties. This mostly comes from its caffeine content. However, while the caffeine is certainly alluring, it is far from the only reason for drinking coffee. Were that the case, one could simply purchase caffeine tablets. At 8 cents per 200 mg tablet, more than twice the caffeine than a cup of coffee, that's half the price of a cup of coffee, no matter how you drink it.

Not too many people out there popping caffeine pills, and this fact should re-inform how we consider coffee pricing. Much like eyeglasses, coffee has a utilitarian value. Eyeglasses help people see better, and coffee wakes people up.

However, just as the base price of seeing better is far lower than what people are actually regularly paying, the base price of getting a caffeine kick is also far lower than what people are regularly paying. If we're only paying for caffeine content, it's 12 cents more expensive to drink ground coffee than it is to take a caffeine pill.

However, people are more than willing to pay it. It seems obvious why - the coffee is better. But better how? And why does that better matter?

To answer these questions, Malcom Gladwell, author of books like Blink and The Tipping Point, spoke to Howard Moskowitz. Howard Moskowitz is a psychologist who is most famous for changing how companies sell spaghetti sauce. He found that companies should not be offering their one version of what they thought people would like for spaghetti sauce. Instead, they would do far better if they offered several varieties for their customers to choose from.

Most relevant to our conversation, the way he figured this out was that people in his field of psychophysics, created systems for measuring a food's pleasantness. When applied, specifically to coffee, they found that coffee had the power, when tailored to our preferences, to make us deliriously happy.

What this tells us is what companies already know: people are not buying coffee just to wake up any more. We are drinking it like wine. Coffee is no longer drunk simply for what it does - it is drunk for the very enjoyability of drinking it, and that is where your money is going when you drink coffee. That extra 12 cents, 75% of the price for a cup of pre-ground coffee, is going to enjoyability.

So again, we look at margin. It is not simply that ground coffee is 4 cents cheaper than whole-bean coffee. But compared to a caffeine pill (4 cents for the caffeine), we are paying 16 cents for enjoyability when we buy whole beans instead of 12 cents when we pre-ground. That's a 4-cent markup. What do we get for our four cents?

First, there's a reason that whole-bean coffee costs more. Turns out people didn't just make the price up out of nowhere. Coffee sold pre-ground can come from beans in any shape, size, or form. Whole bean coffee, on the other hand, needs to use beans that are only of the highest quality.

Second, once you grind the coffee, three flavor-weakening processes immediately begin. The very benefit gained from grinding - more surface area for boiling water to contact while brewing - means that before brewing, there is more surface area for air to contact. The first way air harms your coffee is oxidation, where oxygen in the air begins to break down flavor compounds in the coffee.

The second is hydration. While this might sound great, if you've ever eaten a bag of chips left open overnight during the summer, you know why it's not. When chips go "stale," that's moisture seeping in and diluting flavor.

The third process is loss of carbon dioxide. While this may seem unimportant, it is not too far off from drinking a bottle of coca-cola that has been left opened for a week. In soda, loss of carbon dioxide has obvious drawbacks. In coffee, it is not nearly as dramatic but just as important. When coffee brews, it needs to bloom. Sometimes referred to as the crema, this light brown foam released to the top of brewing coffee is all the essential oils being released and carried by carbon dioxide.

While whole-bean coffee is a tad more expensive and fussy than pre-ground coffee, this is a narrow lens through which to examine the situation that points us toward taking a pill every couple of hours. Looking at the bigger picture, we see that if we are trying to meet the real goals of drinking coffee, increasing our quality of life, that extra money - a whole 4 cents per cup - is money well spent.

P.S. update on the Olympics post coming after our debate ^_^