For most people, that morning cup of coffee is essential for starting the day off on the right foot. The caffeine helps people wake up while the taste and aroma keep the mood relaxed. What’s not relaxing is running late because the coffee took too much effort to prepare. In order to rescue the morning ritual, Steeped Coffee has launched a new and simple brewing method in the form of compostable, single-serve bags.
Just like with tea, brewing a fresh cup is as easy as dunking a small coffee bag into a cup of hot water. Dunking the bag several times helps saturate the water and strengthen the brew, but otherwise, users can just let it steep for about five minutes. The result is all the flavor, body, and notes one would expect from a good cup of joe.
To obtain the right taste, the coffee is ethically sourced directly from the farmers. From there, the beans are roasted locally in small batches, precision ground, then pre-measured into special filter bags. Each bag comes in a nitro-sealed package that removes the oxygen and eliminates the use of glue and staples. This halts the coffee’s aging process, keeping it fresh for months instead of days. When a coffee bag is used up, completely compostable packaging makes for guilt-free disposal. Even the inks used for the labels are water-based and free of toxic compounds.
“When I first started it was just coffee in a tea bag,” says company CEO and founder Josh Wilbur. “There’s a reason this hasn’t been done before. We had to innovate to account for a number of factors such as sourcing ethical and quality beans, getting the right grind size and density, maintaining the freshness of ground coffee, controlling the water permeability of the filter, and making sure everything we do is environmentally sustainable.”
Steeped Coffee is currently available for pre-order on Kickstarter for as little as $20 for ten packets. Just $15 more triples the supply to 30 packets. Backers can select from a variety of blends including Sunrise, California, Odyssey, Driftwood, and Eventide Decaf. Other pledges contain additional goodies such as a custom Steeped Coffee mug, Fellow ceramic cups and kettles, and a Jetboil cooking system.