FAQs

Why ‘single dose’?

Great question! ‘Single dosing’ just means measuring out the amount of coffee you need for one beverage at a time, to ensure that your brewed coffee is as flavourful as it can be. It’s a simple practise that’s easy to incorporate into a wide range of brewing methods. It captures our commitment to freshness and clarity of flavour, using science to inform an artisanal approach to small-batch speciality coffee roasting.

What do you mean by freshness?

Like other fresh products, coffee tends to deteriorate over time. Exposure to air leads to chemical changes within the coffee beans, causing the coffee to go stale. Single dosing is an easy way to slow the staling process, by minimising the extent to which the beans are exposed to the open air.

Single dosing can be as simple as leaving your coffee in its resealable bag until you need to use it, or as involved as weighing out your beans into several smaller containers (to protect each dose from the air that enters each time you open and close the bag). Much depends on how quickly you expect to consume the bag of coffee: at home, a bag of coffee might last you a week or more, whereas a busy cafe might get through several bags in a day. 

To help to minimise the effects of staling, we flush all our coffee bags with an inert gas immediately before sealing. This displaces oxygen from the air in the bag, further slowing the staling process, ensuring that our fresh-roasted coffee reaches you in the best possible condition. Most other roasters skip this to save time and money, especially as they scale up their production.

If you buy a day of coffee from a supermarket, you may notice that it has a ‘best before’ date stamped somewhere on it. Speciality coffee, by contrast, always has a roast date on the bag. This is so you can be sure that you’re getting the beans only very skilled after they went in.

How can I single dose?

There are a variety of methods of single dosing, ranging from keeping your coffee in its resealable bag and weighing it out each time you brew it, to storing individual doses in smaller containers — such as jars, test tubes or ‘bean cellars’, which is where the idea for our logo came from!

What kind of grinder do I need?

As the benefits of single dosing have spread amongst speciality coffee enthusiasts, single dosing coffee grinders have surged in popularity. These differ from grinders typically seen in cafes or in bean-to-cup machines in that they don’t hold the beans in a hopper, which is typically open to the air (so best suited to high-throughput setttings, such as cafes) but instead are designed to grind through one single dose of coffee at a time.

You can use a standard hopper grinder as a single dose grinder by simply loading the hopper with one dose at a time, though single dosing grinders tend to boast optimised workflows and features such as ‘zero retention’ (meaning that you get out the same weight of coffee that you put in, without losing any to the grinding process). Popular examples include the Niche Zero, the DF64, the Eureka Mignon and Lagom Mini; we use the Weber EG-1 v3. Hand grinding makes single dosing cheaper and more portable: see the Comandante C40 and the Timemore Chestnut; we use the Kinu M47 and Knock Aergrind.

How should I store my coffee beans?

Our favourite way of storing beans for single dosing is to use these Bean Vaults from Craig Lyn Design Studio: they feature lids with integrated one-way valves, allowing gases to escape from the beans as they ‘rest’ after roasting without allowing ambient air in. Popular alternatives are available from Weber Workshops (glass or polymer), Normcore and Etsy. We’re working on our very own design: be sure to sign up for to receive our e-mails for a special introductory offer!

The same principles apply to ground coffee, but we would always advocate for grinding fresh: this is because the surface area of ground coffee is much greater than whole coffee beans, meaning it will go stale more quickly because more of the coffee is in contact with the air.