Frequently Asked Questions What makes Cobblestone Coffee any different than every OTHER coffee out there? What's so special about Cobblestone? Well, we have a few 'qualities' that make us stand out from the rest: First, we obviously roast the coffee ourselves, to OUR quality standards. We roast the coffee by hand, in ridiculously small batches, to ensure the highest quality roasts on each batch of coffee that we roast. The smaller the batch size, the higher the quality control of the roast of each bean. The larger your batch sizes get, the more you are applying the laws of averages to each and every individual bean. Big Corporate Coffee mass roasts tons and tons of beans in a single batch, to which there is hardly ANY quality control over how the beans are responding to the heat during the roast. So to reiterate, the smaller the batch size, the higher the control of quality during the roast. We here at Cobblestone roast in VERY small batches by hand,  to ensure perfection in the roast, each and every time. The second quality of  Cobblestone: it all starts with the quality of the green (raw) coffee beans that that we begin with. To the best of our ability, we chose only the highest quality, best TASTING beans that we can find each growing season.  We judge and select the coffees that we purchase by quality and taste via blind tasting, not by it's name or price tag. Read that to mean that we buy some pretty expensive coffees, while our competitors buy the cheapest they can find and try to pass it off as high quality. Quality of coffee is paramount here at Cobblestone, and we can not provide or serve the highest quality coffees to our customers if we do not start off with the top of the line green coffees. We taste a lot of coffee to find the very best, and only the very best coffees will we purchase to provide to our customers. The third quality of Cobblestone: We do not roast our coffees until someone has already ordered it. With a few exceptions, we are a roasting ON DEMAND operation. Coffee stays freshest when it is in it's green, raw, unroasted form. It'll keep for almost an entire crop season, almost a whole calendar year, as fresh as day one. Once you roast coffee, you are playing 'beat the clock' with your coffees freshness. The closer you can get the brewing of the coffee to the date it was actually roasted, the higher the quality of the enjoyment of your coffee will be. My analogy here is the fresh cut flower. Fresh cut flowers look great for the first couple of days after they've been cut, but over time, they begin to wilt, and then die. The same goes for freshly roasted coffee. The highest quality experience of coffee will be within the first couple of weeks, even days, of the coffee having been roasted. Over time, the coffee stales (looses quality) until there is nothing remaining but bitterness. Does your coffee taste bitter? More than likely, it's stale. There you go, three qualities that make us stand out from the rest: We roast it ourselves, for maximum quality, we choose the highest quality beans to begin with, and we don't roast it until someone has ordered it. It really doesn't get any better than that. Add to this, we're a mom and pop family owned and operated business founded in Maryland, with an inexplicable passion for coffee. This business was born out of a love for coffee, and a passion for sharing it... rather than a business born out of a love for business. There are MANY coffee businesses out there that are in this business for a love of YOUR BUSINESS, rather than a love for the coffee itself. You have happened to find one that was born out of a love for coffee and sharing the best coffees with YOU. We sincerely hope you appreciate that as a quality of Cobblestone Coffee as well.