There are good reasons to add flavorings to recipes. Freshly whipped cream, for example, that has a dash of pure almond extract in it might enhance the over-all experience. But what about freshly roasted coffee beans? Granite Ledge Coffee does not offer any chemically treated beans to its customers.

Flavored coffee is, and will continue to be, a highly charged topic. It is often considered the final qualifier when separating the proverbial wheat from the chafe in regards to prepared coffee beverages. "Is it really so bad?" you might ask yourself. What is the actual controversy?

Ask yourself:
1. Do butchers marinate their best cuts of meat or do those go in the front case for customers to see? How about baloney, sausage and hamburger?
2. How about vintners? Suppose their good wines are used to make wine coolers?
3. Lastly, how about processed food conglomerates? Do you think they go to your local farmers market to get their fresh produce?

So too, the best coffee beans are kept out of the reaches of any chemical flavoring process. Only inferior tasting coffee beans are used when
manufacturing flavored coffees and Granite Ledge Coffee chooses to offer only freshly roasted, specialty graded arabica coffees.

In addition, flavored coffees typically have been allowed to stale before going through the chemical treatment; their doing so prevents CO2 diffusion from prohibiting the binding process.

So what's in that cup of Pumpkin Spiced Coffee sold at your local convenience store? It began with the roasting of a inexpensive industrial grade bean, most likely blended with a cheap robusta variety, before being coated with a chemical binder that any number of chemical flavoring agents (some of which may be natural) will be attached to (this binder is what keeps the beans looking like natural, roasted coffee beans). When was the last time you saw an organic flavored coffee?

It's pretty common for the chemicals to actually not taste like much of anything, though they might smell like bananas or Irish cream. Because our senses of smell and taste are so linked, your nose could be telling your brain it's tasting something that's not really there. Are the chemicals safe? Well, the USDA says they are. The same folks who say that all of the chemicals produced and put in our foods are safe. Granite Ledge Coffee steers clear of these because we do not want any chemicals tainting our high-quality beans that farmers have gone to great lengths to grow using myriad of organic methods.

If you enjoy flavored coffee, as many sometimes do, try adding it to the finished drink instead of buying the mass-produced variety from “Chemicals-R-Us”. Doing so will ensure that you know exactly what is in your coffee as well as knowing that in the beginning, your freshly roasted beans are of specialty grade; provided you sourced them from a reputable roaster.