Coffeehouse Gets Press

The Washington Business Journal featured me in their Top Shelf column published yesterday. Here’s what they had to say:

“Caffeine High » Joel Finkelstein has been selling his home-roasted coffee as a hobby for years now. Soon he will be in the caffeine business full time.

Finkelstein has decided to rent a commercially zoned row house at 3917 Georgia Ave. NW in Petworth to sell his coffee line, Fresh Off The Roast. The former freelance journalist also is opening a full-service coffee shop. His coffee was previously available at the now-defunct Western Market, an open-air market in Adams Morgan.

Finkelstein says he approaches coffee as a connoisseur’s drink (he can talk for hours about roasting beans yourself and the freshness and flavor it brings), and he plans to distinguish his product by roasting and selling beans that he knows the exact origins of — often right down to the farmer’s name.

Finkelstein is aiming for a March opening for his yet-to-be-named store. He is brainstorming with some George Washington University marketing students on ideas for names. Talk about low overhead.”

I’m a marketing genius

It’s good I’m humble. One of my customers posted this very gratifying assessment of my apparent marketing acumen on their company blog.

An excerpt:
“To call Joel a coffee enthusiast would be like saying Charles Bukowski enjoyed the occasional cocktail. None of Joel’s beans dare spend time on a store shelf. He roasts them and delivers them to customers almost immediately. On Sundays at Summer Delights ice cream shop in Takoma, he also grinds and brews fresh-roasted beans, earning converts one cup at a time. For the record, his brew is righteous, but we also admire Joel’s devotion, his absolute obsession with crafting the perfect cup of coffee.”

A Coffee a day, keeps dementia away.

Actually, you need to drink a few, but according to recent findings, drinking coffee can reduce the risk or at least delay onset of Alzheimer’s.

“Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by between 60 and 65 percent later in life,” said lead researcher on the project, Miia Kivipelto, a professor at the University of Kuopio in Finland and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

As if you needed another reason to drink coffee.

You can find the full article here.