Better not become a prison inmate unless you like coffee with rat droppings and cigarette ashes in it. If inmates only knew just where the coffee beans come from, and how these coffee beans are moved here, they’d be grossed out.
Even the most hardened criminal can become sick to his stomach if he knew where the coffee beans came from, and how his coffee was prepared at the coffee roastery. I’m not a coffee drinker so I don’t know what this coffee tastes like, but I DO know that inmates really drink up the coffee.
A coffee roastery will put in a bid to a prison’s procurement division. The roastery is in competition with other roasteries who also want the prison’s business. They will sell coffee as cheaply as possible, and I mean dirt cheap. And it is baaaaaad coffee.
Because I’ve never been a coffee drinker, I say it’s disgusting coffee based on what I was told goes into it. I used to work for a coffee roastery whose highest grade of coffee was $15 a pound. The same roastery that brings you fine, top-grade Kona coffee, for instance, will be the same roastery that provides prison inmates with the lowest grade, filthiest coffee — remember, the roastery wants the prison’s business and the only way it’s going to get it is to sell them coffee at ridiculously low prices.
And the only way a coffee roastery can afford to do this, let alone profit from it, is to prepare a truly dirty blend of coffee.
In a coffee roastery warehouse are massive amounts of coffee beans, obviously. They are everywhere, being hauled, carried, transported, roasted, mixed, scooped, packaged, boxed, etc. And always along the way, throughout all this processing, some beans will end up on the floor. They are left there.
A warehouse floor is filthy. It accumulates gobs of dust balls, bits of paper, bits of maybe duct tape, cigarette ashes, cigarette stubs, rubber bands, screws or other fallen parts of machinery, oils from machinery, pencil stubs, pen caps, paper clips, and plenty of rat droppings.
At some point, the warehouse workers will sweep up the floors, gathering all the debris into a pile. Much of this pile of debris will consist of fallen coffee beans. The debris is NOT separated from the beans. Instead, the clump of beans-debris is treated as a blend of coffee to be processed, packaged, and delivered to prison.
The gobs of dust, rat feces, oils, paper bits, pen caps, paper clips, tiny metal parts, screws, nails, etc., all get ground up with the coffee beans. The finished product looks pretty much like regular coffee grounds — I think. But the inmates never see the grounds. They only see the coffee in their cups. And that coffee is more than just coffee. It’s a mix of anything that can end up on a warehouse floor.
But the inmates will never know this.