In normal conditions you can only extract up to ≈30% of the coffee beans mass, ie. no matter how fine you grind and long you brew you'll only get 30%. The rest are insoluble solids: cellulose so basically wood.
When the big boys brew the coffee in really high temp and pressure (165-190C, 15 bars) the structure of the bean changes and previously insoluble parts of the hemicellulose become soluble. This means you get a higher yield but what you get are nasty, woody, heavy bitter compounds.
Yeah, mainly hardware now. We just hired our first dev (and are still looking for a VP Eng!) and have some software stuff coming up. First we're working on making the ordering process better and building tools for our subscribers.
A big part of artisanal coffee is that it uses high quality water (usually magnesium enriched after filtering via reverse osmosis iirc) - is there anything you can do to control for this / shitty water at the customer side?
If you're brewing with Mg-water then, most of it will be left behind when freeze drying, of course, but water used to rehydrate the coffee will be a big one...
When the big boys brew the coffee in really high temp and pressure (165-190C, 15 bars) the structure of the bean changes and previously insoluble parts of the hemicellulose become soluble. This means you get a higher yield but what you get are nasty, woody, heavy bitter compounds.
Here's a diagram explaining more: https://goo.gl/dJTsxM