Did you know you can scour pots and pans with your used coffee grounds? Remove odors from your fridge? Or fertilize your garden? The Internet is full of lists of how to repurpose your grounds. So, it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to print a T-shirt with ink derived from the multipurpose mush.
Alex White and his father-in-law, John Mohr, owners of Domestic Stencilworks in San Diego, recently launched a retail site called CoffeePrinted.com to peddle their line of coffee-themed T-shirts, all hand-printed with coffee-based dye. “We’re huge coffee enthusiasts,” White says. “We’re pretty excited about where this is going to go.”
Coffee Printed is the result of a “five-year odyssey” testing out various waste products that could serve as natural pigments, White says. White and Mohr experimented with several substances, including corked red wine, beets and spent coffee grounds. Basically, anything “that stains your clothing easily became a candidate,” White says. Wine, beets and other vegetables worked well on paper prints, but the only lasting success the pair had on apparel was with coffee grounds. The screen printers solicit used grounds from several local coffee shops, brewing them in vats of vinegar for months at a time. “We strain them and cook them down to make a sauce,” White says.
