Are you a coffee addict? It is not wrong for you to try Ricebran Coffee. This coffee provides an alternative flavor for coffee lovers who want to find a new sensation in drinking coffee.
Ricebran Coffee is a product innovation of coffee by adding bran to it. This drink combines the elements of 'pleasure' from the coffee with 'health' from the rice bran. It was created by students of UGM, namely Fuad Assani, Mathias Mahendra, Mila Permatasari, Sieta Rahmawati, and Yuntia Astutisari.
The name of Ricebran Coffee may not have been so familiar. This product has circulated since March. The business began from the concerns of five young students on the condition of bran which is quite abundant, but not widely used, especially for food/ drink which can be consumed by humans.
The condition inspired Sani and his four colleagues to process rice bran into something more useful and economically valuable. "Rice bran has about 80% of vitamins contained in the grain. The high content of nutrients and bioactive components such as oryzanol, tocopherol, and ferulat acid make bran as raw material having the potential to be used as functional food," Fuad Assani said at UGM campus recently.
Then why is coffee selected? They created Ricebran Coffee due to the current trend of drinking coffee among young people. "Coffee has become a means to socialize and is part of the lifestyle for young people," he explained.
Making Ricebran Coffee is quite easy. The bran which will be used as a mixture of coffee is filtered first to obtain fine bran. Usually 1 kg of coarse rice bran will produce 500 grams of refined rice bran. After being filtered, the bran is steamed and fried without oil. The fried bran is ready to be blended together with coffee and milk into ricebran coffee. "In a one-time production requiring 1 kg of rice bran, 250 grams of Robusta coffee produces 40 cups of ricebran coffee. Each cupis added by 150 ml of fresh milk," Yuntia added.
Ricebran Coffee is marketed with three variations of flavor namely chocolate, strawberry and blueberry. With the price 5000 rupiah per 350 ml cup size, they can sell about 20-30 cups per day. "For the time being, we just sell them in the canteen of Faculty of Economics and Business UGM," she said.
The product derives from the participation of the five young students in Student Creativity Program 2011. Their proposal passed the selection and got funding assistance from Directorate of Higher Education for as much as 4,500,000 rupiah.