Terroir

Coffee is a tropical evergreen, and where it grows shapes everything in the cup. Two species matter. Arabica is sweeter and more complex. Robusta is more bitter but packs a much bigger boost in caffeine. The best Arabica grows high, often a mile or more above sea level, where cool air slows the ripening and builds sugar and density in the bean. Altitude, soil, shade and rainfall add up to terroir, the signature of a place you can taste.

Varietals

Arabica has hundreds of varieties. Typica and Bourbon are the two old lines, and most others descend from them. Caturra, Catuai, SL-28, Geisha, and the thousands of near-wild heirlooms still growing in Ethiopia, where coffee began. Each one tastes a little different. Some floral, some syrupy, some bright with citrus. We name the variety because it is part of where a coffee comes from.

Picked by hand

Cherries on the same branch ripen at different times, so the best coffees are picked by hand, one cherry at a time, at peak ripeness. Pickers pass over the same tree again and again across a season. It is slow, careful work. Your cup started as a ripe red cherry on a mountainside.

Processing

After picking, the fruit has to come off the seed, and how that is done shapes the flavor.

Washed. The fruit is stripped, the seed fermented and rinsed clean, for a bright, clear cup.
Natural. The cherry dries whole in the sun, so the fruit's sweetness soaks in, for a heavier, berry-forward cup.
Honey. Some fruit is left on to dry, for sweetness with more structure.
Wet-hulled (Giling Basah). The traditional Indonesian method behind the deep, syrupy body of Sumatra and Bali.

The Bean Belt.

Coffee only grows in a band around the middle of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where the climate is just right. Your cup always comes from somewhere near the equator.

Two beans, or sometimes one.

Most cherries hold two seeds that sit flat against each other. Now and then a cherry grows just one small round seed instead, called a peaberry. Many roasters sort these out and prize them for their concentrated flavor.

Green, then brown.

Raw coffee is a pale green seed that smells grassy and vegetal. Every bit of the aroma, color, and flavor you know is created later, by the roast.

Caffeine is the plant's natural bug spray.

Coffee plants make caffeine to defend their seeds from insects. The thing that wakes you up is, to the plant, an all-natural pesticide.

What “specialty” means

Specialty is an actual grade. It is the top tier of the world's coffee, set by the Specialty Coffee Association. A coffee has to score 80 or higher on a 100-point scale to earn the name. Only a small slice of the global crop makes it. That is all we buy.

Green grading

Before anything is roasted, the raw green coffee is inspected. On a 350-gram sample, a specialty lot has to show zero primary defects, things like a black or sour bean, and only a few minor ones, with moisture around 10 to 12 percent. It is quiet, exacting work, done a bean at a time.

Cupping

To score a coffee, trained tasters cup it. They steep the grounds, break the crust and smell it, then slurp the coffee off a spoon so it sprays across the palate. They rate ten things: fragrance and aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, clean cup, sweetness, and overall. Each one gets a 6 to 10.

The 80-point line

Add up the ten scores, take off any defects, and a specialty coffee has to clear 80. From 80 to 84 is very good. 85 to 89 is excellent. 90 and up is rare. A single off cup can cost real points. That is the bar every one of our coffees has to clear.

Q-graders

The people scoring are often Q-graders, licensed tasters who have passed a stack of sensory exams and are calibrated to judge quality the same way every time. When we say specialty, that is their trained palate behind the word, not ours.

What is craft roasting?

Craft roasted coffee, also called artisanal, small-batch, or micro-batch roasting, means roasting coffee by hand, in small amounts, by roasting professionals who taste and tune every roast, not machines running one heavy setting over tons of beans at once. It is the opposite of industrial roasting. Here is what stands behind those words on our bag.

How small is "small batch"?

Artisan roasters work in drums that hold roughly 5 to 30 pounds at a time. Industrial roasters run 500 pounds or more in a single cycle, and the biggest companies roast hundreds of millions of pounds a year. A micro-roaster usually roasts less than 100,000 pounds in a whole year, which is less than a large plant makes before lunch.

A roast profile for every harvest.

Every origin and every harvest is a little different. Small batches let us build a custom roast curve for each one, to draw out its own sweetness and character instead of flattening everything into a single taste.

Fresh by design.

Because we roast little and often, only as orders come in, the coffee gets to you quickly, near its peak. Big batches, on the other hand, are made to be stored and shipped long in advance.

The three phases

Roasting turns a grassy green seed into the brown, aromatic bean you know. It happens in three stages. First the bean dries out. Then the Maillard reaction kicks in around 150°C, where sugars and amino acids react to build color and hundreds of aroma compounds. Finally the sugars caramelize into sweetness and depth. Good roasting is mostly heat, time, and paying close attention.

First and second crack

You can hear a roast. Around 196°C the bean pops as it lets go of built-up steam and CO2. That is first crack, the finish line for light and medium roasts. Keep going to about 224°C and it cracks again, softer this time, as oils push to the surface. That is second crack, dark roast territory. Where the roaster stops decides a lot of what you taste.

Development

The time between first crack and the end of the roast is called development, and it is where a roast is made or lost. Cut it short and the cup tastes green and sour. Run it too long or too hot and the bright notes burn off. Most roasters aim for development around 20 to 25 percent of the total roast time. It comes down to seconds.

Roast levels

Light roasts keep more of the bean's origin character. Bright, complex, and, despite the myth, a touch higher in caffeine. Medium sits in the middle, rounded and easy to drink. Dark trades origin nuance for bold, low-acid depth. None is better than the others. They are different ways to read the same bean.

The ratio

Coffee is mostly water, so proportion matters. The SCA's Golden Cup guideline is about 1 part coffee to 18 parts water, roughly 55 grams of coffee per liter. Go up for a stronger cup, down for a lighter one. Weigh it if you can. It is the fastest way to get consistent.

Grind

Grind sets how fast water pulls flavor out of the coffee. Coarse for slow methods like French press and cold brew. Medium for drip. Fine for espresso, where the water is gone in seconds. Too coarse and it is thin and sour. Too fine and it turns bitter. Dialing in your grind is the biggest upgrade most people never try.

Water

A cup is about 98 percent water, so it is not a small thing. Use clean, filtered water. Distilled tastes flat and hard water dulls the flavor. Brew between 195 and 205°F, just off the boil. Cooler and the coffee is underdeveloped. Hotter and it scorches.

Extraction and strength

Two numbers sum up a good cup. Extraction is how much of the coffee actually dissolves into the water. The sweet spot is 18 to 22 percent. Under that it is sour and grassy, over it is bitter. Strength is how concentrated the cup is, measured as total dissolved solids, usually around 1.15 to 1.35 percent for filter coffee. Get both right and the cup sings.

The bloom

Fresh coffee is loaded with CO2 from the roast, and it needs a few days to settle. That is degassing. Pour hot water over fresh grounds and the gas rushes out in a rising, bubbling swell. That is the bloom. Old coffee lies flat. Fresh coffee breathes. Give it about 30 seconds to bloom before you brew and the cup comes out cleaner and sweeter.

Click here for our full brew guide.

What time takes away

Roasting creates hundreds of aromatic compounds, the notes of chocolate, fruit, caramel, and flowers you smell when a bag is opened. They are delicate, and they fade first. The natural oils that carry flavor slowly oxidize, the way a cut apple browns. The carbon dioxide built up during roasting escapes, and it takes aroma with it as it goes. A bag that has sat in a warehouse for months has not gone bad. It has simply gone quiet. The cup still works. It just no longer sings.

What freshness keeps

Everything that makes coffee worth drinking, the aroma, the sweetness, the depth, all the notes of flavor, is created by the plant and the roast, most alive in the days and weeks just after roasting. Time, air, heat, and light wear it down. We do not promise miracles in a mug. But the sooner your coffee reaches you after roasting, the more of what the plant and the roast created actually makes it into your cup.

Craft roasting

Most coffee sits in warehouses and on shelves for months before it reaches you. Large coffee corporations roast massive batches of coffee at once, but we decided to do the opposite. We roast in small batches only as orders come in, so your coffee leaves the roaster only days from when it was made, not months. That is the whole point of buying fresh: you get the coffee when it is still at its brightest.

The little valve with a big job

When you see a coffee valve, you know your coffee was roasted to order. Fresh roasted coffee is alive. For days after roasting, the beans release carbon dioxide in a natural process called degassing. Sealing that coffee in an airtight bag would cause it to expand and burst. Leaving the bag open or with a two-way valve would allow oxygen to creep in and steal the flavor.

The one-way valve on our bags solves both issues. By letting the CO2 out from degassing without letting oxygen in, your coffee can travel smoothly without losing its personality. Press the bag gently to breathe in the aroma escaping through the valve for a little Salaam from the beans. :)

Keeping it fresh at home

Keep it sealed. Air is the main thief. Close the bag well after every use or transfer to an airtight container.
Keep it cool and dark. A cupboard away from the stove is perfect. Skip the fridge, where coffee absorbs moisture and odors.
Buy small, buy often. A bag you finish in a few weeks will always taste better than one that lingers.
Optionally: Buy whole bean. Grind right before you brew.