Farm to Bag

Coffee is a fruit. That one fact explains most of what happens between a farm and your cup.

Every coffee bean starts as the seed inside a cherry that grew on a tree, usually somewhere mountainous, warm and wet. What that farm does — the altitude, the variety, when they pick, how they handle the cherry after picking — is most of the flavor. The roaster's job is to not wreck it.

Where our coffee comes from

We buy green (unroasted) coffee from importers who work directly with farms and cooperatives and can tell us the farm, the region, the altitude and the harvest. Mostly that means Latin America and Africa — and we rotate as harvests come and go, so the lineup changes through the year. Whatever we have roasted recently is in the shop.

How it gets processed

Once the cherry is picked, the fruit has to come off the seed. How that happens is called the process, and it's one of the biggest levers on flavor. Washed coffees are clean and bright. Naturals are fruity and heavy. Honey process sits in between. For our decafs, the caffeine is removed gently — with sugarcane-derived ethyl acetate or the Mountain Water process — so we can still roast them light. There's a whole page on it.

How we roast

We roast in small batches on Park Road through the week, depending on what's needed for orders and the next market. Roasting light means stopping the roast early enough to keep the origin character — the fruit, the sweetness — instead of roasting until everything tastes like roast. We taste every batch before it goes in a bag.

Into the bag

Our retail bags are 12 oz of whole bean coffee, with the origin and roast level marked by hand. If you'd like it ground, pick your brew method at checkout and we grind it the day it ships. Whole bean stays fresh longer, so if you have a grinder, use it.

At home

Keep the bag sealed, away from heat and light. Grind right before you brew. Use more coffee than you think — lighter roasts are denser than dark ones. And if you're used to dark roast and the first cup tastes unfamiliar, give it a few days. That's usually the moment people stop going back.