Behind the Scenes: How We Choose Our Coffees
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We get asked this more than you might expect.
"How do you decide which coffees to carry?"
It's a fair question, and one that deserves a real answer, not a marketing version, but the actual honest description of what the process looks like.
The short version is slowly. With a lot of cups and a lot of waiting.
But there's more to it than that, and we thought it might be worth walking through not because the process is glamorous or particularly dramatic, but because understanding it might give you a different sense of what ends up in the bag you open.
It starts with tasting
We cup a lot of coffees. More than make it onto our shelves by a significant margin.
Cupping is the standard method for evaluating coffee at the industry level: a precise quantity of freshly ground coffee, steeped in a fixed amount of hot water, is evaluated by breaking the crust with a spoon to release the aroma, then tasted by slurping loudly, intentionally, to spread the coffee across the whole palate at once. It looks a little absurd if you've never seen it done. It works extremely well.
We taste coffees at different stages: freshly brewed when hot, as they cool toward room temperature, and again when they've dropped to near-ambient temperature. A coffee that seems uninteresting at first sip sometimes reveals something genuinely beautiful as it cools. A coffee that dazzles initially sometimes falls flat when the heat dissipates and there's nothing underneath the initial impression.
We taste across different days, too. Coffee from the same lot can taste slightly different depending on how long it's rested since roasting, on the atmospheric conditions in the room, and on factors that are sometimes hard to pin down precisely. A single cupping session doesn't tell you enough. Multiple sessions across multiple days start to paint a more complete picture.
What we're looking for
Clarity is probably the first thing we notice. Does the coffee present itself in a way that's easy to read, where individual flavors or impressions are identifiable rather than muddied together? Or does it taste like a generically pleasant cup without much to say?
This isn't about complexity for its own sake. Some of the best coffees we've offered have been relatively simple: a single clear characteristic expressed beautifully, something you might describe in three words rather than ten. But that simplicity should feel like restraint, not absence.
We look for coffees that stay interesting. Not just impressive in the first sip, but worth returning to on the fifteenth morning. There's a particular kind of coffee that shows off brilliantly when you're paying close attention but becomes monotonous as a daily cup. That's not what we're after. We want the cup that rewards attention without demanding it one that feels right when you're focused on it and also when you're just going through your morning.
We taste for balance: the relationship between brightness and sweetness, between body and clarity. None of these qualities exist in isolation. A coffee can have beautiful acidity that's completely undermined by a hollow finish. A coffee can have wonderful body that becomes oppressive without enough freshness. We're looking for the ones where the elements cohere, where the cup feels complete rather than one-dimensional.
And we taste with your experience in mind. Not just the experience of someone brewing carefully with a scale and a gooseneck kettle, but the experience of someone making coffee quickly in the morning in an unfamiliar setup. We want coffees that are expressive when you're paying attention and forgiving when you're not.
The coffees that take time
Some coffees stand out immediately. You taste them once, and something clicks. They're bright or complex or warm in a way that communicates instantly, and the decision to pursue them is easy.
Others take longer, and these are often the ones we end up loving most.
There's a category of coffee that seems quiet at first. Pleasant, but not arresting. You move past it in a cupping session and note it as fine without getting excited. Then you come back to it later, cooler in the cup, and something has changed. A note you didn't catch before has emerged. The sweetness has opened up. The whole cup feels more coherent than it did twenty minutes earlier.
These coffees reveal themselves slowly. They require patience from us before they can offer their best to you. We've learned not to rush that process, not to dismiss a coffee because it didn't announce itself loudly in the first moment.
This is partly why we don't move fast. The coffees that need time to reveal themselves are often the most interesting ones to live with. The ones you're still finding new things in on the last cup from the bag.
When a coffee doesn't make it
The majority of what we taste doesn't appear on our shelves.
Sometimes it's a quality issue; the lot doesn't hold up across multiple tastings, or something about the processing introduces a flavor we can't work around. Sometimes a coffee is genuinely good but doesn't quite fit where we are right now; it's fine on its own terms, but it would feel redundant next to something we're already offering. Sometimes we simply don't feel confident enough in it to put our name behind it.
We don't talk about these much, but they're part of the process too. Every coffee that makes it through represents a lot that didn't, and that selectivity, as unsexy as it sounds, is what makes the ones that do appear feel worth trusting.
What "ready" actually means
When we say a coffee is ready, we don't mean it passed a checklist. We mean it earned its place that we spent enough time with it, across enough different conditions, to feel genuinely confident that you'll be glad you opened that bag. That it'll hold up across the window of time you're likely to use it.
That confidence comes slowly.
But it's the foundation of everything we put in front of you.
And when we get it right, the cup does the rest.