How We Pick Which Coffees to Stock (and Which We Won't)
People ask us fairly often: how do you decide what coffees to stock? Why these origins and not others? Why don't you have decaf? Why don't you have flavored coffee? Why don't you have espresso blends designed for specific machines?
This post is the longer answer. It's the buying process behind our catalog — what makes a coffee qualify, what makes us pass, and which coffees earn their spot year after year.
If you've ever wondered whether small roasters actually curate or just buy whatever's available, this is the post that walks through what we do and why.
The bar: specialty grade (the actual quality floor)
Every coffee we stock is specialty grade. That sounds like marketing language, so here's what it actually means.
Specialty grade is a quality classification defined by the Specialty Coffee Association. To qualify, green coffee must:
- Score 80 or higher on the 100-point SCA scale, scored by a licensed Q-grader
- Have zero primary defects (full black beans, full sour beans, dried cherries, foreign matter)
- Have no more than 5 secondary defects (broken beans, partial black beans, partial sour beans, insect damage, etc.)
About 3% of the world's coffee qualifies. Most grocery store coffee, including most "premium" and "gourmet" supermarket bags, doesn't.
We buy specialty-grade green coffee because we want every bag we ship to taste clean. If a coffee has defects, those defects show up in the cup — moldy, ferment, cardboard, rubber. We don't want our customers to taste those things, and we don't want to taste them ourselves.
The specialty-grade bar is the first filter. Every coffee that gets considered has to clear it.
The second filter: our importer relationship
Most small roasters don't buy green coffee directly from farms. They buy from importers — companies that source, import, and warehouse green coffee in the US, then sell to roasters in 5-50 pound bags.
We buy from one importer. We chose them for two reasons:
1. They cup every lot before it ships. Most importers will send samples. Ours sends samples of every lot they have, with cup scores and flavor notes. We get to taste before we commit.
2. They publish producer information. The importer we work with publishes the farm or cooperative name, the region, the varietal, the processing method, and the price paid to the producer for every coffee they sell. We know what we're buying and where the money goes.
There are importers that don't publish producer info (they buy on the commodity market and resell). There are importers that publish producer info but don't cup every lot. We avoid both.
When we add a new coffee to the catalog, the importer sends us 3-5 samples from a region we're interested in. We cup them all. We pick the one we like best. We buy one or two bags' worth to start. We brew it at home for a week. If we still like it, it stays.
The third filter: freshness (can we actually rotate it?)
We roast to order. That means every coffee in our catalog has to fit into the Wednesday roast cycle in a way that keeps the bags fresh.
Here's the math problem:
- We roast every Wednesday.
- We ship every Thursday.
- A coffee has 4-6 weeks of peak freshness before it starts to fade.
- We sell roughly X bags of any given coffee per month.
If we stock too many coffees, the slow-moving ones sit in the warehouse longer than they should. If we stock too few, our regulars get bored.
The current sweet spot for us is about 6 coffees at a time. Some of those are year-round (the ones that move fast). Some are seasonal (the ones we'd buy more of if we could).
This filter kills a lot of coffees we'd love to stock but can't rotate fast enough. We don't currently stock:
- Ethiopian Yirgacheffe (we'd love to, but the rotation speed isn't there yet)
- Kenyan AA (same reason)
- Hawaiian Kona (also expensive, also slow-moving for our volume)
- Sumatran Mandheling (we tried it; customers preferred Brazilian)
- Decaf (we'd have to commit to a separate decaf roast day, and the volume isn't there)
That list changes as the business grows. In 2027, we expect to add an Ethiopian and possibly a decaf. Right now, we're disciplined about what fits the cadence.
The fourth filter: the brew method test
We drink every coffee we stock in every brew method we recommend. If a coffee only works in one method, it has to be exceptional in that method to make the catalog.
Example: our Costa Rica Tarrazú is best in a pour-over. It's also drinkable in a French press and an espresso, but it's not as good. We stock it because it's exceptional in the method we recommend for it.
Example: our Whiskey Barrel Aged is great in every method. French press, pour-over, espresso, drip — it works everywhere. We stock it because it's flexible.
A coffee that requires one specific brew method and is mediocre in everything else doesn't make the cut. We want our customers to be able to brew whatever they have and still get a good cup.
The fifth filter: the "would I buy this" test
This one's less quantifiable, but it's the one that matters most.
For every coffee we consider, we ask: would I (E) buy this with my own money at the price we'd have to charge?
If the answer is yes, it goes on the shortlist. If the answer is "I mean, sure, if it was on sale" — it doesn't make it.
The reason this filter exists: our overhead is low enough that we can price specialty-grade coffee meaningfully below most large specialty brands. But we can only do that if we're not buying the most expensive green coffee available. We're buying good coffee, not the most prestigious coffee.
A $40/bag green coffee doesn't necessarily taste better than a $20/bag green coffee. The prestige comes from limited supply, specific farms, processing methods, or competition scores. Sometimes those things add real value. Sometimes they don't.
The "would I buy this" test catches the cases where we're paying for prestige rather than quality.
What we won't stock (and why)
A few categories we deliberately don't carry, even though customers ask:
Decaf
Most decaf is processed using chemical solvents (methylene chloride or ethyl acetate) to remove the caffeine. The result is a coffee that tastes flat, sometimes chemically. The Swiss Water Process and CO2 process decaf taste better but cost significantly more.
For us to stock decaf, we'd need to either:
- Accept the lower quality of chemical-solvent decaf
- Pay 30-50% more for Swiss Water / CO2 process decaf and pass that cost on
- Commit to a separate decaf roast day that justifies the volume
We're not there yet. If you need decaf, there are good roasters who specialize in it (we recommend trying a couple before you settle).
Flavored coffee
Flavored coffee (vanilla, hazelnut, etc.) is regular coffee with added flavoring oils. The flavoring masks the actual coffee taste, which is fine for people who want flavored coffee, but it's not what we're about.
We'd rather teach people what good coffee tastes like than add flavors to bad coffee. If you want flavored, you can buy it anywhere — we want to stock the kind of coffee that doesn't need flavoring.
Espresso blends designed for specific machines
We carry one espresso-friendly blend (our Latin American Blend). We don't carry blends designed for specific espresso machines (Breville, Rancilio, etc.) because we don't have the customer service bandwidth to help customers dial those in.
If you want espresso machine expertise and machine-specific blends, Counter Culture, Onyx, and Stumptown all do this well. They have the staff and the catalog. We're not going to compete on that dimension.
Ultra-light roasts
We roast most of our coffees to medium or medium-dark. Ultra-light roasts (barely past first crack, almost raw) showcase origin character but taste sour, thin, and grassy to most drinkers.
We don't roast ultra-light because most of our customers don't want that cup. The exception is our Costa Rica Tarrazú, which we roast to a light-medium to preserve the bright, clean character. That's the lightest we go.
What stays in the catalog year after year
A few of our coffees are consistent sellers and we rotate them year-round:
- Colombia — washed, balanced, the forgiving single origin. Customers come back to this one when they want a daily drinker.
- Costa Rica — bright, clean, transparent. Customers come back to this when they want to remember what single origin means.
- Latin American Blend — the value pick. Same green coffee quality as our single origins, blended for consistency, priced for daily drinking.
- Whiskey Barrel Aged — the special occasion bag. Customers buy this for gifts or for themselves when they want something different.
These four anchor the catalog. Anything else is seasonal or experimental.
How we'd describe our buying philosophy
If we're being honest about our approach:
We buy good coffee, not prestigious coffee. We don't pay for farm prestige, competition scores, or processing novelty unless the cup quality justifies it.
We buy coffee that fits our cadence. Roast-to-order means we can't stock anything that won't move quickly. We turn down good coffees because the rotation math doesn't work.
We buy from one importer, not three. Sourcing from multiple importers means more variety but also more administrative work, more invoices, more relationships to manage. We prefer the depth of one good relationship to the breadth of several.
We buy what we'd drink ourselves. The "would I buy this" test is the final word.
If that approach sounds like one you want to support, our single origin collection has what we currently stock. And if you want the deeper education on what single origin means and why it tastes different, our Single Origin, Explained post walks through the basics.
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If you've been wondering whether we curate or just buy whatever's available — now you know. Every coffee in the catalog passed five filters. If you have a coffee you'd love to see us stock, reach out and tell us about it. We add one or two new coffees a year, and we read every email. Every bag you buy helps fund animal rescue efforts through our partnership with ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, and local shelters.
Brew slow. Sip slow. ☕
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P.S. If we ever stock a coffee you don't see in the lineup right now, it's usually because the importer dropped a new lot that scored well in the cup and we wanted to try it. We don't announce these until they're in the catalog and we've had a chance to brew them at home for a week. That's the "would I buy this" test in action.