The Honest Version of Why We Sell Three Flavored Coffees

There are two posts on this site that say we do not make flavored coffee.

Why we don't roast flavored coffee and why we don't add "natural flavors" to our coffee. Both of them are careful, and both of them end with the same sentence: we are not going to make flavored coffee.

We currently sell three of them. Mocha, Dubai Chocolate, and Mushroom Coffee.

If you have read those posts, you noticed. I am sorry about the whiplash, and this post is the correction, because leaving two old posts up next to a shelf of flavored coffee and hoping nobody reads both is not honesty. It is just hoping.

What the two older posts actually said

They said three things, and two of them are still right.

Flavor compounds do not survive brewing well. Still true. If you put flavoring on a bean and then brew it hard, a lot of the character you paid for ends up down the drain or in the cup as a strange note.

The beans under most flavored coffee are commodity stock nobody can trace. Still true, and it is the reason our standard exists at all. Our whole sourcing argument — why we sell only arabica, how we pick which coffees to stock, single origin explained — is that we know where the coffee comes from.

Flavoring has a real operational cost. Still true. It is additional handling, more airtight packaging, and residue in the roastery. We have not stopped paying that cost.

One of those posts also tells you that our Mocha and our Dubai Chocolate get their chocolate flavor "without flavoring." That line was wrong. Our Mocha is flavored with flavoring oils while the beans are still warm, and our Dubai Chocolate carries natural flavoring. I would rather correct it here than quietly leave it up.

The line we actually draw

Here it is, in one sentence: we do not add flavoring to any coffee we sell as single origin, and we do not sell a flavored coffee whose underlying bean we cannot trace.

Everything else follows from that.

Our single origin line is unflavored and always has been. Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Brazil Santos come out of the roaster exactly as the green coffee came in. If a bag says Costa Rica on it, the cup tastes like Costa Rica, because nothing else was added to it.

The three flavored coffees are a different line, and they work differently. Mocha, Dubai Chocolate, and Mushroom Coffee all start as specialty-grade single origin arabica that we roasted. The flavor goes on after the roast, not before. So the bean underneath is still a bean we chose, a bean we roasted, a bean we could tell you the origin of. We just do not claim the cup tastes like the origin anymore, and the label does not pretend otherwise.

That is the whole difference between what the older posts forbade and what we do. They were describing flavored green coffee — beans that arrive at the roaster already flavored, from a supplier you cannot trace. We do not buy that. We roast the coffee first and add to it after.

The three coffees, honestly

Mocha. Specialty-grade single origin arabica, medium roast, small batches, flavored with flavoring oils while the beans are still warm. The product notes say rich chocolate, naturally infused, no artificial ingredients. It is the cup for chocolate-loving coffee drinkers, and it is the foundation of a homemade mocha that does not need syrup. Twelve ounces, twenty-four ninety-nine.

Dubai Chocolate. A blend of single origin coffee, medium roast, lightly flavored with natural flavoring. Chocolate-forward, soft sweetness, clean finish. Brew it black as an after-dinner dessert cup, brew it strong as a mocha base, or brew it over ice for a treat that holds up as it dilutes. Twelve ounces, twenty-four ninety-nine.

Mushroom Coffee. A medium roast with lion's mane, cordyceps, and reishi infused into it. No flavoring at all, and no mushroom flavor in the cup — it tastes like a balanced medium roast with cocoa, soft citrus, and a clean finish. Eight ounces, ground, twenty-four ninety-nine. We make no health claims about it, and what is actually in our mushroom coffee explains exactly why.

Here is the part worth saying out loud: all three cost the same as our single origins. A 12 ounce bag is twenty-four ninety-nine whichever one you pick. One of our older posts said we would never price a flavored coffee the same as a single origin. We did not hold that line either, and the reason is simple — the flavoring is real cost and we did not pass it through as a surcharge. That is a decision we can revisit, and we would rather tell you it happened than let you assume we just made an error.

What has not changed

The things we wrote about are mostly still true.

We do not sell decaf. Why we don't sell decaf is one of the better posts on this site and it is still accurate — a 12 ounce bag of decaf is a small part of our weekly roasting and we would be using a roasting slot for it.

We do not run sales. Every price on this site is the price. Why we don't run sales is also still accurate.

We do not add flavoring to the coffee that carries an origin name, and we do not add flavoring to the bags we call single origin, and we do not sell a decaf.

What would change our minds

This is a testable line, not a marketing line, and here is what would break it.

If we ever bought pre-flavored green coffee from a supplier we could not trace, we would take the coffee off the shelf. If a flavored coffee's base bean stopped being something we chose and roasted, we would take it off the shelf. If one of these coffees started tasting like the flavoring instead of like coffee, we would take it off the shelf.

We have a rule about not shipping what we have not tasted — we taste every batch before it ships — and we apply it to the flavored line exactly the way we apply it to everything else. Why we cup every coffee twice is the second pass.

If you want the unflavored version

Then take the unflavored version, and we will not talk you out of it.

Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Brazil Santos are the single origins, and the Latin American blend is the blend we reach for when we want something that tastes like coffee without asking anything of the person drinking it.

If you are new here, what to order first is the shortest version, and how we brew coffee on Sunday mornings when we have time is how we drink it when nobody is in a hurry.

The last word

Two old posts said we would never do this. We do it now, for three coffees, with a line we can explain and a rule we could be held to.

That is the honest version. It was never that we thought flavored coffee was beneath us — it was that we did not want to sell something we could not trace, and it turns out we could solve that by adding the flavor after the roast instead of before it.

We should have rewritten those two posts when we figured that out. We did not, and you are reading the correction instead.

P.S. If you want the tasting vocabulary we use for these cups — what "chocolate-forward" and "clean finish" actually mean — what we mean when we write tasting notes and what a coffee tasting note actually means when we write one are the two we send people to.

Brew slow.

Sip slow.

— Seraphina