Sourcing
Every lot that comes through our door is specialty grade, traceable to a region and a harvest, and tasted on our own table before it earns a label.
Our standard
A roaster can ruin good green coffee, but no roaster has ever fixed bad green coffee. So the buying matters more than anything we do with the drum.
We buy only specialty grade arabica — the top tier of the trade, graded for defects and cup quality rather than sold by the ton as an anonymous commodity. In practice that means smaller lots, higher prices, and knowing which region and which harvest a sack came from before we commit to it.
We are a small roastery, so we are not buying containers. We buy a few sacks at a time from importers who work directly with growers and washing stations, which lets us be picky in a way volume buyers cannot afford to be. If a sample does not cup well, we pass, even when it is the cheapest thing on the table that month.
100%
Specialty grade arabica
9
Origins on the cupping table
3
Samples cupped per lot
48h
Roast to doorstep
Where it grows
Our buying splits cleanly in two. East Africa gives us brightness and structure for espresso; the Americas give us the cocoa and caramel backbone that makes an everyday cup worth drinking black.
East Africa
High-grown, densely structured coffees with real acidity — blackcurrant and citrus from Kenya, a rounder sweetness from Tanzania, florals and stone fruit from Ethiopia. Blended together they carry espresso without turning thin or sour under pressure.
The Americas
Balanced, sweet, low-acid coffees that take a darker roast without going hollow — cocoa, caramel, toffee and toasted nut. This is the base of our everyday blends and the foundation under every flavoured roast we make.
How we buy
Nothing gets bought off a spec sheet. Every lot has to survive the same short, unglamorous process.
Samples arrive
Importers send us small green samples with the region, altitude, process and harvest year attached. Anything that arrives without that paperwork does not get opened.
We sample roast
Each sample is roasted to a neutral profile — no dark roast to hide behind. We are trying to taste the coffee, not our own work.
Three cuppings
Tasted blind across three sessions on different days, scored for sweetness, acidity, body and finish. Coffee tastes different when you are tired, so one good session is not enough.
We commit, then profile
Only after a lot earns its place do we build a roast profile around it and give it a label. The coffee decides the roast, never the other way round.
Green handling
Green coffee is stable for months, not years. It slowly loses sweetness and picks up a papery, woody note past its harvest window — which is why we would rather reorder often than warehouse a year of stock.
Small, frequent lots
We buy weeks of green at a time, not seasons, and reorder as the harvest calendar turns over.
Stored cool and dark
Sealed in lined sacks off the floor, away from sun and anything with a smell. Green coffee takes on odours like a sponge.
Current crop only
We roast from the most recent harvest available. When a lot is running old, it comes off the shelf rather than into a blend.
Re-cupped before it runs
Long-running lots get tasted again mid-life, so a slow drift never reaches your bag unnoticed.
Flavoured coffee
Most flavoured coffee exists to cover up cheap beans. Ours starts from the same specialty grade single origin coffee we sell unflavoured — the syrup is there to add something, not to mask anything.
The same graded single origin coffee goes under the flavour as goes into our blends.
Added after the roast, while the beans are still warm, and folded through in small batches.
Gluten free, allergen free, vegan, with no added sugar and no added calories.
Enough to read clearly in the cup, not enough to bury the coffee underneath it.
Buying justly
It is easy to talk about origin as though it were a flavour note. But every sack we open was picked by hand, cherry by cherry, by people whose year depends on what a buyer decides to pay. We are Christians, and Scripture is blunt about withholding wages and about scales that favour the strong — so paying properly for coffee is not generosity here, it is the baseline.
“The labourer deserves his wages.”
Specialty lots are bought on quality, well above the commodity market that sets the floor for cheap coffee. We would rather raise our price than push down theirs.
We work with importers who buy from named washing stations and cooperatives, so there are fewer hands between the grower and the money.
A share of every order goes back through our local church and to the growing communities our green coffee comes from.
Questions
Through importers, and we would rather say so plainly. At our size, flying to origin to negotiate a few sacks would cost more than it returns to anyone. So we work with specialty importers who maintain those relationships properly and can tell us the station, the cooperative and the harvest behind every lot.
Some individual lots carry certifications and some do not, so we do not make a blanket claim on the bag. Certification is expensive for a small grower, and plenty of excellent, fairly traded coffee never gets certified. We buy on cup quality and on what the importer can tell us about the price paid.
Blends let us keep a flavour consistent as harvests rotate through the year — your regular bag tastes like itself in March and in October. The components are still specialty single origin coffees; we are just responsible for how they sit together.
Yes. Coffee is agricultural, harvests end, and a lot we loved in spring may not exist by autumn. When a component changes we re-cup the whole blend and adjust the roast until it tastes like the coffee you bought last time. If we ever cannot get it back, we would tell you rather than quietly ship something different.
Taste the sourcing
Pick a blend, choose your grind, and we will roast it this week. Judge the sourcing by what lands in your mug.
