A tasting note is not an ingredient list. It is a set of words a roaster picked after tasting the coffee, drawn from a vocabulary somebody wrote down in advance, and it does its most useful work before you buy rather than after.

Nobody certifies direct trade, and every page on the subject tells you to ask a roaster. We're one, we buy through importing partners, and we publish what we paid per pound green instead.

Every sort between the tree and your kitchen is aimed at the unripe seed, and the pale bean in your bag got past all six of them. That makes it the one piece of evidence about the harvest that reaches you unedited.

A cup score is the arithmetic total of a scorecard, and the SCA replaced its scorecard in 2024. Here is what the number is actually measured against, and what our own product pages do not tell you about ours.

Four commercial methods remove caffeine from green coffee, and they differ only in what does the pulling. Here is what each one does, and the residual limit the field argues about without ever quoting it.

Natural process names an operation performed at origin. Four naturals on one shelf run from mango and papaya to milk chocolate and roasted almond, which is what the word actually predicts.

The region on an Ethiopian label is a trading habit that outlived its system. Four specifications decide the cup instead, and a good listing publishes all of them.

Kenya's grading letters measure the bean, not the cup. Here is how the country description holds up against one bag we actually bought, published notes and all.

Brazil grows more coffee than anyone else, which is why the word on the bag spans a wider range of quality than any other origin. Two reputations, both honestly reported, and one lot to test them against.