A place about coffee for coffee people. An alternate home for the Specialty Coffee weirdos and normal folks alike, united by a shared passion for coffee. This is a space for folks from industry insiders to casual consumers and everyone else in between.
I'm in Sacramento, California, USA and am a coffee roaster so I like my roastery. I don't know the rules about self promo here so I'll say around me (that aren't me) the best are Mast, Temple, and Camelia.
Mast has the best coffee actually roasted in Sacramento if you brew your own, but the drinks in their cafes are always lackluster. Temple's drinks are on point but I feel like they haven't scaled well on the roasting side. Camelia has good coffee and I personally really like their packaging.
Mast has the best coffee actually roasted in Sacramento if you brew your own, but the drinks in their cafes are always lackluster. Temple’s drinks are on point but I feel like they haven’t scaled well on the roasting side.
I think it's wild how this happens, and how (relatively) common it is. We have a few businesses in town here that fall into that same issue - either they roast really well and phone it in on drinks in cafe, or the cafe is excellent but the in-house roasting just doesn't meet the bar.
Though the big nominee I would have had for that award shifted their roasting program last fall and now the coffee is kind of crummy in addition to lackluster drinks in-cafe.
My absolute favourite case there is a company whose cafes do a phenomenal job of making their coffee taste normal, but take some home and those beans are consistently roasted like someone back at the factory is trying to craft bean-shaped satire of Specialty light roasts. It would be art if it was deliberate, but they're completely straight-faced and earnest that they roast the absolute best coffee in the city and anyone who doesn't agree is an uncultured boor who doesn't really like coffee. I wish I was kidding.
But if I ask you, that doesn't count as a self promo, right? lol (because I am curious now!)
I'm in Perth, Western Australia...
Favourite roaster for my standard morning flat white is Leftfield. All their roasts are blends on the medium/dark side, but consistently high quality.
(And... I just looked at their website for the first time in ages and see that they now have a whole bunch of single origins...)
For coffee nerd stuff, I like community coffee and blacklist. Blacklist are a third wave coffee shop, they do a whole heap of single origin roasts and do pourovers, etc, in the cafe.
I've never heard of Leftfield or Blacklist; but Community Coffee is a name that's made it to my part of the world in the past - I recognize them at least.
I think the darker end of mediums is a range of roasts that Specialty can tend to neglect, but where there's still enough space and variety for a roaster to express excellence and play with interesting coffees. I recall you posted latte shots earlier - you're mostly an espresso person?
Where are you? A different Australian state, or a different country? I'm surprised that anyone has heard of community coffee outside of WA.
Yeah, I'm only recently an espresso person. Got a cafelat robot a year ago and am still learning lots. Used an aeropress for ages, but still do pourovers from time to time.
it's an interesting observation that speciality coffee ignores darker roasts. I reckon there will be a revolt against light roasts soon as people start to explore what makes good dark roast.
For example I only noticed this on the Leftfield website the other day. Haven't tried it yet.
https://www.leftfieldcoffee.com/shop/kams-signature-roast-traditional-dark-roast
Rich & satisfying, this is our fullest roast. It’s a gourmet take on traditional craft roasting, by hand and on manual equipment. After constant requests for something a little more old-school, Kam has chosen the densest beans that can take a higher roast degree. It’s not an easy style to do well, it takes a special touch but there are over two decades of craftsmanship behind this one. Enjoy…
I'm damn close to being almost the exact opposite side of the planet lol; I'm in Vancouver, on West Coast of Canada.
/r/coffee has had several conversations about coffee that's 'overseas' to my perspective, and I'm pretty sure Community Coffee has come up every time Western Aus does. To my impression, they're effectively one of the biggest names on your half of your continent, I can only name two other WA roasters off the top of my head, and one of those solely because they spent a couple years spamming /coffee - the other guys that I know about more positively is Five Senses, out of Perth / Port Kennedy area? Their name comes up online from time to time, but I have a friend that worked in their cafe while she was down there on a gap year.
Espresso is probably the one major venue that medium-dark still gets playtime up here; I think my local peers and cafe owners here have finally started working out that the execution threshold on light and very-light roasts is so astronomically high that it's not a consistently positive experience in cafes - only in the last five years or so have I stopped needing to worry that each new Specialty cafe I tried might serve me some battery-acid shot of ultra-light single origin that only the owner can actually do a good job with.
it's an interesting observation that speciality coffee ignores darker roasts. I reckon there will be a revolt against light roasts soon as people start to explore what makes good dark roast.
I wouldn't say strictly ignores, so much as undervalues. While I think there's some very good reasons underlying some of the attitude towards darker roasts in modern Specialty, I think that a lot of those reasons and the attitude itself are exaggerated for cultural rather than coffee-factual reasons. NA & EU Specialty movements started as a culture defined by what they weren't - as a movement 'in opposition to' what was popular and common in the coffee industry and among coffee consumers in the time Specialty started. And a lot of what was popular at the time was dark roasts - so "we" did light roasts of nice beans that dark roasting was bad for because we are special people making special coffee in special ways, not like those filthy casuals making boring normal coffee with dark roasts and cheap beans. ...I hope that reads as satire and not genuine...
I don't think we're likely to have a revolt against lighter roasts. I think some of the stigma around some darker roasting is fading over time, I think there are some specialty businesses more willing to embrace and experiment with darker roasting, but the label of dark is largely left out of the question - the closest we see to a real 'revolt' is against roast levels as a metric, in abstract. Roasters are increasingly likely to let experimentation and profiling take roasts darker and lighter without the roaster checking the 'roast level' or using it to determine their goals. Some roasting of coffees that are flattered by darker roasting has trended darker, but less as a conscious thing and more that the sample roast runs indicate 5° hotter and 1:00 longer are positive changes to the coffee.
As worthwhile detour, I know that our "roast levels" and yours aren't consistently 1:1; my impression has been that your typical roasting range is over a narrower spread - your light roasts are darker, your dark roasts are lighter - than ours typically is, so when NA or EU is talking about "dark" that's generally going pretty close to black, clear expressed oils like a day or two after roast, and almost inevitable "drum" or "heat" notes in the cup. That starting point is a huge portion of why there are those attitudes - that is a foundation that's very hard to build or find quality within.
I don't think I'm a loud enough voice in NA today to take credit, but I've been banging on for years now that Specialty is missing how much depth and space for excellence in roasting and beans exists at med-dark levels, because Specialty companies explicitly doing "dark roasts" or med-darks were typically either using top-shelf light roast beans and just roasting them dark, or buying something cheap and average and doing a very boring roast with relatively little QA. While I was roasting I had several peers confess that their dark product was kind of phoned-in because they and their team hated cupping the dark batches. And I'm like ... but you're getting paid to?
That said, in their defense - it does require different skills and developing a different palate from what Specialty normally asks for in cupping light and medium roasts of "our" beans, though; it was a lot of work that I also didn't enjoy very much to learn what to look for and how to iterate cupping QA for darker roasts, and to develop a palate adequate to realize and explore that there are differences among beans and what they bring, even at roasts dark enough Specialty wisdom says there's no origin traits left.
I'm in NYC, so we're a bit spoiled. There's great coffee all around, but my personal favorites are Sey Coffee in Brooklyn and The Coffee Project, which is essentially a coffee professional development group for training and certification that also has an excellent roastery and several cafes.
I didn't know that Coffee Project did their own retail line as well; I thought their niche was providing roasting space/machine access to small startup roasters who couldn't own their own dedicated space.
Yeah, I've had some really great beans from them! They actually have a location literally across the street from my apartment, so they're my go-to source for beans and I go pretty frequently. I just had a Thailand typica from them that was really lovely and a passion fruit maceration that was funky as hell, but really fun.
I’m not a coffee expert so I’ve been trying various places near me in Seattle. So far Ladro, Victrola, and Storeyville seem lovely.
The other big OG that I'm familiar with from down there is Espresso Vivace, who make a really fantastic lineup of old-world style espressos with third-wave execution. The first cafe I ever worked at served them, I've loved their coffees since.
I will certainly check them out! Thank you!
I'm in lower mainland BC, Canada; my go-to in the Vancouver region are Luna, House of Funk, and Pallet.
Luna is an extraordinarily talented, relatively tiny, roaster run out of Langley region that specializes in very unusual, weird, or distinctive coffees. They do things that are an easy sell for the Specialty coffee person into the more out-there side of things and the combination of their sourcing talent and knowledge, and the talent and effort put into their roasting, has them consistently put out very high quality 'niche'-appeal lots, typically with short shelving time and fairly quick stock rotation.
House of Funk is a brewery/roastery located in North Van that roasts a lot of 'funky' beans. The roasting isn't as innovative or technical as Luna, but their sourcing is very much focused on the weird and their lineup is consistently unusual and very interesting coffees. Unrelated to the coffee, their packaging design is IMO second to none, the coffee generally comes in a can with art on, and some of them are cool enough I keep them long after the contents are done.
Pallet is wobbling furiously between "very accessible" and "very innovative" in a surprisingly graceful balancing act. They have a product line devoted to interesting third-wave coffees and unconventional processing or lots, they're the biggest and the most financially successful of the three and they do leverage that to buy absolutely fantastic greens and bizarre microlots on spec in a way that someone smaller might not be able to gamble on. At the same time they bring third-wave quality and attention to detail to roasting some very accessible, very "normal" coffees that are still excellent. This is my go-to when I'm trying to show 'normal' people what third-wave coffee can offer them.
SF Bay Area (Specifically South Bay for me):
...but it's really hard to only pick three!
I'm near Marietta, GA. I go to Cool Beans. They have a storefront right on the rail where they get their coffee in giant burlap sacks (sent in from different countries of course). They roast in-house, so you really can't get more fresh than that.
I'm in NW Oregon, with lots of great roasters in the area. But honestly, I've been home roasting so long that I feel like I have no idea what--if any--good new ones might be out there. So it's hard to say that my older favorites are really the best.
With that caveat, Upper Left and Nossa Familia in Portland, and Relevant in Vancouver (WA) were my old favorites. Looks like they're all still there, so I'll put my vote in for those 3.
I absolutely love Relevant. Never let me down yet