One of the first things people ask us is: "Where does your coffee come from?" It's a great question, and the answer matters more than most people realize. The quality of a roasted cup of coffee is determined long before it reaches the roaster — it starts with the green beans. Here's how we think about sourcing and why we approach it the way we do.
Buying from Importers We Trust
We purchase our green coffee through specialty importers based right here in California. These aren't middlemen who buy commodity-grade coffee at the lowest price they can find. They're companies who have spent decades building direct relationships with coffee farmers around the world — visiting the farms in person, negotiating prices face-to-face, and verifying that the people doing the hard work of growing and picking coffee are compensated fairly.
The importers we work with practice what's known as direct trade. They negotiate prices directly "at the farm gate," meaning the price is set transparently between the importer and the farmer, without layers of brokers, commodity traders, and co-op bureaucracies siphoning off value along the way. The prices they pay are well above Fair Trade minimums — often 50% to 100% or more above the Fair Trade floor price. Fair Trade certification guarantees a minimum price to a cooperative, but it doesn't guarantee that the individual farmer — the person who actually grew and picked your coffee — received a fair share of that payment. Direct trade, when practiced honestly, goes further.
We think this matters. Coffee farming is brutally difficult work, often done by small-holder families at high altitudes in remote regions of the world. If we're going to roast and sell their product to our neighbors, we want to know that the price we pay traces back to a real improvement in those families' livelihoods. That's not something we can guarantee with every single lot — transparency has limits, especially with auction coffees or lots from regions where hundreds of tiny farms contribute to a single importable quantity — but it's the standard we aim for.
How We Choose Which Coffees to Roast
Once we've identified importers whose sourcing practices and quality standards we trust, the fun part begins: tasting. Or, in coffee language, "cupping."
For each of our offerings, we sample multiple options before selecting the ones we'll use. The process looks roughly like this:
First, we start with what our customers are asking for. Our waitlist surveys and conversations with neighbors tell us a lot about what people want — a smooth, everyday medium roast; a bold dark roast for espresso lovers; a great decaf that doesn't taste like an afterthought; and a rotating single origin that introduces people to something new. Those preferences are our starting point.
Then, we order samples. We'll typically evaluate four to six options for each offering, looking at beans from different farms, regions, and processing methods that could fit the profile we're going for. We evaluate the aroma of the green beans (William has a remarkably good nose for this), roast small sample batches, and cup them side by side.
Finally, we pick the ones that meet our quality threshold and best match what our customers have asked for. Sometimes the best coffee on the table isn't the right fit — a wildly fruity, experimental natural process Ethiopian might score incredibly high on a cupping sheet but wouldn't be what most people want in their everyday morning cup. We're looking for the intersection of exceptional quality and genuine enjoyment.
Quality Is Non-Negotiable
Every coffee we select is specialty grade, meaning it has been evaluated by trained cuppers and scored 80 points or above on the 100-point Specialty Coffee Association scale. In practice, we aim higher than that. Specialty grade is the entry point, not the ceiling.
We also pay close attention to how recently the coffee was harvested and imported. Green coffee is much more shelf-stable than roasted coffee, but it's not immortal — it slowly fades over time, losing vibrancy and developing a flat, "baggy" taste. We buy in quantities that let us move through inventory before that happens, so the beans we're roasting are as fresh as the supply chain allows.
Why This Approach Works for a Small Roaster
We're not a large-scale roasting operation. We're two brothers (ages 8 and 6) and our dad, roasting in Olivenhain and delivering to our neighbors. Our size means we can be picky in a way that large commercial roasters can't — we don't need to fill thousands of bags a week with consistent, middle-of-the-road coffee. We can choose specific lots, roast them carefully, and get them to your door within days of roasting.
It also means that when we find something really great, we want to tell you about it. That's part of why we started this blog — and part of why our Rotating Single Origin offering exists. Some coffees are too special not to share, even if we can only get a limited amount.
"I like smelling the green beans before we roast them because they smell totally different from the roasted ones. The Ethiopian ones smell like blueberries even before we do anything to them." — William, age 8
If you have questions about where a specific coffee comes from or how it was sourced, we're always happy to talk about it. That's one of the advantages of buying from your neighbors — you can just ask.