‘Green’ is essentially coffee before it’s roasted, also coined ‘green coffee’ for obvious reasons.
Small coffee companies often don’t have the luxury or means to travel to hunt down scarce lots. Instead, we use a select few green coffee importers that bring in specialty grade coffee. These coffee sourcers do the legwork by bringing in already filtered specialty coffee, and already have the means and logistical infrastructure to make the whole process viable.
Coffee is similar to wine in that it’s scored on a 100 point scale. Anything over 80 and above and you’re in the specialty coffee realm. Aside from a plethora of scoring criteria based on scent and taste, a coffee breaks into the specialty side depending on the number of defects or faults in a sample.
We live and breath specialty, but we also like to set a bar since we’re only running with single origin offerings. Since every coffee has to stand out on its own, solo, an 86 is the lowest that we would bring onto the coffee lines. This is where we noticed a coffee can bring that specific depth and distinctive flavour. Considering that a coffee shrub produces 1 to 1.5 pounds of roasted coffee per year, and the majority of labour involved cannot be mechanical, but instead all done by hand, by real people, we chose to stick with single origins and show each lot for what it is.