Our Coffee Origins

Direct-trade means we buy green coffee with a working relationship to a specific farm or cooperative, not through a commodity broker. We know where each lot comes from, what elevation it grew at, what process it ran through, and who handled the parchment. The price we pay is set against quality, not the futures market. For a small roaster, that relationship is the only way to lock in SCA 80+ green coffee year after year.

Better is the wrong frame. Different origins read like different albums. Colombia is the comfortable medium roast that most coffee drinkers settle into. Ethiopia Kochere is brighter, more floral, the cup that gets a coffee snob talking. Burundi natural is the wild card with fruit and wine notes. Vietnam anaerobic is the experiment. Pick by what you want from the cup that morning, not by an objective ranking.

Three filters. First, the green coffee has to cup at SCA 80 points or higher on the official Specialty Coffee Association scale. Second, the relationship has to be direct or one removed (an importer who works with a single co-op, not a multi-origin warehouse). Third, the cup has to do something distinct that the rest of the lineup does not already cover. Adding a seventh Central American washed-process medium roast would not earn its slot.

Washed process removes the cherry fruit from the bean before drying, which gives a cleaner, brighter, more transparent cup. Most of the world's specialty coffee is washed. Natural process dries the bean inside the whole cherry, which lets the fruit sugars push into the bean. The result is a heavier, fruitier, often wine-like cup. Burundi in our lineup runs natural. Ethiopia Kochere runs washed. The contrast between the two tells you most of what you need to know about process.

Yes. The Da Lat lot ferments inside sealed tanks with oxygen excluded, which produces a slower, controlled fermentation. The cup carries cocoa, dried fruit, and a heavy syrupy body that you do not get from standard natural processing. Anaerobic fermentation is one of the modern processing experiments that has reshaped what specialty coffee from non-traditional origins can taste like. Vietnam is mostly known for commodity robusta, so a specialty-grade anaerobic arabica from Da Lat is genuinely unusual.

From cooperative-grade lots in the high-elevation coffee-growing regions of Burundi. We do not publish the exact washing station name because the supply moves between micro-lots year to year. The constant is the country, the elevation band (1,700 meters and up), and the natural process. The varietal is a Bourbon strain, which is the standard for East African coffee that runs naturally.

We launched the Costa Rica Tarrazu on May 12, 2026 as a single-harvest lot. When the green coffee runs out, the product goes off the site until we secure the next harvest from the same region. That is how single-lot sourcing works for a small roaster. We do not blend it forward to keep the SKU alive, because the cup would no longer be the Tarrazu lot.

Two of the seven currently carry the USDA Organic certification: Colombia and Mexico Chiapas. The remaining origins are direct-trade specialty grade but not formally organic-certified, in most cases because the smallholder cooperatives that supply them cannot afford the certification overhead. The cup quality is the same standard. If organic certification is the primary filter, the Colombia and Mexico are the two to start with.

Not in the single-origin line. Each origin on this page ships as a single-origin coffee with the cannabinoid extract bonded during the roast through the ZenFusion process. Some seasonal sampler sets pull from this lineup, but the core seven SKUs are single-origin. Blending muddies the origin story we are trying to tell, so we run them straight.

Lightly. ZenFusion bonds a broad-spectrum hemp extract to the green coffee during the roast curve, which adds a clean herbal note in the finish. The origin character (the chocolate of Colombia, the citrus of Ethiopia, the fruit of Burundi) sits in the front and middle of the cup where it always has. The infusion sits in the back. We chose the process specifically because spraying hemp oil onto roasted beans wrecks the origin character, and bonding during the roast preserves it. The full process is documented on the how we roast page.