Where are you located, and who are your go-to success roasters within the area?
What do you like about them - and are there any stand-out offerings you’d recommend?
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 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’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’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.
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.
