What is single origin? Nope...wrong again! It's not a new dating app. Single origin refers to coffee that comes from one place – one region, or often even one farm or estate.
This is different from blended coffee, which uses beans from many different places and blends them together. This allows blended coffee to be “produced” at all times of the year. Single origin coffee is only produced seasonally, unique to the region it comes from.
WHAT MAKES IT SPECIAL?
Single origin coffee is coffee that gets a lot of attention while it grows. The farmer carefully monitors the coffee throughout all the stages of its growth in order to maximize its potential for flavor and goodness. More importantly perhaps, single origin coffee allows the drinker to experience what the French find so important in their wine – the “terroir”, that is the unique flavors that coffee from a particular region in the world has to offer deriving from its own specific climate, soil, and elevation, etc.
DOES IT TASTE BETTER?
We're glad you asked! Because single origin coffee is carefully cultivated to produce its own best flavor by farmers with intimate knowledge of their growing region, single origin coffee offers unique and delicate flavor profiles you may not find in many blended coffees at large grocery or retail stores. In addition to its origin, how coffee is roasted is crucial for the flavors it can produce. Our coffee is manually roasted in very small batches and monitored throughout each roast to bring out the best that particular coffee has to offer.
WILL IT MAKE ME A COOLER PERSON?
The short answer: Undoubtedly.
The longer answer: If recognizing that coffee is an agricultural product that requires cultivation, harvesting, shipping, and processing at destination (i.e. roasting), and being informed about where it comes from, why, and how makes you cooler...well, there you go. It's also generally the case that single origin coffees are traded at prices that are much more just to the farmers who grow the crop. We think that not exploiting folks is a surefire way to be a cooler person.
WARNING!
Specialty coffee (single origins in particular) that are well roasted have pronounced and complex flavors. You may not have ever tasted coffee like ours, and once you do, it might be difficult to go back to the watery, chemically, brownish swamp creature you used to drink! Undeterred? Then let me introduce you to a few of our favorite single origins.