This is how every coffee we sell as a single origin gets chosen, apart from the Huila lots, which come from partners we buy from every year.
How samples arrive
Each season importers send us 60 to 70 sample bags, a few hundred grams of green coffee each, with a code written in marker. I roast every one the same way on a 100 g sample roaster, rest it for a day, and bring eight at a time to the table.
Prices, farm names and the importer's notes stay in a drawer until the scoring is done. A famous name or a bargain price makes a cup taste better than it is.
The blind table
Rui leads. He was a sommelier for ten years, and he writes tasting notes faster than Inés and I can slurp. We each score sweetness, clarity, finish and how the cup holds up as it cools, on our own sheet.
Then we compare, and argue. Inés and I disagreed by more than two points on three cups out of eight this round. When that happens, the coffee goes back on the table the following week.
Each lot is cupped three times on different mornings before we decide. A coffee that shines on Monday and falls apart on Friday would disappoint you in the third week of the bag.
Rui has one rule that I have come to trust: if he cannot write three clear flavours for a cup, it does not make the shortlist, however pleasant it is. A pleasant blur is the most common way a good sample fails.
The lot that lost
The top score of the season went to a washed Kenyan: blackcurrant, grapefruit, very loud. It won the cupping bowl and lost in the batch brewer, which is how most of our filter is poured before 9:00. At volume it turned sharp and thin. We turned it down, and it hurt a little.
The lot we bought
The one we bought came third on the first morning and first on the third: a washed coffee from Guji, in southern Ethiopia, that tastes of peach and black tea and stays sweet when it is cold. We paid 5.20 US dollars a pound for the green coffee. The green beans in one 250 g bag cost us about 3.20 euros, before roasting, packing and wages.
Inés gave it a 7 on the first morning and an 8.5 on the third. I moved less, from 7.5 to 8. Rui wrote "peach tea, cold" on all three sheets.
It is on the bar from this week as a V60. Ask for it, and tell us whether we chose well.
Maksim, from the roaster
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