Coffee Roasters

A roaster is the company that buys green coffee and roasts it, and it has more influence over what you taste than the machine you brew with. These pages collect each roaster's coffees in one place so you can see what a company actually publishes across its whole range rather than on one bag.

The roast date is the single most useful thing on a bag

Coffee is at its best from roughly three days to a month after roasting. Before three days it is still releasing carbon dioxide and brews unevenly; after a month the aromatics have faded, and by three months a bag is noticeably flat.

A best before date does not tell you this. It is typically a year out and says nothing about when the coffee was actually roasted, which could have been eleven months ago.

So a printed roast date is the clearest signal a roaster gives about how it expects its coffee to be treated. Very few large roasters print one, and the ones that do are making a claim they can be held to.

Traceability, in the order it gets more meaningful

"Beans from around the world" tells you nothing at all.

A named country is a start. A named region is better, because coffee from one part of a country tastes distinctly different from another.

A named farm, estate or cooperative is the real thing. It means the roaster knows whose coffee it bought, and it is the level at which a relationship with a producer becomes checkable rather than a phrase.

Altitude and varietal are the specifications above that. Both affect flavour directly and both are rare on a supermarket shelf.

Certifications say a different thing from direct trade

Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance and USDA Organic are audited by third parties against published standards. They are limited in what they cover, but they are verified by someone other than the seller.

Direct trade is not a certification. It is a roaster describing its own buying practice, and its value depends entirely on how specific the description is. A programme with published commitments and named producers means something. The phrase "sourcing with impact", naming no body, no programme and no commitment, means almost nothing.

Judge both by what is checkable. A certification is checkable because someone audits it. A trade relationship is checkable when the producer is named.

Reading a roaster rather than a bag

The advantage of looking at a whole range is that inconsistencies show up. A roaster that certifies most of its coffees but not one of them has made a decision worth knowing about. A roaster that publishes tasting notes on four bags and none on its flagship is telling you something about that flagship.

Buyer ratings across a range are worth the same kind of look. One low-rated bag means little; a pattern across several substantial review counts is a signal, even when the sourcing on paper looks good.