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Picture: Indonesia, 2026. Photographed on a visit to understand experimental fermentation.

Specialty coffee has inherited centuries of craft. Washed coffees are bright and clean. Naturals tend to be sweet, fruit-forward, full-bodied. Honey processes are somewhere in between. See the picture on the bottom of the page if you want to see the differences clearly!

These methods are the core of specialty. They are great in their own right, refined across generations of producers who know exactly what they are doing. If you've had a good washed Ethiopian or a thoughtfully made natural from Colombia and loved it, you've tasted what great speciality coffee can be.

We love those coffees too! We just don't roast them.

The coffees on this site come from producers who treat processing and fermentation as something to be designed a stage of the work, not just how it's always been done.

That means tanks instead of open piles, to create so called an "anaerobic environment". Specific yeasts instead of whatever drifts in on the wind. Temperature held for two hundred hours or nine days sealed in barrel. A wine yeast and cherry juice introduced in a second phase. Each of these is a choice. Each one is made by someone who has spent years calibrating what those choices do to flavor.

The result is coffee that tastes like things coffee doesn't usually taste like, like preserved fruit and wine, which is awesome to us.

By the way, the picture of the coffee plant here is at a farm in Indonesia we visited recently.

A question that comes up: isn't this cheating?

When you see a coffee processed with mango, or strawberry, or cinnamon, the natural first thought is that someone has flavored it. That feels like a shortcut.

We really don't think so! Fermentation is microbial work. Yeasts and bacteria break down sugars and produce new compounds, many of which we taste.
When a producer adds fruit to a fermentation tank, they're feeding the microbes with fruit as fuel, they're not infusing flavor. A mango co-ferment can end up tasting like passionfruit, or rose, or nothing fruit-like at all, because what you taste isn't the mango, it's what the microbes made out of it.

Scientists have been measuring these compounds since the early 2000s. The aromatic molecules that make a coffee taste like mango are produced by specific yeast strains breaking down sugars in the presence of mango - not transferred from the fruit itself. It's the same logic that lets a winemaker choose a yeast culture to bring out particular aromatics from the same grapes.

So: a producer making the same kind of deliberate choice a winemaker, a brewer, or a cheesemaker makes every day. The fermentation is the thing!

How to start

You don't need to understand anaerobic fermentation or carbonic maceration to drink these. Start with what sounds interesting. Pick a flavor profile that catches you. Brew it the way you'd brew any other specialty coffee.

If something grabs you, then get curious about how it was made. That's how we ended up here in the first place, tasting something that was so different, and needing to understand how it was possible.

The process is on every product page if you want it, but only read it if you want to!

One more thing: let it rest

For a long time, “fresh coffee” basically meant one thing: the closer to the roast date, the better. But specialty coffee is a little more annoying than that :-).

Roasting creates COâ‚‚, and a lot of it stays trapped inside the coffee after it leaves the roaster. Over the following days and weeks, that gas slowly escapes through a process usually called degassing.

That matters when you brew. Very fresh coffee can still be releasing a lot of gas when water hits it, making extraction harder to control. With the light roasts we prefer, a little rest often helps the coffee become more open, sweet and expressive.

In our experience, some of the more experimentally processed coffees we work with can need even more time. They can taste a little "loud", sharp or disjointed early on, then settle into something much more balanced and expressive after a few weeks. Depending on when you order, your jar might arrive very fresh and need some patience, or it might already have had some of that waiting done for you. The roast date is always on the jar.

TLDR: That's not old coffee, it's coffee we're happy to drink.

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