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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!

See our funky coffees

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