Roasting · June 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Why We Cup Every Lot Three Times
Green, first crack, and a week after roast — a coffee changes more than you'd think between the farm and your filter.
Most of what a coffee will taste like is decided before it ever reaches our roaster — but not all of it, and the gap is where our job actually happens.
We cup every incoming lot green-referenced, meaning we brew both the raw sample the importer sent and our own first roast, side by side, blind. If they don't agree, something happened in transit or storage, and we want to know before it's in your bag.
The second cupping happens the day of roast, still ringing with CO2, mostly to check for defects a roast can't hide — baked, tipped, scorched. The third happens seven to ten days later, once the coffee has rested and the roast has actually settled into itself. That's the cupping that decides what goes on the shelf, because that's closest to how you'll actually drink it at home.
It's slower than trusting the first cup. It also means the bag you buy tastes like the coffee we intended, not the coffee we happened to roast that morning.