All posts in “Trade”

The 3 Best New Coffee Roasts to Try This Month

Seasonality is everything in coffee. So when it comes to choosing the best beans to brew at home, our recommendation is simple: just look to what’s new. Here, three fresh batches from some of the country’s best roasters — Merit, Huckleberry and Blueprint.

Merit Nano Genji

One of the first harvests from a brand new coffee washing station in the heart of Ethiopian coffee country, Merit’s latest is a lightly sweet, bright and floral tribute to coffee’s most-loved origin. Best brewed pour-over.

Origin: Jimma Zone, Ethiopia
Roast Level: Light-Medium

Huckleberry Burundi Gitwe

In her first year on the competitive coffee roasting circuit, Huckleberry’s head roaster Shelby Williamson took America’s top prize: the U.S. Roasting Championship. This new bag, a Trade exclusive, grows for years on Gitwe, a mountain in Africa’s Eastern Rift range before harvest. The roaster’s tasting notes include peach, graham cracker and tangerine.

Origin: Muramvya Province, Burundi
Roast Level: Light-Medium

Blueprint Gamatui Community

The best way to understand the enormous effect processing has on beans is to try a coffee that’s undergone natural processing. Grown on the slopes of Mount Elgon in Eastern Uganda, Blueprint’s just-harvested medium roast is the perfect place to start. The beans boast huge sugar and acid content, making for a fruit bomb of a bag (Trade describes it as “deeply reminiscent of your favorite berry-flavored cereal”). The beans are harvested from three coffee plant varietals, including SL34, one of the best plants for coffee quality in the world.

Origin: Kapchorwa, Uganda
Roast Level: Medium

Dark-Roasted Coffee Could Be the Comeback Story of 2019

Like craft beer before it, Third Wave coffee is riddled with stereotypes. The caricature of the beer snob is a close relative of the coffee snob — snooty, dismissive and weirdly righteous. You’ll remember, too, that the craft beer community of yesteryear held fast to its belief that certain beers were beneath them — such as lagers — until some of America’s best brewers decided they weren’t. Craft coffee’s version of the lager saga is darkly roasted coffee, and now it looks like it might get off that high horse, too.

Meet “The Classics,” Trade Coffee’s new monthly coffee subscription. Built for the person who wants to get into coffee, new subscription nets you two bags of dark-roasted, specialty-grade coffee beans per month ($25 total).

“I think the thing about darker roasts is that they’re inherently a bit nostalgic,” said Erika Vonnie, director of coffee at Trade. “For the most part, that’s how coffee was roasted in America for a very long time. In the past, specialty roasters have leaned on lighter roasts, but they tend to be so far removed from what people know about coffee that it makes the transition from Folgers to specialty especially difficult.”

This idea mirrors the prediction of specialty coffee consultant and entrepreneur, James Hoffmann. In a video predicting coffee trends in the new year, Hoffmann spoke to the specialty coffee industry’s traditional stance against dark roasts: “We’ve pushed back pretty hard against [dark roasts] as an industry. We’ve said dark roasting is morally wrong, it destroys the hard work of great producers, and I understand and see that argument. I think we’re going to start to say, ‘If people like dark roasts, why can’t they have good green coffee?’”

By “green” coffee, Hoffman is referring to coffee beans prior to roasting (historically, darker roasts were filled using beans of a lower grade). It doesn’t hurt that that buzzy coffee roasters like LA’s Go Get ‘Em Tiger and Arkansas’s Onyx Coffee Lab are releasing higher-end dark roasts, too.

“You can’t hand someone curious about specialty coffee your super funky, light-roast Gesha and send them off into the sunset,” Vonnie said. “This is about getting coffee in the hands of people who want something that’s great, but still reminds them of coffee they’ve had before.”

The Classics subscription is available through Trade’s site now.