We all like and praise specialty roasters. We recommend them online, we tell our friends about. The coffee is great.
… Except when it’s isn’t. And you still paid specialty price for it.
Do you have any bad experience with specialty roasters, places you won’t go back to? Have you ever encountered roasters claiming to sell specialty coffee, but when you open the bag it’s worse than supermarket coffee?
OP, sounds like you have an axe to grind yourself perhaps? Want to start us off?
This isn’t “name and shame”, but more a general complaint. And that is “specialty decaf”.
Due to a heart condition, all I can drink these days is decaf.
And the predominant bean for this, due to the economies of scale, is the same bland Swiss water decaf Columbia used by roasters from Starbucks to many many specialty coffee roasters. And the result is the bland, ashy, muddy decaf we all lothe.
Thankfully, some specialty roasters have started switching away from the awful water process to EA and CO2, though still mostly using the same tired Columbia strains.
Of the two newer decaffination methods, EA is significantly better at keeping the flavors faithful to the original bean (tested with several blind tastings), but roasters still tend to roast the results to medium / medium dark to bow to the greater market, which is really a shame.
There are a handful of roasters that have been attempting EA decaf at a light/medium-light roast level and the results are finally something I’d classify as “specialty decaf”, but my rotation is still only about 5 total bean/roast/roasters combos.
Hopefully the new caffine-free coffee cherry strains gets to market soon, I really really want to explore specialty coffee like I used to.
If you’re up for roasting your own (it’s easy and fun!) there is a great variety of decaf green beans.
www.sweetmarias.com/green-coffee.html
I regularly roast their decaf fazenda and it’s great.
Which roasters? Sometimes I want coffee in the evenings, but I can’t have caffeine that late.
Main Rotation
- Ceremony
- Merit
- Littlewolf
- Onyx
For variety
- S&W Roasting (availability varies)
- Hatch Crafted (availability varies)
- Dogwood (best local)
Give 'em a break!
They’re necessarily small businesses, and if they get say, a bad sack of raw beans, or the roast doesn’t come out right for one reason or another, they still have to make a living.
Not a fan of the Melbourne roaster St Ali. It’s local, but not a small roaster anymore - can find them in supermarkets. From all reports the owner sucks. Tried some beans before I found that out and they were ‘meh’. So yeah, it’s a no from me.
I rate Italo Disco, but the rest of their roasts are very much meh. Plus they’re pricey af - I only buy from them during Black Friday sales, and three of the last four years they’ve got my order wrong (missing or incorrect items) and I’ve had to contact them to fix it. Sometimes more than once.
Yeahh haha not surprised. I remember they did shady sales tactics during covid when there were shortages of things like RATs - like spend over $100 to get a free box of tests coz they somehow had an oversupply. Bizarre
when the coffee is mid, make the best of it. it’s still a rare luxury in the grand scheme of things. use it to practice latte art or brew it for your friends during book club.
