Sourcing
Our strategy is simple: Buy the best quality coffee. Carry a wide variety of flavor profiles. Find something unique to offer our customers.
We only carry specialty coffee, which means it was graded at least 80 points — usually higher — on the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s 100-point scale. The quality of the coffee depends on several factors, including altitude, season, soil and the farmers’ care in harvesting and preparing the beans.
That’s why we take such great care when sourcing our coffee. We work closely with importers to find coffees that are not only the best quality, but also interesting and pleasingly unique. We keep a variety of origins and tasting notes available, which include a mix of perennial favorites and new, unusual and seasonal flavors.
Roasting
What Is A Coffee Bean?
The coffee “bean” is actually the seed of a berry. Dense, green and hard as a rock, they’re not something you’d normally associate with your aromatic cup of joe. The magic of turning green, stone-like seeds into coffee happens during the roasting process.
Roasting determines the flavor of the finished coffee. It’s a process by which we develop our personalized Lucky Goat flavor profiles; recipes that are crafted to perfection over time by our experienced staff who take pride and pleasure in what they do.
Single-Origin
For each type of single-origin coffee, we develop a profile: a map that shows how we apply heat over time. It takes trial and error to create a profile that best fits each type of coffee, balancing its inherent character and the flavors that develop through roasting. Each cup is unique and appropriately reminiscent of its origin, while also being both balanced and familiar.
Our importers provide tasting notes — what they detected when they sampled the coffee — and we use that as a loose guide when creating our profiles. Sometimes, though, we find a new path. For example, we might decide to bring out a coffee’s chocolate notes instead of its citrusy flavor, just by roasting it a little darker. By experimenting with multiple small sample batches for each new single-origin coffee, we’re able to determine which combination of time and temperature brings out the best flavors in a particular bean.