We generally try to stay away from describing roast profile as light or dark. These terms refer only to the surface color, and do not address the most important characteristic: flavor development.

Elm's roast profile can be roughly described "we roast until the coffee tastes good, and then we stop." Our roast profile is focused on highlighting the flavors of each coffee which are cultivated by the producers. Any flavors introduced by the roasting process are then a negative to us.

On the broad spectrum, our coffees are quite "light," but since we prioritize development in the roasting process, our roasts are very sweet and approachable, without the grassy, cardboard, and sour flavors of underdeveloped roasts.

We work with a myriad of great importers that focus on sourcing high quality lots from exporters and producers who also focus on building up their local communities. Some of these importers we work with are Covoya, Cafe Imports, Atlas, Crop to Cup, and Shared Source to just name a few.

All coffee ordered online is roasted to order Mondays and Thursdays. If your order is in by 9am those days, it will be roasted that day. Orders are then shipped the following day at the latest, excepting unforeseen circumstances. Subscriptions are the exception: all subscription orders are roasted Mondays exclusively. If you set up a subscription after 9am Monday morning, it will not be roasted and shipped till the next Monday.

We have a page full of brewing information, here.

Typically not. While we occasionally purchase certified organic coffees, we don’t tend to highlight that certification. The reality is that these certifications can be prohibitively expensive for many of the producers we work with.

That said, we pay well above Fair Trade minimums on every coffee we source, often by four to five times. Many of these coffees are grown using organic, biodynamic, and other sustainable farming practices, not because of certification, but because these methods are often essential for small producers to maintain both quality and yield.

Our coffees are not specifically tested for defects like mold, as those tests can also be cost prohibitive. However, defects of that nature are typically identified during the grading process, which directly impacts a coffee’s score and price. All coffee is evaluated on a 100 point scale, with specialty coffee defined as scoring 80 points or higher. We generally source coffees that score 86 points and above.

We roast on a traditional drum roaster, so we do not necessitate months long resting periods. In our own experience, we rest all of our coffee for a minimum 7 days before using them for espresso or filter brewing. The coffee can actually peak in flavor anywhere between 2-5 weeks after roast, and continue to taste great, but maybe lacking higher end acidity, for up to 3 months after roast.

If you need to preserve coffee for longer, freeze it in single dose quantities in an oxygen free environment (vacuum sealed bags or 50ml centrifuge tubes are what we have used before). These can be ground straight out of the freezer, it actually improves grind quality. These doses should last almost indefinitely, but will age at an accelerated rate after thawing, hence the single dose recommendation.