Selecting Your Beans Part 3 – Where to Score

Fresh roasted artisan coffee is not easy to come by in many places. Even when you find local roasters, it can be hit or miss as to the quality of their beans or their roasting skill. Some towns have several great options, others have zilch. Often you can find locally roasted coffee in the stores, but only rarely is it fresh. Its a frustrating state of affairs that drives many coffeegeeks to roasting their own.

My first piece of advice is to head to the coffeegeek regional bulletin boards and do a search for your locality. If you come up light or empty post to the forums seeking recommendations. When I’m traveling to another city I try to check the boards ahead of time to make a list of coffeebars and roasteries to check out.

There is one sure fire way to score great beans which I’ll tell you about after the jump.

There are many coffee companies that sell their beans online, shipping coffee fresh out of the roaster to your door. Outside of getting on a plane and traveling to the doorsteps of the best microroasters, mail order is your best bet for experiencing the best coffees.

We’ll start with the shameless Plug:
I’m proud to say I work for Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee, one of the most forward thinking and ethical companies in the business (and that might be understating it). At the risk of flushing away any perception of journalistic integrity I may have earned writing here this week, I will tell you that our coffees rock. Intelli has committed themselves deeply to direct sourcing of coffee, paying high prices to farmers, and developing sustainable relationships that have produced some of the best single origin coffees around.

A comment earlier this week suggested Intelli should offer some sort of deal to Dethroner readers. Not a bad idea. So till the end of December use the coupon code “DETHRONER” and get free UPS ground shipping. The only caveat is this being the Holiday season, UPS ground can sometimes be pokey. Check out our offerings and also note we sell grinders and brewing devices too. I’ll recommend some of my current favorite coffees from our offering list in the comments.

And in the interest of regaining some journalistic integrity, I’ll also recommend a couple other roasters that I routinely sample from whose stuff I like. Portland’s Stumptown coffee rocks and is responsible for some of my most eye opening coffee experiences. North Carolina based Counter Culture always has some unique offerings and their green buyer Peter Giuliano is one of the visionaries of the new movement in coffee. My friends Andrew Barnett and Steve Ford at Ecco Caffe are always up to something good. The coffees I snatched from Seattle’s Zoka made me popular at Burning Man this year. There are no doubt several others worth mentioning, but this should give you a good head start.

And as I said back in part 2, its good to set aside old preconceptions of what you expect certain coffee origins or roasting styles to taste like. Great coffees roasted by great roasters will always have the potential to surprise you.