Coffee & Crema does its best to serve coffee that has had the best start in life. To that end we have a few simple rules we follow. It actually makes our job easier if we just settle for nothing less than the best, rather than spending hours cutting corners and shaving pennies.

Single Estates, No Blends

Most places serve coffee blends to hide the defects of the cheaper or older coffee they use. They hope you won't notice the funky taste in their Colombian if they hide it behind a Sumatran and a Kenyan. But exceptional coffee shouldn't be muddled up with inferior coffee. It shouldn't even be muddled up with other exceptional coffees! Farmers all across the world work very hard to produce something they are proud of, in a manner sensitive to their environment and everyone that lives on the land. To that end we will always try to give them the credit they deserve and provide you with the name of country, region, farm and varietal of the beans we sell.

No Flavors

Coffee has lots of flavor already hidden away inside each little bean and our goal is to have you taste it - something you can't do if we cover it up with additives. We work very hard to make sure nothing comes between you and the taste of the coffee you are drinking. Flavor-added coffee gums up our grinder and makes everything taste flavored. There's nothing we can do about it and though we want to meet customers where they are we can't do it at everyone else's expense.

No Dark Roasts

Contrary to popular belief, roasting dark does not bring out flavor but hides it. Intensive roasting exchanges a bean's natural flavor for other, homegenizing, flavors. Chocolate and caramel are the characteristics of dark coffee and if it done well can be quite tasty but it's not the coffee we are tasting at that point, it's the roast. I'm not even talking about terrible coffees that are roasted dark to hide their deficiences (we all know a roaster or two out there that does this ... ) but even the really exquisite examples of the dark arts.

Roast Dates

Roast dates are important because coffee loses its flavor so quickly. Valve-sealing the bags has improved the freshness of coffee overall but almost every roaster uses this as an excuse to put a "Sell By" date on their bag instead of a "Roasted on" date. We like to move our coffee within one month of its roast date. Its an aggressive time frame but the coffee you drink tastes better for it.

Test, Test, Test

We cup samples of coffee at every opportunity, both to evaluate which ones we will serve and to better appreciate them. We don't take anyone's word that they have the best stuff out there. Our customers deserve better than that and we have the responsibility of being their advocate. We continue to cup our coffee after purchasing it, just to make sure our roaster is doing a good job.

We Serve What We Sell

There is not a coffee on our shelf that doesn't get brewed up in some form or another and drunk. We won't buy it unless we like it and if we like it we'll drink it. And it would be rude if we just drank it all and didn't offer any to our customers, right?