Not all Coffee is Created Equal

Mass-produced coffee is typically made from low-quality beans that are roasted to mask their flavor. So if coffee just tastes like coffee to you, something is fundamentally wrong with your beans. Coffee has natural sugars and complexities that can give you full-bodied flavors like Blueberries, Chocolate, Vanilla, and more…

And that brings me to my point - Not all coffee is created equal. There’s a vast difference between the taste and quality of micro roasted coffee versus mass-produced coffee. Similarly, micro brewed beer has gained popularity for its unique taste and quality compared to mass-produced beer.

When roasting coffee in smaller batches, it allows us to have more control over the process. We’re able to fine tune the profile of the coffee until we find a perfect allocation of heat over time that brings forth the natural flavors of the bean. Our coffee profiling will even change as the seasons do! As the beans age, and the crops change, our roast profile must do the same. This is something mass production just simply cannot keep up with. You’ll often find large brands roasting their beans darker to cover up imperfections in the variety of these distinctions.

We’re a chef of the bean, and we take every step in this process with rigorous detail so that we can set ourselves apart from the vast array of large competitors with unlimited advertising budgets in this space...

We want you to taste our coffee blindfolded and know exactly where it comes from.

We pride ourselves in the ability to taste a coffee bean and tell you if it comes from Ethiopia, Kenya, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and more… We can often even get down to the specific region within miles of the farm just by the taste alone.

It’s not just the way it’s roasted, it’s the way it’s farmed and produced.

If you haven’t seen it already, we provide information about the farmers for each of our coffees on the product pages of our website. Scroll down and see it for yourself.

For example: One of the biggest distinctions from many coffee farms in Brazil vs. farms in Africa is the way they are produced on the land. Brazil, being one of the largest coffee exporters in the world, bases it’s farming methods on fast and large scale production, giving the beans little-to-no time to produce the natural flavors you will find in beans from other parts of the world. Brazil coffee is cheap, and that’s what you’ll get from the taste too. Most Brazil farmers use a non-selective picking method: It’s one of the only places in the world where tractors are used for the harvest. Because of this crude picking, ripe and unripe coffee cherries get mixed. Resulting in a low-quality flavor that’s typically masked by a darker roast to hide its imperfections. But there’s that one benefit I guess – It’s CHEAP.

In Africa they do things quite differently. Instead of attempting to be the largest exporter of coffee in the world like Brazil, they are attempting to create quality over quantity. They do this by using a natural processing method where the sun dries out the cherries around the coffee until the bean falls out on its own (like it would do in nature without human intervention.) This is an absolute KEY step in the process that makes their coffees so distinct with rich and full-bodied flavor.

But not all African coffees are farmed in this way, so it’s our job to make sure we are rewarding the farmers in these regions who are perfecting the art of the bean, by promoting and roasting their coffees exclusively.

This is one of the biggest reasons why you will likely never see a Brazil bean in our catalog (Unless they make some dramatic changes to their methods), we are uninterested in low prices that sacrifice the quality of our coffees.

In conclusion, quality micro roasted coffee offer unique and distinct flavors that cannot be found in mass-produced alternatives. Yes, it’s more expensive, but our taste buds deserve it... Food and Drink is one of the biggest pleasures of life – we experience it every day. So why sacrifice an everyday pleasure for a cheap alternative you must mask with sugars and cream?

Coffee is Life. Coffee is an artform. Coffee is my passion.

Regards,

Nicolas Milone, Co-Founder, Foxen Coffee