Stumptown Coffee Roasters

It’s that moment when your hand is warmed by the mug, you raise it to your nose, inhale deeply, and then take a sip.

That sip is the culmination of years of work, three-thousand-mile journeys, and passion. These are the steps we take to ensure that each sip is perfect.

notes of orange or hints of clove—it’s because those organic molecules are contained in the coffee bean. If a coffee reminds you of apple pie, it’s because coffee shares some of the same components as food, like lactic and malic acid.

Inside that small bean are the same natural components that make flowers smell so lovely, the same ethers that let you know when a piece of fruit is ripe. Coffee has twice as much going on, molecularly speaking, as red wine.

When tasting coffee, try waiting for it to cool down a little—you’ll be able to taste (and smell) the most when it’s the same temperature as your body.

Flavor only matters in the context of you. What do you like? What does this scent remind you of? Are you looking for a full-bodied cowboy coffee, or a delicate, tea-like finish? Chocolate aromas, or hints of jasmine?

Don’t worry if you can’t describe it precisely, or have a different perception than someone else. Even when you can’t put it into words, you’ll know what you like.

You’ll experience the full flavors of the coffee bean, if and only, nothing has gone wrong during roasting.

Since our beginnings, Stumptown has searched the world for the best coffee out there. That coffee grows in mountainous regions of the tropics—farms perched at high elevations with warm days, cool nights, and distinct rainy and dry seasons. Microclimates, soil composition, coffee cultivars, and post-harvest processing methods can each contribute distinct dimensions to the cup.

Our coffee team spends about half the year in producing countries, meeting directly with our producer partners on their farms, at their mills, and in their cupping labs.

The effort is worth it. We’re not doing it the easy way by buying bulk, mid-quality beans anonymously from a trading house. Instead, we go right to the source of the best coffee—that farm atop a hill in Ethiopia, for example. We hike through fields, stand among coffee drying decks, and sit down to share a meal and talk about the crop with producers we’ve met many times.

We routinely pay producers well in excess of what they could receive on the commodity market, but we understand that our coffee demands more work—hand-picking each cherry at ideal ripeness and processing it with great attention to detail.