How Barista & Co Choose the Best Coffee Beans
Coffee is coffee, right?
Wrong.
Learning how to choose the best coffee beans to deliver to you has proven to be the biggest challenge. Sure, we could copy our competitors and send you any old coffee in pretty packaging with a brand story that makes you think you’re getting a great brew. But we’re not like that.
We’re Barista & Co and we’ve roasted, ground, brewed and tasted thousands of coffees from all over the world. We’ve sipped single origins from Uganda and super sweet ca phe da coffee at a street coffee seller in Hanoi.
Coffee is in our blood. And we think you deserve the super fresh taste of award-winning coffee that was roasted just days before it made its way through your letterbox too. Side note: Are you a Regular yet? Subscribe to our single origin coffee to get unbeatable value on fresh arabica coffee, delivered to your door how and when you want it.
But that’s a huge ask. How do we ensure we choose the best coffee beans that everyone will enjoy at home? Well, we follow five principles:
- Ethical
- Roasted fresh
- Small batch production
- Single origin
- Brew fresh
Keep reading this blog to find out how Barista & Co always manages to get our hands on the best coffee beans from Columbia, Uganda and all over the world. Or skip to the end to find out how you can save 40% when you try our coffee today. No t’s and c’s or small print. Just fresh, honest coffee.
Coffee Doing It Right
When James founded Barista & Co, he wanted you and all your friends to be able to get fresh, honest coffee at home. To make that happen, he needed to do 2 things.
Firstly, he had to taste a lot of coffee. Being the coffee geek that he is, that wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t long before he discovered, in his own words, the best coffee beans in the world.
The second thing James had to do was work out how he could get the best coffee beans from Columbia and Uganda to your door sustainably and ethically. This proved to be a bit more challenging. The big brands on supermarket shelves export billions of tonnes of coffee from these countries, paying unheard of wages and causing irreversible damage to their environments… But this is what’s expected of the coffee industry now.
James put his foot down and travelled to Uganda to meet local coffee farmers. He met the locals in the small villages and got to enjoy a fresh brew or two with the farmers that had picked the beans themselves. This was the one.
Since then, James has put that ethos into everything we do at Barista & Co. We know our farmers by name and pay them fairly. By switching to electric vehicles, recyclable packaging and removing plastic from some of our most popular products we’re reducing the impact we have on the environment (we’re also proud to be a carbon negative business). We also offer repairs and replacements on all our kit so you should never have to throw anything away anyway.
In our minds, we’re not doing anything above what is expected of us. Everyone involved in farming, exporting, roasting and packing Barista & Co’s award-winning coffee deserves to be happy. And you know the thing about happiness? You can taste it in the beans.
Roast Fresh
Have you seen the Pilgrims Choice cheese advert? The one where someone buys a block of cheese in the supermarket and all the staff in the office start dancing around in joy. Spoiler alert, that’s not what happens when you buy a block of cheese. It doesn’t matter how good the cheddar is.
We’ve got to be honest; it doesn’t happen when you buy a bag of freshly roasted coffee from Barista & Co either. That’s because your order sets off a chain reaction. Firstly, we head over to the roastery and get a fresh batch of light or dark roast coffee (your choice, obviously) on the go just for you.
Once roasted, we have to leave it to degas for a little while – just long enough to make sure the coffee arrives at your door safely and the postman doesn’t get any nasty surprises in the back of his van when the bag explodes.
The next step depends on what you’ve ordered as well – did you order a bag of whole beans or are we grinding to your chosen brewing style today? We grind for espresso, filter and cafetiere brewing styles.
The final step is bagging, labelling and posting to your door. When we say we roast fresh, we really mean we roast fresh (unlike supermarket brands 🙄). It’s key to being able to offer the best coffee beans in the UK you know…
Small Batch
Our Dorset coffee roastery can roast 17kg of coffee at a time. There’s no mass production line with beans moving along conveyor belts and exhausted warehouse workers falling asleep at their posts. We have Ben. He’s kind of a big deal around here.
Ben is responsible for making sure every single coffee bean we roast gets the VIP treatment. Keeping our roasting output small means he has more control of variables that could affect your roast. He’s proud of every bag of coffee, that’s how we know you’re going to love it.
It’s not only the roasting process that we’ve kept small. We’ve homed in on our supply chain to keep it simple. So simple that it’s only four steps…
First, our coffee beans are picked by farmers we know by name. Secondly, our export partners get our beans from Columbia and Uganda to our roastery in Dorset. Then it’s Ben’s time to shine –he roasts, bags and posts your coffee to your door. Your house is the final step, bet you didn’t expect to be featured in our supply chain.
Other brands of coffee don’t apply this philosophy. Their beans are machine harvested and left in storage until the company needs them. Then they’re shipped to the roastery, often not in the UK. The beans are roasted on mass, packaged at a warehouse and then moved to a storage unit. We’d love to tell you the rest of the process, but it’s long-winded, unnecessary and boring. Basically, your coffee could have been in the bag for two years. No thank you.
Single Origin
We like to make sure that our coffee is traceable to a single place. This is because, much like wine, several variables affect the taste and structure of your cup of coffee. Humidity, altitude and shade all have a role to play in how that perfect little bean tastes.
When you start blending, you lose that authenticity and it’s the coffee that suffers. Blending beans from different regions is a great way to bring the costs down which is why so many brands do it… but we want the best coffee beans, not the biggest profit.
There are two things we do to choose the best beans for our single origin coffee. Firstly, James gets on the case. He’s a bit of a coffee geek and the best man for the job. It’s a hard life being head of tasting coffee at Barista & Co, but someone’s got to do it…
Of course, we couldn’t guarantee we offer the best coffee beans based on one person’s opinion. It’s thanks to you and everyone else that ditched the instant and the stale shelf coffee that we know our coffee beans are the best.
We’ve run customer satisfaction surveys and continuously gather feedback on Trustpilot. That’s where we’ve got a 4.9 star rating and people say things like:
“First time customer and…. I’m really impressed!
Beautifully smooth dark roast freshly roasted and ground coffee; perfect for my morning jolt; no bitterness or sharpness I often find with other brands (pre roasted, long-life vacuum sealed types)”
“I was believing that Costa and Starbucks are the best brands in the market but after Barista & Co Coffee trial this belief has changed. I am not exaggerating if I say it’s the Best Coffee I ever tested in my entire life.”
And
“Loved this coffee. I had the dark roast and the light roast and both were very good. Full of flavour, no bitterness and made my little coffee heart sing!”
So, as you can see, we put a great deal of effort into choosing the best single origin coffee beans. We listen to your feedback and taste everything we roast. Because at the end of the day, coffee doesn’t win awards for pretty packaging.
Just a heads up, we use the same Colombian single origin coffee bean for our darker roast as we do for our decaf. None of this blending in Robusta to bring the cost down. Just super fresh, decaf coffee beans.
Brew Fresh
By no means do you need to use a Barista & Co coffee press to get the best coffee at home, but you do need to use the best brewing tool for your preferred style of brew. Some people like their coffee thick and velvety, others prefer it to be clean and crisp. How do you like your coffee?
You might be shocked to hear that 51% of people aren’t using the right coffee maker for their favourite style of coffee. We were.
To help you brew fresh coffee that you love at home, we’ve put together this quiz. Don’t worry, it will only take you a minute. All you need to do is answer four questions to give us a bit of information about the style of coffee you love. Once we’ve got the intel, we’ll recommend the style of coffee maker you should have to brew fresh at home.
Delicious, super fresh coffee at home can be simple. It doesn’t have to create a whirlwind of mess and leave you with a pot of soggy coffee grinds to deal with. Our coffee makers have all been designed to be as easy to use and clean as possible so you can get a great brew at home without the clean-up.
How to Choose the BEST Coffee Beans
There are five things we do at Barista & Co to make sure you get the best coffee beans for your money.
Firstly, we treat everyone fairly. Happy people pick, roast and grind happy beans. Being ethical, paying fairly and supporting our team just makes sense to us.
The next thing we do at Barista & Co is roast fresh. We roast coffee daily so that when it comes through your letterbox it has a super fresh guarantee.
We also like to do everything in small batches. Yes, it’s more work for us. But it’s so worth it knowing that every bean is getting the VIP treatment.
Let’s not argue. Single origin coffee tastes better because you can rely on it to remain consistently good. We’ve tasted the difference, now we only offer award-winning single origin coffee. When are you going to try?
Finally, we give you all the tools you need to brew fresh coffee (that you know you’re going to like) at home. Click here to take the coffee maker quiz if you didn’t get around to it earlier.
So there it is. That’s how to choose the best coffee beans. How we do it anyway. But how do you know we’re not lying? Maybe our coffee is average and everyone on Trustpilot is lying about it being the best brew they’ve ever had.
Or maybe not…
Try Now and get 40% OFF
To give you the opportunity to try our award-winning single origin coffee (that is also ethically sourced AND roasted fresh to order) we’re giving you a massive 40% off. That’s almost half off our 350g letterbox friendly bags and our best value kilo bags.
You’re not subscribing, so don’t worry about cancelling anything before we charge you again. It’s just a great opportunity for you to get your hands on a bag of super fresh coffee from Barista & Co.
Choose from our lighter roast or darker roast and let us know whether you want it in whole beans or if we can grind it to your liking. We’ve also got a decaf darker roast option available for those of you who like to keep the party going into the evening.
When you do subscribe, you’ll get the option to try one of our monthly featured coffees. This is a brilliant way of tasting coffees from all over the world that James has already tried and loved!
As you can see, you’ve got nothing to lose. Try our coffee today and let us know whether you think we’ve got the best coffee beans in the UK or not.
P.s a little birdy told me that you’ll find a £5 off voucher inside your box to use on our subscription coffee when you do fall in love with it.
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