The first thing people notice is never a fancy tasting note. Nobody walks up and says, “I detect jasmine, stone fruit and cocoa.” What they usually say is simpler.
“This isn’t bitter.”
Or, “It doesn’t taste burnt.”
I hear that reaction a lot, and it tells you something about what we’ve come to expect from coffee. We’ve gotten used to bitterness. We’ve gotten used to that heavy roasted taste, so used to it that some of us assume burnt is just what strong coffee tastes like.
I don’t buy that. What drew me to air-roasted coffee in the first place was how clean and fresh it tasted. It tasted more like the bean itself and less like the roasting process. I still think about it that way today.
Coffee, before anything else happens to it, is an agricultural product. Someone grows it, picks it, processes it, gets it ready for export. The best beans carry something of where they came from. An Ethiopian Yirgacheffe shouldn’t taste like a Costa Rican coffee. A great bean has its own character. That’s what I want in the cup.
At LOVEz, we use specialty-grade coffee, much of it grown on smaller farms, roasted using convection hot air. The goal isn’t to beat the bean into submission with heat. It’s to develop the coffee without cooking the character out of it.
So that’s where the value starts, for me.
Then there’s the question everyone eventually asks: what about price?
You can walk into a grocery store and buy coffee for less, sometimes a lot less, and I have no argument with that. If the cheapest coffee available is your main priority, premium air-roasted coffee probably isn’t worth the extra cost. Nothing wrong with making that choice.
It’s just not the customer we’re trying to serve. We sell to people who care about flavour, who notice when coffee is fresh, who can tell a clean cup from one that tastes burnt or bitter. Freshness matters enormously to us. We aim to roast and ship the same day whenever we can. It doesn’t always happen perfectly, but that’s the standard we hold ourselves to.
There’s another part of the price that matters just as much: the farmer.
Small farmers can only keep growing exceptional coffee if they’re paid a fair price for their green beans, enough to build a real income from producing quality. Great coffee doesn’t begin in the roaster. It begins on the farm.
One of my favourite customer reviews came from a guy who’d been drinking Ethiopian Yirgacheffe for decades, from more sources than I could count. He said ours was the best he’d found. That meant something, because he had a real reference point. He knew what he was comparing it to.
So here’s the real test. Air roasting also earns its price when the quality of the bean, the freshness, the farmer and the roasting method actually show up where they’re supposed to.
In the cup.
When you can taste the difference, the price starts to make sense.
The first thing people notice is never a fancy tasting note. Nobody walks up and says, “I detect jasmine, stone fruit and cocoa.” What they usually say is simpler.
“This isn’t bitter.”
Or, “It doesn’t taste burnt.”
I hear that reaction a lot, and it tells you something about what we’ve come to expect from coffee. We’ve gotten used to bitterness. We’ve gotten used to that heavy roasted taste, so used to it that some of us assume burnt is just what strong coffee tastes like.
I don’t buy that. What drew me to air-roasted coffee in the first place was how clean and fresh it tasted. It tasted more like the bean itself and less like the roasting process. I still think about it that way today.
Coffee, before anything else happens to it, is an agricultural product. Someone grows it, picks it, processes it, gets it ready for export. The best beans carry something of where they came from. An Ethiopian Yirgacheffe shouldn’t taste like a Costa Rican coffee. A great bean has its own character. That’s what I want in the cup.
At LOVEz, we use specialty-grade coffee, much of it grown on smaller farms, roasted using convection hot air. The goal isn’t to beat the bean into submission with heat. It’s to develop the coffee without cooking the character out of it.
So that’s where the value starts, for me.
Then there’s the question everyone eventually asks: what about price?
You can walk into a grocery store and buy coffee for less, sometimes a lot less, and I have no argument with that. If the cheapest coffee available is your main priority, premium air-roasted coffee probably isn’t worth the extra cost. Nothing wrong with making that choice.
It’s just not the customer we’re trying to serve. We sell to people who care about flavour, who notice when coffee is fresh, who can tell a clean cup from one that tastes burnt or bitter. Freshness matters enormously to us. We aim to roast and ship the same day whenever we can. It doesn’t always happen perfectly, but that’s the standard we hold ourselves to.
There’s another part of the price that matters just as much: the farmer.
Small farmers can only keep growing exceptional coffee if they’re paid a fair price for their green beans, enough to build a real income from producing quality. Great coffee doesn’t begin in the roaster. It begins on the farm.
One of my favourite customer reviews came from a guy who’d been drinking Ethiopian Yirgacheffe for decades, from more sources than I could count. He said ours was the best he’d found. That meant something, because he had a real reference point. He knew what he was comparing it to.
So here’s the real test. Air roasting also earns its price when the quality of the bean, the freshness, the farmer and the roasting method actually show up where they’re supposed to.
In the cup.
When you can taste the difference, the price starts to make sense.
