Our Story
Coffee is the core of our family business. For over 25 years, our primary goal has been to create and provide the best tasting coffee. To achieve this goal, we focus on quality and freshness in all aspects of our coffee program. From sourcing and roasting, to brewing and retail, quality and freshness continue to be our top 2 priorities. As a result, our customers have confidence in the integrity of the coffee we craft with care.
The Best Coffee Beans Available
Since we opened in 1992, our options for sourcing specialty green coffee beans have grown in number and complexity. Yet, our goal has remained simple and consistent – to acquire high quality beans from reliable sources that commit to ethical and sustainable practices. Trends that lend themselves to clever and often deceptive marketing don’t appeal to us. In the end, high quality beans that are carefully roasted yield delicious, high quality coffee, regardless of the adjectives, catchy labels, or certifications attached to it. Working directly with experienced importers, we research and purchase pallets of the best coffee seasonably available around the world.
25 Years of Roasting Experience
Roasting is the final and critical act of transforming raw, tasteless coffee beans into the beautifully aromatic browned bundles needed to create the coffee we love to consume. Within the specialty coffee world, roasting techniques vary widely. From light to dark, there’s a whole spectrum of various adjectives that describe the progression of a roast in regards to its increase in time and temperature. At Uncommon Grounds, we roast with the goal of achieving the best tasting, balanced version of each origin we feature. From a scientific perspective, we know that a full-city roast yields a cup of coffee with the most balanced body, acidity, and bitter sweetness. Along the roasting spectrum, full-city sits just over the medium mark.
Regardless of a coffee’s origin, we choose to roast the majority of our beans to a full-city level… full-city equates to the fullest flavor in the cup. Because each coffee’s origin, altitude, and processing method also affect flavor in the cup, our roasters create individual profiles to best highlight a coffee’s natural, inherent characteristics. These profiles are designed to prioritize a bean’s internal development.
Just as a turkey that’s been roasted hot and fast may have browned skin, but be an over or undercooked disappointment inside, coffee, too, can be easily roasted to a brown color. However, without giving beans the proper time and heat needed for necessary internal chemical transformations to take place, flavor in the cup is severely sacrificed. Light roasting a coffee results in an underdeveloped, very acidic tasting coffee. At the other extreme, dark roasting a coffee properly creates a lovely robust bittersweet flavor with low acidity.
Our emphasis on quality and freshness elevates our roasting program to a highly specialized niche that distinguishes our coffee from other roasting companies