Let's talk coffee.

Where it begins  . . .

"Coffee" starts with a large, berry-producing bush named Coffea Arabica, which grows best in equatorial climates with altitude. The berry of Coffea Arabica is akin to a large, firm cherry; at its center (and taking up most of its mass) is a small, hard pit. Workers or machines remove the berries and collect them at a processing station. Once there, the skin and mucilage is removed by one of several processes, the simplest (and oldest) of which is to just leave it in the sun until it dessicates and then slough it off. The seed is then dried, sorted, stored, auctioned, shipped, roasted, and eventually ground; water of the appropriate temperature is introduced for an appropriate amount of time to achieve a partial extraction of the acids and oils that make up the structure of the seed/pit.

Behold: Coffee.

Where it ends  . . .

Every step of that process, from the nutrients in the soil of the growing region to the precise duration of the pour / the partiality of the extraction, changes the flavor, often substantially.
If that seed is of good quality, and treated with care, and roasted evenly until it dries and its proteins have just begun to undergo the mailliard reaction, and ground uniformly to a consistency somewhere between table salt and ground pepper, and combined with 94-95°C water at about a 17.5:1 ratio by weight, and then the resulting substance is filtered to remove the partially-extracted ground coffee, it will yield a cup with remarkably wild flavors.

Berries. Jam. Honey. Stone fruit. Caramel. Spice. Florality. Cocoa Nibs.

Specialty coffee can taste like strawberries and cream (A nice dry process sidama / guji, roasted just past cinnamon), or blueberries (yirgacheffe), or caramel and peach (columbia), or spiced preserves (costa rica), or a very nose-heavy wine (kenya), depending on any or all of the factors above.
As a crop highly subject to the variation of its growing season, however, sometimes those flavors can trend to less pleasant, or not mix well in milk, or dominate a beverage that they're mixed into. Further, the coffee harvest season is not a single time of year—you need to follow the coffee calendar around the world to know what's in season at any given time.

Why specialty matters  . . .

For large coffee shops, or roasters that specialize in "coffee beverages," or even specialty shops that exist in a market that requires them to maintain a consistent base espresso or blend for their regular, non-specialty customers, or who are subject to a pricing cap that rotating lots will exceed, that level of variation is often undesirable, and the cup results will likely be unappreciated by the body of the clientelé. Because of this, it can be desirable to "unify" that wildness to focus on round, caramel notes and big body  . . . And the one thing that unifies the flavor of coffee, more than any other single factor, is the roasting process. When you want to use coffee as a beverage base with a "generic coffee flavor," you want to reduce the wildness of the flavors and enhance the bitter flavors, and so you subject the seeds to a more prolonged roasting process that results in the evulsion of oils, and gives you a body that milk settles into for that "roasty toasty bold rich" flavor.

Why I care  . . .

People like me, who are looking for those wild, sweet, floral, mind-altering cups refer to all of these as "over roasted," although we can appreciate roast variation and coffee blending for espresso beverages. With the preamble out of the way, 99.9% of coffee in North America is what specialty coffee enthusiasts refer to as "bad." That includes Dunks, Folgers, Horties, Chock full, and so on, ad nauseam. Worse than that, for most of us, is what we consider "disgusting"—Starbucks, Peet's, Philz, and so on, that is roasted so dark that it tastes, at its best, like bitter, undrinkable char. If you like any or all of these coffee brands, that's totally ok—personally, I enjoy the "bad' coffee as a nice, warm beverage with milk and sugar. (I can't drink the "gross" coffee, though).

Here's the rub—it's almost certain that, despite the exhortations of people you know about how "good" their favorite coffee is, that you've never had true specialty coffee.

That's something I'd like to help with!

Where this is going  . . .

There are three tiers when it comes to specialty coffee.

Tier three

The lowest tier is made up of roasters who started off as specialty and then went high-volume (Verve, Blue Bottle, Counter Culture, Victrola, etc), roasters who need to compete in "traditional" market requires them to feature "bulk" coffees or blends, but who still drop a few specialty roasts (Dogwood, Black Oak, Novo, Olympic, and many of the east-coast roasters), roasters who were "specialty" at the leading edge of the North American coffee comeback ("third wave") who have been locked into a rhythm for a long time (Ritual, Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and 90% of Seattle coffee, I'm looking at you). This tier is enjoyable, and still night and day when compared to the "bad" coffees—you can actually note regional variation and varietal characteristic in the cup. These roasters often specialize in blends and espressos, and rarely dive headlong into what the best lots of the day are, although their buying power leads to them acquiring entire specialty lots when they do.

Tier two

The second tier is roasters who are nationally very good. Roast variation leads to them have some mainstay batches that make you wonder just how large their lots of green coffee are, but they also have a rotating selection of the truly specialty lots, and they bid at auction for them. Often, their focus on their large "mainstay" lots results in a bit less fine-tuning of the roast process for their expensive or specialty lots. However, they are the backbone of specialty coffee in North America. Brandywine, Onyx, Four Barrel, Methodical, Black & White, Soul Work, Proud Mary, Zoka  . . . many of these can be found in the catalogue at trade, but be warned that there are a number of "third tier" or "pretenders" (see below) in that catalogue as well. This second tier is, as I said, the backbone of specialty coffee, although every single one of these roasters will drop stinkers, and will sometimes get into moods that affect their coffee offerings.

Tier one

The third tier is world-class roasters. These are roasters that basically only do specialty coffee, typically focus on (or exclusively roast) single origin coffee, and they tend to excel at roasting to develop and bring out all of the unique characteristics of their coffee. These are companies like DAK, Sweet Bloom, Queen City, Monogram, Passenger, Glitch, Hydrangea, and so on.

These coffees ain't cheap.

Over the past fifteen years, many roasters have joined this elite class—it's gone from a party of one or two microroasters to some fairly large-volume roasters who still maintain their touch. Roasters cycle in and out of the bottom of this list fairly regularly—maintaining quality at this level is extremely difficult and resource-intensive. They don't have a constant influx of cafe milk drinks to keep them going, and they directly bear the brunt of poor yields, shipping cost increases, tariffs, bad lots, and catastrophic world events. Additionally, the time and effort it takes to maintain the roasting apparatus (sourcing, sample roasting, auctions, roasting, packaging, distribution, shipping, and all that goes with it) is a massive factor.

Tier S

Ok, I'm invoking the wrath of anime nerds, but there really is a top tier. There are places in the world who are doing truly exceptional things with coffee—growing in greenhouses, microprocess lots, and specialty lots outside of the affordability of even the fanatical coffee lovers. Coffees of this tier are rarely seen in shops, and the process of extraction typically looks somewhat like a lab experiment, with distilled water and remineralization processes, TDS meters, refractometry, tables, graphs, and charts. Roasters in this tier have an inevitable downward pressure that requires significant effort to fight, and they often end up in tier I or even II after a few years, when they attempt to achieve commercial viability.

A $60 COE cup of coffee from one of these roasters is likely not much past the break-even point.

Pretenders and "Almosts"

This is one ugly side of coffee, and a real slog for folks like me: The Pretenders. There are a number of roasters and coffee shops that are started primarily for commercial interest, and they see the "vibe" of modern specialty coffee and want in. They either don't know or don't care enough about specialty coffee to buy from good roasters. They're often focused on milk-based espresso drinks, and usually (but not always) can be identified by the following features to save a trip:

• A wall of syrups. Good specialty coffee shops may have a few, but it's not a dominant feature.
• A paper cup dispenser beside the espresso machine
• No ceramic options for drink orders
• No pourovers, or inappropriate coffee on pourover (blends, "dark roast", etc)
• Hoppers full of black grease. (Sign of dramatic overroasting and bad cleanliness)
• Dirty steam wands
• The smell, if you're walking by.
• Names that emphasize bitterness, caffeine, "joe", mornings, etc
• Gimmicks—coffee shop and uh ... bicycles! No wait, motorcycles. No wait . . .
• Café and ... and what? Bar, restaurant, gym, hookah lounge, brothel . . . ?
• A LARGE retail space in an expensive area
• Nothing saying what roaster they use/no pride in their coffee
• An expensive, heavy, flashy website with slide overs, pop-ups, full-screen images, and 2.2GB of minified javascript
• "Shade grown", "Fair trade", "Organic" (No thanks, I'll have the synthetic), "Coop", "Direct trade", etc. This is all basically fluff.
• If a roaster: Specifying roast level, or defaulting to selling ground coffee
• "Medium" or "Dark"-roast ethiopian. Whyyy!?
• Real excited about their "GEISHA" coffee, especially if they stylize it japanese and mysterious. The Gori Gesha forest in ethiopia has a unique arabica typica cultivar. A geisha is a japanese entertainer and not relevant here.

Can you get enjoyable beverages at these places? Certainly, if that's your jam. Many of the coffee shops in Seattle, as an example, don't do pourover, leading to them not making any of the specialty coffee tiers, but are espresso experts, and are good at producing beautiful lattes/cortados/capps, etc.

The more hopeful/aspirational version of The Pretenders is: The Almosts. The Almosts are near specialty quality. Many of them roast. There are two primary types: the "almost" chains, and the "almost" cafes. The chains are establishments that were on the path to specialty, but decided to focus largely on bulk for business reasons. Some of these places are basically in Tier III, but the quality has gone off over time. Stumptown, Bird Rock, Dune, literally everything in Spokane (Indaba, etc). Occasionally they'll drop a specialty roast, or have a cup that Really is All That, but generally they're only good for espresso.
The "almost" cafes are more hopeful. These are roasters who merit mention, often alone in a coffee desert. (Alchemist in Fresno, Black Oak fits the bill in Ukiah with a Santa Rosa café.) They're doing things right, but they just haven't gotten dialed in yet. This is, in my experience, almost always largely attributable to a lack of strong local, collaborative coffee culture. I'm pulling for these places, but often times they're in the process of building their own market among people who are accustomed to coffee as a cheap pick-me-up.