Our Story
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.
While you are holding that cup of coffee, close your eyes. Open your mouth slightly. Breathe in deeply through your nose.
You’re smelling the most complex thing humans consume. When people talk about the flavors of coffee—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.
We believe that the roasting process should be transparent and that it’s our responsibility to honor the hard work already invested in the coffee by roasting it to showcase its distinctive qualities.
Every roast cycle is like the arc of development in the belly of the roaster—each minute or experience is inextricably tied to the minute or experience before and after it. Our roasting team brings 121 collective years of roasting experience to work with them each day. It’s that depth of knowledge that allows them to welcome our longtime offerings back to the menu like greeting an old friend—warmly, with familiarity and a practiced eye for the nuanced ways the coffee may have changed from its last visit.
Roasting is one of the most delicate and critical parts of the chain of events leading to a good cup of coffee. We attempt to highlight what makes that particular variety or farm exciting, rather than imparting our own fingerprint. We're here to bring out the best in the coffee, and if we do our job correctly, no one should even be thinking about the roast when they drink it.
"Traveling the world to visit producers reminds us of the differences in every region, every farm, and our approach to sourcing and roasting aims to highlight and honor these distinctions. It’s humbling to be welcomed by producers with generosity and hospitality; this is also something we try to honor and reflect, in turn, to our customers."
—Shauna Alexander,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.
We're proud to have pioneered the Direct Trade model of sourcing green coffee. Since we started buying coffee directly from producers in 2002, the industry has changed dramatically and lots of other folks have adopted similar-sounding approaches. For clarity's sake, here's what we mean when we say Direct Trade.
Direct Trade is built on three principles: pay higher prices tied to quality, not the commodity market; work with producers we know, so we have transparency into their side of the supply chain and they have transparency into ours; and maintain those relationships over many years, striving to build truly collaborative partnerships. These pillars support Stumptown's vision of what a coffee experience should be, and that vision permeates every level of our business.
Stumptown pays price incentives directly linked to a coffee's quality, which we determine based on the internationally accepted Specialty Coffee Association’s Cupping Form and Q-Grader protocol, which provides a framework and transparency to both parties.
Producing great coffee is expensive. We don’t take that for granted and we never expect to get great coffee on the cheap. We don’t set prices based on the “C” (commodity market) price because we don’t buy commodity coffees. We pay outright prices guaranteed across multi-year partnerships. Divorcing our decisions from the unpredictability of the commodity market allows everyone along the supply chain to focus on what’s important: producing, roasting, and serving the best coffees on the planet.
From the beginning, it's been critical to us that we know where our coffee is coming from—the farms, the people, and the regions. Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson pioneered this approach in 2003 when he began our foundational direct relationship with the Aguirre family of Finca El Injerto, whose coffees are, to this day, vital and beloved menu offerings. Other early Direct Trade partners include Los Delirios (Nicaragua), El Puente (Honduras), and Bella Vista (Guatemala), and we've steadily grown our relationship network over the last fifteen years.
Every region and producer is different. And when many producers come together to form a community lot, as in the case of farmer associations, we negotiate with a representative of the producer group; such is the case with perennials like Colombia El Jordan and Ethiopia Mordecofe. This level of transparency allows us to negotiate prices, whenever possible, directly with producers. And in all cases, our coffee team aims to visit the producers every year to walk the farms, choose the lots, and focus on our common goal: high quality, delicious coffee.
Direct Trade is also our way of saying “we’re in it for the long run.” We don’t call a coffee Direct Trade until we have sourced it for at least three consecutive years with the intention to continue purchasing from that producer.
We invest in relationships with suppliers who produce exquisite coffees. We both get better results as we invest and grow together over many years. In 2019, 91 percent of all the coffees Stumptown purchased were from relationships where we’d sourced coffee for three or more consecutive years.
| PRODUCER | REGION | PARTNERS SINCE | ||
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| Nariño, Colombia | South America | 2013 |
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| Rodriguez de Mendoza, Amazonas, Peru | South America | 2013 |
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| Huehuetenango, Guatemala | Central America | 2003 |
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| Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea | Asia | 2015 |
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| Pueblo Nuevo, Nicaragua | Central America | 2004 |
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| Suaza, Huila Department, Colombia | South America | 2007 |
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| Huye District, Rwanda | Africa | 2012 |
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| Jimma Zone, Ethiopia | Africa | 2011 |
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| West Valley, Costa Rica | Central America | 2018 |
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| Tarrazú, Costa Rica | Central America | 2006 |
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| Guji Zone, Ethiopia | Africa | 2006 |
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| Kayanza, Burundi | Africa | 2016 |
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| Department of Tolima, Colombia | South America | 2006 |
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| Aceh Province, Sumatra, Indonesia | Asia | 2013 |
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| Antigua, Guatemala | Central America | 2005 |
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| Tarrazú, Costa Rica | Central America | 2010 |
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| Chinacla, La Paz, Honduras | Central America | 2004 |
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| Aceh Tengah Province, Indonesia | Asia | 2014 |
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| Jimma Zone, Ethiopia | Africa | 2011 |
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| Tarrazú, Costa Rica | Central America | 2009 |
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| Antigua, Guatemala | Central America | 2008 |
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| West Java, Indonesia | Asia | 2018 |
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| Kumure, Guji Zone, Ethiopia | Africa | 2010 |
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| Chirinos, Department of Cajamarca, Peru | South America | 2014 |
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| West Valley, Costa Rica | Central America | West Valley, Costa Rica |
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We don’t call them farmers, we call them producers, giving credit to the fact that they are the production experts. They are the ones who make this coffee great. They are the ones who go the extra mile for quality.
Producers are the heart of what makes great coffee.
Their skills, expertise, and craftsmanship are the difference between mediocre coffee and coffee that is like nothing you’ve ever tasted before. The coffee will never get any better in quality once it lands in our hands, after all. We rely on the producers for that pristine bean. A good roaster works tirelessly to preserve that coffee’s inherent greatness.
The producers grow the coffee trees. They pick the cherry when it is perfectly ripe. They remove the outer fruit, leaving just the bean covered in a thin parchment. They rest the beans, let the beans develop into their full selves. Every producer does something slightly different—they may tend a small patch of coffee trees on the farm inherited by a grandmother, and she may oversee the cherry soaking in a big tank of water, fermenting at just the right rate.
Our producers live on four continents. They speak at least 30 different languages. Some use traditional methods that are centuries old; some have taken out four-year loans to get that new top-of-the-line piece of equipment that will lead to a greater, cleaner cup.
It’s not the easy way. It’s not the fastest way. But it’s the right way, and it creates the best coffee possible.
There isn’t one kind of coffee, there’s a coffee family tree.
For hundreds of years, humans have been cultivating, hybridizing, and perfecting it, and today there are hundreds of types or varieties.
The variety of coffee tree matters—or at least, it usually does. Just as different types of grapes yield different wines, the variety of the bean can have a profound impact on the finished cup.
There are hundreds of varieties, and we’ve chosen roughly a dozen that we find truly special. But here are the first ones you should know.
Sweet, complex, and delicate, Bourbon is the pinot noir of coffee. The plants are fragile and don’t produce as much cherry as some other varieties, but they’re worth the effort. A cup of Bourbon-type variety is lush and classic. It’s the coffee of coffee. It charms the snob and the rookie alike. And no, it has nothing to do with the delicious brown adult beverage, though we at Stumptown are big fans of that kind of bourbon, too
This is an offshoot of the Typica family, which is delicate, floral, at times even citrusy. This variety was brought to Indonesia in the late 1600s by Dutch traders. We love it for its nuances and high, fine acidity. Villalobos in particular brings strong flavors of stone fruit like apricot, peach, and plum.
The beauty of these varietals is in their mystery. They are the wildflower varieties, descended from the natural coffee forests of southwestern Ethiopia. Each village has its own variety, handed down over centuries and shaped by the soil, elevation, and weather.
Think of Gesha as coffee from an alternate dimension. It's like a Szechuan peppercorn, or the Sun Ra Arkestra—both complex and otherworldly. And with a delicate, black-tea body and zest of bergamot, it’s as far as it could be from diner coffee. Gesha is picky—it will only grow when, where, and how it wants, and in tiny microclimates. But whether you grow it in Indonesia or the Americas, it’s always thoroughly itself.
Which, finally, brings us to the very beginnings of coffee…
