How Green Coffee Gets Evaluated Before It's Roasted

Before a roastery buys a coffee, someone has to taste it — and before they taste it, someone has to weigh it, roast a tiny sample batch, grind it, and line it up with all the other candidates. This is what that morning looks like.

The samples

Green coffee beans in a blue tray on a digital scale

Green coffee samples weighed out on a lab bench

Green samples arrive in small bags from importers and farms. Each gets weighed out to the gram — consistency matters, because you’re not comparing “which tastes nice,” you’re comparing coffees against each other.

A coffee grinder prepared for sample grinding

The warehouse behind the lab

The warehouse space behind a roastery lab

A sunlit corridor inside a warehouse roastery

Roasteries live in warehouses for a reason — sacks take space, and so does the equipment. The lab is the quiet corner of a much louder building.

The tasting

Pouring brewed coffee samples for tasting

A tasting table covered in coffee samples

A brewed coffee sample in a glass

Then the same ritual as always — rows of glasses, spoons, loud slurping. The difference is what’s at stake: this table decides which pallets of green coffee the roastery commits to for the season. A quiet morning with outsized consequences.

What happens after the buying decision: inside the roastery itself.