Our Philosophy

Small World Coffee is dedicated to providing fresh, custom-blended coffee that is precision-roasted to the point of peak flavor. When roasting and blending, we are perfectionists. We are able to offer coffee aficionados the best beans and blends for making the perfect cup of coffee or cappuccino, whether they make a thousand cups a day like we do in our café, or slightly less than that at home.

The Beans Are The Means

It all begins with the beans. The wide variety of high-quality coffees available from around the world provide us, as roasters, with a wonderfully diverse palette of raw materials with which to work. Each coffee growing region produces beans with unique characteristics. We select only the cream of the crops, sampling until we find the most intensely flavored beans that are completely free of taste defects.

The Balance Of Blending

At the heart of Small World Coffee is our love of blending and creating a collective taste profile that posess the exquisite flavors and aromas from each bean. Even with such a smorgasbord of coffees, it is rare to find a single variety that has the perfect balance of body and acidity. Blending is the art of choosing a particular taste profile and finding the right combination of different types of beans that will result in the most well-balanced and complex coffee possible.

The East Coast Roast

There is a somewhat well-accepted system of names to indicate the color of a roast, but since our preferred roast color falls between two established names-Its darker than a full-city but lighter than a French roast-we decided to make up our own name: the east coast roast. This was a deliberate attempt to differentiate ourselves from the style of roasting that was common on the west coast in the 80’s and 90’s, where very dark roasted coffee was all the rage. We roast to the peak of the second pop, precisely the point that yields the most complexity; dark enough to enhance the body and impart the flavor of the roast, but not so dark as to obliterate the subtler flavors and acidities.

Freshness

Even the most well-blended, perfectly roasted coffee has a finite period in which to provide its optimal flavor. Like a bouquet of flowers, the fragrance of roasted coffee can only be appreciated when it is truly fresh. For the maximum in flavor and aroma, coffee should be used within ten days of roasting, ideally between the third and seventh day. For this reason we roast three times a week, we roast only after an order is received and we ship within 24 hours of roasting. There are a lot of claims made about freshness, and about how vacuum-sealing and types of bag material allow coffee that is weeks or months old to taste as good as coffee that actually is fresh. We prefer to play it safe and go with the fresh stuff. And to make sure we don’t accidentally slip-up, we date everything we produce by hand. All you need to check our coffee for freshness is a calendar.