What makes our coffee so good?
Sunview Coffee is roasted to order, so you are always drinking it as fresh as it gets. We intentionally source it from growers and importers around the world who support best growing practices and equity through the supply chain.
We roast specialty coffee which by definition, is the highest-grade coffee available, grading 80 or above on a scale of 100. Specialty coffee is hand-picked and sorted, and vigorously scored for quality. It depends on dedication throughout the supply chain, from the farmers to the baristas, and everyone in between to maintain high standards. Learn more about this process.
All of our coffee is grown and processed with best-practices; and farmers, producers, green buyers, importers and us as the roaster handle the coffee with the utmost respect for the product and the people involved. Since most specialty coffee is grown by very small scale farmers at high altitudes in remote mountainous regions, certifications like "organic certified" and "fair trade" can be cost prohibitive and out of reach for the average farmer, even though their practices match or exceed those standards. What's more, grading protocols vary from country to country. This is another reason why the "specialty coffee" label is so important. That being said, some of the coffees we sell are certified organic, and all of the others follow strictly high standards.
Just North and South of the equator, is a tropical region referred to as the coffee belt, where virtually all coffee is grown.
image source: https://oilslickcoffee.com/economics/market/what-starbucks-means-to-specialty-coffee/
We source coffee from some of the most premier coffee grown regions, like the high mountains of Huehuetenango in Guatemala and in the volcanic soils of Tarrazú, Costa Rica and Santa Ana, El Salvador, and the forests of Sidama, Ethiopia- the birthplace of coffee and where it still grows wild. In these regions, farmers typically steward less than 10 acres of coffee shrubs. They carefully hand pick the coffee cherries at peak ripeness in the morning and deliver it to a coffee mill in the afternoon. Here it's aggregated, hand-sorted and laid out on raised beds to dry in the sun.
Sometimes these mills use a machine to remove the pulp before the seed (or bean) is dried. This is called wet-processed coffee. Other times it's dried with the pulp on it, leading to a fruitier and more variably flavored coffee. This is called natural-, or sometimes honey-processed coffee. Each of these characteristics impacts the aroma, flavor and mounth feel of coffee when it's brewed.
Check out our current coffee selections and notice these different properties in the description.