Elm Coffee Roasters

Elm says it roasts until the coffee tastes good and then stops. It avoids the labels light and dark because they describe only the color of the bean's surface and say nothing about development, meaning how fully the roast has brought out the bean's flavor. By its own account its coffees sit on the light side yet taste sweet, without the grassy, cardboard or sour notes of an underdeveloped roast.

Elm buys green coffee, meaning unroasted beans, through importers including Covoya, Cafe Imports, Atlas, Crop to Cup and Shared Source. It generally buys coffees that score 86 points or higher on the 100-point scale, where 80 points marks specialty grade. Defects such as mold usually show up in that grading, which sets a coffee's score and price.

Every coffee starts with sample roasting. The team roasts 200 to 500 gram samples that importers send from the origin country before shipment and cups them, meaning tastes them side by side, to decide what to buy. It roasts a second sample after the coffee arrives to check that shipping has not changed it. Elm has done this sample roasting on an Ikawa Pro, a small electric hot air roaster run from an iPad.