Recent Posts

Grinding Coffee: Pre-ground Versus Whole Bean Coffee

Grinding Coffee: Pre-ground Versus Whole Bean Coffee

So many mornings start with coffee — mostly with pre-ground coffee which is what 75 percent of coffee drinkers in the United States use. However, there’s a special beauty to grinding your own coffee beans, ensuring you sip the freshest and most aromatic coffee. It can be…

What is Espresso? Everything You Need to Know

What is Espresso? Everything You Need to Know

It’s one of the most popular drinks in the world, but what is espresso? There’s an art and science behind the brew, and we’d love to tell you more. Here at Intelligentsia Coffee, espresso is our pride and joy. Black Cat Espresso was one of…

Colombia El Bado

Colombia El Bado

Buesaco, Nariño, is well on its way to earning grand cru status in Colombia’s coffee sector. Over the last decade, thanks in part to its dominance in the Colombia Cup of Excellence quality competition, it has developed a reputation for being among the best places to look for bright, complex coffees

Colombia Arcafe

Colombia Arcafe

We mark the transition from our first decade with Arcafé to our second with this small single-origin release from two Arcafé members, Ana María Caicedo and Pablo Orlando Chavez.

Honey Badger

Honey Badger

As we moved into the New Year, we began to prepare for the return of our Honey Badger seasonal espresso, named for an animal who is almost as ferocious in its pursuit of sweetness as we are.

We enjoy this espresso because it places a heavy emphasis on sweetness while also exploring the most suitable accent notes.

Peru El Platanal

Peru El Platanal

Buy Peru El Platanal here. DIRECT TRADE PARTNERAlcibiades MelquiFinca El Platanal REGIONJaén ELEVATION1765-1810 m CULTIVARSCatimor, Typica HARVEST DATESJuly-September 2021 LOOK FORCocoa | Orange | Cola We have been sourcing smallholder coffees from northern Peru for well over a decade. Until we started working with the…

Bolivia Finca Takesi Geisha

Bolivia Finca Takesi Geisha

Don Carlos Iturralde and his family saw opportunity in an isolated region of the Bolivian Andes where others had not. None of their neighbors had planted coffee, and conventional wisdom suggested much of the farm was simply too high and too cold for coffee to thrive there. That didn’t stop Don Carlos and crew, who forged ahead anyway with a few hearty investors who shared their vision of creating a world-class coffee farm in the shadow of a snow-capped Andean volcano.

Costa Rica La Papaya

Costa Rica La Papaya

This is Moka, a compact plant with small cherry believed to be a dwarf mutation of Bourbon. It has been less thoroughly studied than other Bourbon mutations, at least in part because it is so uncommon: it is rarely encountered anywhere, and almost never on smallholder farms in the mountains of Central America like the one where this lot was grown.

Colombia La Mina

Colombia La Mina

There is nothing especially conspicuous about La Mina. At first glance, it is virtually indistinguishable from any of the other small coffee farms scattered across the gently rolling hills of Buesaco. But the López family’s attention to detail sets La Mina apart. The farm’s selective cherry harvesting, obsessive selection, and meticulous processing have made it one of the country’s most decorated farms — five CoE wins and counting — and an exemplary deviation from the mean.  

Borealis Blend

Borealis Blend

Every winter, the sun sends forth a solar wind so fast that it makes 100-million-mile odyssey to Earth in less than two days. Millions of hyper-charged solar particles ride that wind to the north pole, where they send technicolor cascades off the outer bounds of our atmosphere. The effect is something other-worldly.

Borealis is similarly meant to mark the season and inspire awe, both with the iridescent bag and the coffee that goes inside.

Ethiopia Gesha Village 1931 Natural

Ethiopia Gesha Village 1931 Natural

At Gesha Village, Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel Overton have taken an heirloom cultivar from the primeval forests where coffee was born and processed it with a modern twist on a time-honored tradition. The result is truly superlative, a 1931 Gesha varietal lot that combines the outsize flavors of the natural process with the crisp clarity characteristic of the best washed coffees.

Peru La Pomorosa

Peru La Pomorosa

La Pomorosa is located in Utcubamba, Amazonas, a little east of the region from which we have sourced most of our single-origins in Peru in recent years. This is the first single-origin coffee we have sourced from Rosas and La Pomorosa.