luca wrote:How picky you want to be is entirely up to you, but don't feel that this is the only practice that you might regard as "shady". For example, blends are often the dumping ground for green buying mistakes, or places where roasters are very price sensitive and buy cheap stuff - coffee might be past crop (like a year or two older than the current crop), or it might have good aspects offset by a number of bad aspects. This is particularly the case with "espresso" blends, where the darker roast level introduces bitterness to the cup, so roasters often seem to feel that if the coffee they are putting into the blend is astringent, papery, phenolic, medicinal, rubbery or has a host of other bad aspects, they're going to be hidden in the roast level anyway. There's coffee around on the market that has so many defects to it that it is not specialty grade. Like it's not all that uncommon that I'll taste commercial blends that seem to have mould or phenolic defect.

If a roaster doesn't want to disclose the composition of the blend, it may be that they need a bit of flexibility. This might be because they are buying different components specially for the blend, or it might be because the blend is a dumping ground for leftovers that they wind up with. And if they a roaster has coffee that isn't too characterful, in fairness, they can probably hide 10-15% in a blend without most people realizing.

Then there's the whole mire around coffee companies' representations around sustainability and what they pay for their green coffee, where, suffice to say, most coffee companies will make some noises about paying some amount that they think is fair, and most of them will not provide actual details to consumers.

The flipside is that invariably many consumers have a pigheaded combination of wanting to pay very little, and wanting to believe some sort of marketing puffery along the lines that they are getting "only the finest."

So ... are you being too picky? It's caveat emptor.

(I say all of this as general comments - I don't know anything about this particular roaster.)

coffee_maybe wrote:Regarding the "sustainability" i'm using a bean from a local Wholesale company - Metro Cash and Carry (pretty popular in Europe). The bean is supposed to BIO 100% arabica blend. It is super easy to see that even if 100% arabica, there are different beans in there. Like one day a shot would take 25 seconds, the next day the should would take 40 seconds. We are talking about stale coffee here, that has clearly off-gassed enough to be stable but still - there are different beans in there.