Interesting to read everyone's experiences with Sey. I have recently moved away from espresso to pour over and since then have been drinking a lot lighter washed coffees, which I find very enjoyable and refreshing as pour over.

Over the past weekend I visited Scorpio in Sacramento and had a cup of Sey as well as picked up a bag. I really enjoyed the coffees. Lots of clarity and vibrancy, great sparking acidity and overall pretty delicious with my Ode SSP. I was extremely impressed with them, so much so that I actually just signed up for a 4 bag / month subscription with them, which is my first subscription ever. I was a bit torn with them and Wendelboe but ultimately didn't want to deal with the shipping woes that can happen with the un-tracked Nordic post. I am really looking forward to seeing what Sey ships out to me and trying the various offerings. Pricing wise is surprisingly good when you sub with them.

I will be keeping an eye on Prodigal as well though and seeing how things go once they offer subscriptions.

In case people reading this craft water. Sey uses 50Gh (split evenly calcium and magnesium, but I only use magnesium) and 15Kh. I was told that a year ago, and the same person at Sey confirmed recently that is what Sey uses for pour-over brews still.

Also, he wrote that for pour-overs they do 18:1 typically.

Thanks for sharing! This is great to know. Also pretty much confirms my recipe as I landed right in that area myself through my own testing.

Interesting, i just finished a bag of Luna Bermudez before the Sey, and it looked very similar in roast level to the naked eye. I found it very easy to extract, and there were no off notes, even though i opened it around a week after roasting. Maybe this is partly due to the processing? Hard to say for me.

On the Nordic front, the only time I've tried Tim Wendelboe, it tasted both underdeveloped and baked. By contrast, the only bag of la cabra I've had was one of the best light roasted coffees I've ever tried - incredibly juicy and sweet. Both of these were darker to my eye than Sey or Manhattan, and rested a couple of months.

I've read though several posts in this thread suggesting an assortment of ways to try and make the OP's coffee taste better.

One man's opinion: Great coffee should not be that hard. There is nothing to be gained by roasting coffee on the fringes.

Quick update, Sey kindly replaced the bag of Colombian with another coffee, and I've received the second month of my subscription. Neither of the new coffees had a vegetal note, although both are extremely lightly roasted. I'd say they have promise at the minute, but both need a bit more rest.

Interestingly, they note that Colombians often have some vegetal or herbal type flavors at very light roast levels. Not sure if my roast was under developed or not, but I'm a happy customer regardless.

Almico wrote:One man's opinion: Great coffee should not be that hard. There is nothing to be gained by roasting coffee on the fringes.

OK, I've got several responses to this.

The first is obvious - that's your opinion, and some people like roasts on the fringes - eg very light, very dark or very baked. So obviously what is to be gained for those people is the very thing they are looking for.

The second is that this comment has a "bury-the-head-in-the-sand" type unspoken assumption in it that somehow we get to choose roasters that deliver perfect roasts. In the real world, this is not the case. A really good roaster might deliver ... what? 30% roasts that are exactly stylistically as they intended them? 50%? There are a handful of roasters that I can think of in the world that do better than this. So I think that if we were sensible about talking about roast styles, we would judge roasters not by their coffees when things go right, but by the percentage that they get right and what happens when their roasts go wrong. This is where "roasting on the fringes" may have an advantage. If a roaster's roasts always tend towards too light, too dark or too baked, then their failures are usually going to fall into the realm between good and that extreme. If a roaster roasts in the "all things to all people" style (you know, where they basically perpetuate the fanciful lie that there is a "medium roast" that is perfect for everyone; it's aromatic, low acidity, high body, low bitterness; nobody can complain about anything) then their failures are usually all over the place; they will have some roasts that are too light, some that are too dark, and some that are too baked. I'd argue that if your roast failures fall into a range between one extreme, this is probably going to lead to a higher customer satisfaction rate. For example; imagine that you have a customer that hates light roasts and acidity, likes medium roasts and doesn't mind it when they are a bit darker. If we assume that a given roaster has a 1/3 success rate and they deliver two failures, when this customer buys 3 bags, they are going to be happier to receive two that are slightly darker than they are to receive one that is slightly darker and one that is slightly lighter. So aiming for an extreme may result in greater stylistic consistency in roast failures. This applies regardless of customer roast level preferences. I'm actually checking in on this thread because I've bought some Sey after a fairly long hiatus, and indeed I think we can see the benefits of this approach in play. I have a chaferote pink bourbon from them that is distinctly darker in colour than the other coffees that they have, yet it is still distinctively aromatic and I quite enjoy it, despite being overly sensitive to roast.

My final comment is specific to Sey. Their signature green sourcing style is to buy these super clean, quite aromatic coffees. They generally don't have the intensity of flavour of things like anaerobic naturals, but they also don't have the dirty cup characteristics that those coffees have. If you took those coffees slightly darker, you would probably obliterate the aroma that they are chasing; these coffees rely on an absence of roast influence in the cup to allow the aroma to shine through. So roasting them darker would destroy the whole value and style proposition that draws people to Sey. A darker roast may work better for something like an anerobic natural coffee, where the great intensity of fruit flavour will still shine through, but the dirty finish inherent in the coffee will be somewhat hidden in the dirty finish that the darker roast level inherently brings with it. I don't think that anyone could objectively say that either of these two examples in this paragraph is "better" than the other, but they are certainly very different, and I can see why consumers would have a strong preference for one or the other, without either being "right". But certainly I think that Sey's roast style choices make sense for the green that they seek out and buy. And if people don't like the style, that's fantastic - they can go and buy from a roaster that better suits their taste without dying wondering if they are missing out on stuff that they might like.

Preach it! I could read your comments and opinions all day long and am always grateful when you share your thoughts.

I recently began subscribing to Sey (4 bags a month) and am super impressed. All 4 of the coffees I got were all very good and as Luca points out, very clean. I cupped them all 8 days off roast and am very happy with each one, especially the chiroso Colombian.

ShotClock wrote:Quick update, Sey kindly replaced the bag of Colombian with another coffee, and I've received the second month of my subscription. Neither of the new coffees had a vegetal note, although both are extremely lightly roasted. I'd say they have promise at the minute, but both need a bit more rest.

Interestingly, they note that Colombians often have some vegetal or herbal type flavors at very light roast levels. Not sure if my roast was under developed or not, but I'm a happy customer regardless.

That's nice of them.

I've certainly noticed that some colombian coffees do have vegetal/herbal characters.

Subscriptions are kind of an odd one in that you're not choosing coffees individually, so it's kind of hard to work out what you can reasonably expect. Usually, the idea is that the quid pro quo for trusting the roaster and giving them some sort of shot at recurring revenue, etc, is that you get a discount. Sey in particular seem to have some fairly crazy discounts. If you max out the boxes per month and prepay for a year for 17% discount, I think the per box price ends up sort of around half their a-la-carte prices ... and I think you get included shipping. So there's some reward in it for you if you can find some friends to subscribe together and then have a monthly random allocation draft or something!

Personally, I'm kind of willing to accept that subs that give me large discounts will have the odd coffee that I don't like, since I'm only going to subscribe in the first place to coffee roasters that roast in a style that I like and tend to buy green coffee that I like. However if you don't have a good frame of reference for what to expect from different types of green coffee, or you are subbing to someone to see what their roast quality is like, then it's hard to tell what you can expect.

Then we also get to the mire of subjectivity. What is a defect and what is not? Classically, people might say that the only green defects are really the visible ones (including quakers) and phenolic, ferment (ie. acetic acid) and mould. Anything that's not that is within the realm of stylisically permitted non-defect. Query something like baggy/past crop character. And so you hit the wall of subjectivity. Where is the line between acceptable "herbal" and disgusting "vegetal"? Is it not so much the flavour itself, but, rather, the elements around it? Is a herbal coffee perhaps OK if it has high sweetness and good body and absolutely awful if it lacks both? One thing that I've always found hilarious on this point is the echo-chamber of repetition from prominent coffee people that tomato in Kenyan coffees is disgusting ... yet these people then go on to assert that intensely fruited coffees that smell like trash can juice, sharpie, balsamic vinegar, fish markets and jackfruit are high quality. Personally, I'd take a sweet, clean and crisp blackcurrant, stonefruit and fresh tomato Kenyan over one of the latter coffees any day of the week. Rubber is another interesting one; in robusta we're told that it's low quality, but somehow the blinkers go on when it comes to Java, where it's presented to us as some sort of floral complexity that warrants paying a premium for. And that earthy, musty, animalic, tobacco that we got from liberica? Well, according to some roasters these were desirable, premium characteristics that we have been ignoring all along ... so pay up! The only true constant, I think, is that as a consumer you certainly can't rely on just any coffee roaster picking coffees that are of a style that you will agree is good, so it pays to get a feel for each coffee roaster's green buying style. Personally, my attitude is that if roasters can take the view that it's all subjective and they can essentially present whatever they want as a premium product, then the corollary is that as a consumer I'm equally allowed to have subjective tastes, and so I can add these roasters to my personal blacklist for their green buying choices without that being any sort of criticism of them.