Unpacking Coffee, but Make it Everybody

Hi again.

For 76 episodes, Unpacking Coffee was a podcast about exploring coffee with an emphasis on packaging and storytelling. We came at it from the design side. Roasters would send us their coffee, we'd photograph it, and we'd sit down with them to find their story, and sometimes how the packaging told it.

We wanted to give micro-roasters and household names an even space. A first-year operation in a garage got the same time and care as Intelligentsia. The show was a platform for storytelling, not cupping. We deliberately never cupped the coffee on the show. That part was for our listeners.

The longer we did it, the more the show wanted to grow. We started with roasters and packaging because that's what we knew. But every conversation pulled us further up the supply chain, and we started bringing in importers and producers like Benjamin Paz or traveling farther and farther, like our visit to Reykjavík Roasters. Camber, Máquina, Ritual, Linea. Seventy-six conversations later, we knew a lot more than we did when we started.

Then in-person interviews stopped being a thing for a while, and the show wound down. The name sat on a shelf. We kept drinking coffee. We kept losing track of which coffees we'd loved.

So we built something with the name instead. It's a design project as much as a coffee project, which probably tracks if you know us.

Our Listeners Get the Mic

The show never cupped the coffee because we thought cupping belonged to the people drinking it. The app is where that finally happens, at scale. Everybody who's interested, logging what they're drinking, scoring it, comparing notes, arguing about extraction. You bring your tastings. We bring ours.

Every roaster gets a page that fills up with what people are actually saying about their coffee, and that page works the same whether it's a one-person roastery or a name you'd recognize from anywhere. That part matters to us. Same care, same space, same shot at being someone's new favorite thing. This time, you're the host.

Tag a Flavor, Find Your Next Coffee

This is exiting. Tag a coffee with the flavors you're getting (cherry, jasmine, stone fruit, cotton candy, whatever's there) and every tag becomes its own page. Click cherry and you'll see every cherry-tagged coffee on the site, who tasted it, what else showed up alongside it.

It turns into a conversation created by people who actually drank the coffee. Loved Heart's limited release Gesha from Benjamin Paz with the jasmine note? Here are other coffees people tagged the same way, from roasters you might not have tried yet.

We had some fun with the design here. Every coffee gets a little generated mark based on its flavor tags. A Colombian with butter and pistachio looks different from a Honduran with skittles and dark chocolate. Scroll the homepage and it's a wall of these things. Twenty years of designing coffee packaging, and we still can't stop thinking about, well, the intersection of coffee and design.

Recipes You Can Remix

Brew methods have a  place as well. Maybe you try Linea's Hario Woodneck Pour Over Recipe. Favorite it, use it, or remix it into your own version. Ray's go-to is a simple Stagg recipe for two. Someone else's might become yours.

The Nerdy Stats Abound

Your profile keeps a running count: cuppings, unique coffees, roasters, countries, favorite brew method. The dashboard tracks your scoring trends by brew method over time, the flavors you keep coming back to, the roasters you've tasted most. If you're the kind of person who wants to know whether your Chemex scores are actually higher than your V60 scores, the answer is in there. We've become those people. The app is for them. (And for us.)

Come Hang Out

It's free. It works from anywhere on Earth and beyond. It’s new and evolving. There's a feedback button on every page and we read what comes in.

If you've ever finished a bag, loved it, and then completely blanked on what it was called, this is for you. Bring a coffee. Tell us about it.