Hi. I’m Ray. And I’m Kandace. And this is Unpacking Coffee.
For a few years, that meant a video show. We’d open a bag, talk about the design, interview the roaster, maybe go off on a tangent about Michigan’s bottle deposit laws. It was a love letter to specialty coffee, one episode at a time. Then COVID happened, and it turns out we really liked doing interviews in person. So we stopped.
We didn’t stop drinking coffee, obviously. That would be insane.
What happened next
Somewhere around last year, we started getting annoyed. Not at each other—we’ve been married a long time, we’re past that. Annoyed at the fact that we’d taste something great, not write it down properly, and then three bags later have absolutely no idea what we actually liked.
Notebooks got lost. Spreadsheets felt like homework. We tried apps designed for professional cuppers that made us feel like we were filling out insurance forms. Nothing stuck.
So we built something.
What this is now
Unpacking Coffee is a free site for logging your coffee tastings. Roaster, origin, brew method, recipe, score, notes—done in under a minute.
Your tastings can stay private or feed into a shared database. The public ones help fill out roaster pages and make it easier for everyone to figure out what’s worth trying. Think Untappd, but for coffee, and without checking in at an Applebee’s.
We wanted something that respects how much you care about this stuff without making you feel like you’re doing homework. Detailed enough to actually be useful when you look back. Fast enough to use on a Tuesday morning before the day gets weird.
Who we are
We’ve been in specialty coffee a long time—first through design work at Needmore (Ray helped get Stumptown off the ground, among others), then through the show. Kandace comes at it from an anthropology angle, which means she asks better questions than Ray does. Together we’ve met a lot of people who care way too much about water chemistry and extraction percentages.
We’ve become those people. It’s fine. We’re fine.
What’s coming
Better ways to see your own patterns. Tools to figure out what to try next. A clearer picture of what’s happening across origins and roasters and brew methods.
There’s a feedback button on every page. We read everything. We might even write back, though Kandace is more reliable about that than Ray.
Come hang out
It’s free. If you’ve ever finished a bag, loved it, and then completely blanked on what it was called—we made this for you.
— Ray & Kandace