Nobody buys coffee by country. They buy it by taste.

The loudest coffee we buy. Kiriti is a wet mill above Karatina serving around 700 smallholders, most of them farming under half a hectare. The water comes off the Aberdares, the cherry is sorted twice by hand, and the result is a cup that tastes closer to blackcurrant cordial than to anything you would call "coffee flavour".

If you have only ever had dark-roasted coffee, this one will surprise you. Give it as filter first.

Cherry dried whole in the sun for three weeks, turned by hand every hour of daylight. That is where the strawberry comes from — it is fruit sugar from the skin working its way into the seed, not anything added later.

The most "this doesn't taste like coffee" coffee on the shelf, and the one people come back for.

The lightest thing we roast. Washed Yirgacheffe has almost no weight in the cup and all of its character in the aroma — bergamot in the way Earl Grey is bergamot, then lemon flowers as it cools.

Brew it a little weaker than feels right. It rewards restraint.

Our least demanding coffee, and the one we hand to anyone who says they are not sure where to start. It works as filter, it works as espresso, it works with milk, and it does not fall apart if you get the grind slightly wrong.

Wilmar has been sending us the same block of his farm for four harvests now. We pay per lot, agreed before picking starts.

Honey process means the skin comes off but the sticky layer underneath stays on while the bean dries. You get some of the sweetness of a natural without the wilder fruit notes — apricot rather than strawberry, and a syrupy weight that carries beautifully into milk.

The safest bet on the shelf if you want something sweet but not sharp.

The one that tastes like what most people picture when they think "good coffee": chocolate, nuts, no sourness anywhere. Roasted four notches darker than everything else on this shelf, on purpose.

Cheapest coffee we sell and the biggest seller by weight. There is no shame in that.

Blends get a bad name in specialty coffee and mostly they deserve it — they are where the rejected lots go. This is the opposite: three components we buy on purpose, roasted on three separate profiles and combined afterwards so nothing gets under- or over-cooked.

The Indian Monsooned Malabar is the odd one out and the reason it holds up in a 200 ml latte instead of disappearing.

Decaf is where most roasters stop trying. The solvent here is ethyl acetate derived from Colombian sugarcane, done at origin, and it leaves far more of the coffee intact than the older methods.

We drink this one after four in the afternoon and nobody at the bar can pick it out of a line-up.

Burundi sits next door to Rwanda and grows the same Red Bourbon, but the cups come out drier and more tea-like — less jam, more blackberry leaf. Mpanga soaks the parchment twice, which is slow and expensive and is exactly why this tastes as clean as it does.

If Kenya is too loud for you and Ethiopia too floral, this is the middle path.