About · North Interstate Avenue, Portland
Ten years of buying small and roasting on Tuesdays.
Northbound started in 2016 with a sample roaster, a five-kilo drum and a market stall. We still buy the way we did then — one lot at a time, after cupping it — but we now roast about 310 kg a week and roughly a third of that leaves as wholesale.
What we will not do
- Sell coffee without a roast date printed on it
- List a coffee we have not cupped at least four times
- Buy a blend component we cannot name the farm for
- Take a subscription we cannot roast fresh that week
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Farms and washing stations we have bought from directly since 2016
310 kg
Roasted in an average week, across two roast days
10 yrs
On the same block of North Interstate, with the door open to visitors
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Cafés, restaurants and offices on standing wholesale orders
Sourcing
We buy the lot, not the label.
Everything we roast is a single lot with a paper trail. Most of it comes through two green brokers in Portland who let us cup arrivals before we commit, and the rest comes from farms we have visited and now contract with a year ahead.
The list is deliberately narrow. We work in three regions — Ethiopia and Rwanda for filter, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil for espresso, with El Salvador and Costa Rica when a small lot is worth the money. When a farm we like has a bad year, we say so and skip it rather than blend around the problem.
- Kayon Mountain, Guji, Ethiopia — five harvests running
- Finca La Esperanza, Huila, Colombia — our house espresso since 2019
- Gitesi washing station, Karongi, Rwanda — bought every year since 2018
How the price is set
The C-price is the commodity benchmark for green coffee, and it has almost nothing to do with what good coffee costs to grow. We negotiate per lot, on top of it, and we publish the number.
| Lot | Region | We paid FOB | Above C-price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kayon Mountain, natural | Guji, Ethiopia | $5.10/lb | 62% |
| Finca La Esperanza, washed | Huila, Colombia | $3.95/lb | 41% |
| Gitesi, washed | Karongi, Rwanda | $4.40/lb | 55% |
| Rio Verde, pulped natural | Cerrado, Brazil | $2.85/lb | 28% |
Contracts signed September to December 2025. FOB means the price at the port of origin, before freight, duty and our own roasting losses.
The roastery
Two roast days, one drum, and a lot of cupping.
We roast on a 15 kg Loring on Tuesdays and Fridays, in batches of 11 to 13 kg. That is small enough to taste the difference between one batch and the next, and large enough that the shop and the wholesale accounts are drinking the same roast.
- Every lot is sample-roasted three ways before it goes on the list
- Production batches are cupped the day after roasting, blind, by two of us
- Profile changes are logged against the lot number, not the coffee name
- Filter roast: first crack at 9:30, dropped around 12:00, 12% development
- Espresso roast: a touch longer, dropped after first crack for body and sweetness
Freshness
Fresh is a date, not a claim.
Roasted Tuesday, shipped Wednesday
Orders close Monday at 6pm and are roasted the next morning. Bags are packed within 24 hours of the drum and go out on Wednesday's carrier pickup, so a Portland address has them Thursday.
We roast to order, not to stock
Nothing sits in a warehouse. The shop list is what is actually on the shelf, and a coffee comes off the page the day the lot runs out rather than being roasted again from older green.
Seven to twenty-eight days
Filter is at its best a week off the roast and holds for about a month in the valve bag. Espresso needs four or five days to settle. We print both windows on the base of the bag.
What we have not solved: decaf is still the weakest thing we sell. Good sugarcane-process lots are scarce, they cost nearly as much as the caffeinated coffee beside them, and they fade faster in the bag. We keep one on the list because people ask for it, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend it is a triumph.
Practical things
Shipping
Free over $40, otherwise $6 flat in the US and $9 to Canada. Subscriptions always ship free. Orders placed after Monday 6pm go into the following week's roast.
Returns
If a bag is not right, tell us within 30 days and we will re-roast, replace or refund it. You keep the coffee either way — posting it back costs more than it is worth.
Privacy
We keep your name, address and order history, and nothing else. No card details ever reach our servers, and we do not sell or share the list with anyone.