Story
Coffee,
shipped like
software
Unlisted is a small-batch roaster in Austin, run by a product engineer who got obsessed with roast curves and never really stopped. That background is the whole explanation for how this place works: prototype, iterate, ship the next version.
Most roasters build a permanent range and defend it. We treat the lineup like a product that's never finished — coffees land, earn their place or don't, and eventually make way for something better.
Why the lineup rotates.
Because the work never really stops. We buy small lots, roast through them, and when one's finished it doesn't come back — it moves to the archive and something else takes the slot. That's not scarcity marketing and there's no countdown timer on it. It's just what happens when you buy small and refuse to reorder something only because it sold.
The trade is real and worth stating plainly: you can't rely on the same bag being here in six months. What you get instead is a range where nothing is coasting, and a decent chance of drinking something you'd never have picked off a shelf.
Nine out of ten samples don't make it.
We don't work directly with farms, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. We buy through importers, off sample sets — the same green anyone else could order. What we actually do is cup about ten lots for every one we buy.
Most of what gets passed on is perfectly good coffee. Clean, correct, nothing wrong with it. It just already exists on somebody else's shelf, and putting it on ours would be doing the same job twice.
What earns a yes is a fun flavor from a smaller farm or origin. Uganda doesn't get talked about the way Ethiopia does, which is most of why we bought it. The obvious lots are obvious to everyone — the interesting ones take more cupping to find.
Then we buy a bag and work the roast until we have a recipe we like, and we keep going until it's versatile. A coffee that only works one way boxes you in. We'd rather ship something that holds up on a pour-over, in an immersion brewer and in a batch — so the bag is still good on a morning you don't feel like measuring anything.
How a coffee earns a spot.
It gets cupped before it gets bought.
Every lot runs through the same SCA protocol the specialty world uses to grade coffee — measured, brewed, crust broken, tasted as it cools. If it doesn't earn a spot, we don't roast it.
The protocol we runThe roast is a build, not a recipe.
A curve gets prototyped, tasted, adjusted and tasted again until it's doing what the coffee's capable of. Sometimes that takes a few passes. The version you get is the one that survived.
The release historyIt's roasted after you order it.
Small batches, dated, shipped the week they're roasted. Nothing sits in a warehouse waiting for demand to show up.
What's roasting now
We'd rather tell you than sell you.
Every coffee gets a number from 1 to 5 saying how wild it tastes, so you can tell before you buy whether it's a comfortable morning cup or the one that makes you put the mug down. Tasting notes are what we actually got on the table, not a list of fruit chosen to sound expensive. When we haven't cupped something yet, it gets no number at all rather than a made-up middle.
The same goes for the parts that aren't flattering. If a coffee is nearly gone, the site says so. If it's finished, it says that too.