Story
Coffee,
minus the
lecture
Unlisted is a small-batch roaster in Austin. We taste a lot of coffee, buy very little of it, and roast the ones that made us sit up. Serious about the coffee, unserious about ourselves — that's most of the philosophy.
Most roasters build a permanent range and defend it. We'd rather keep looking: coffees land, earn their place or don't, and eventually make way for something better. What that gets you, and what it costs you, is the rest of this page.
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.
What that means when you buy.
We buy small, and we don't reorder something just because it sold. So a coffee runs until the lot is gone and then it's gone — it moves to the archive and whatever we found next takes the slot. Sometimes that's a few weeks apart. Sometimes nothing lands for a while, because nothing was worth landing. There's no schedule to it and no countdown timer on it.
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.
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 gets worked until it's right.
We roast it, taste it, nudge it and taste again until the coffee's doing everything it can. Sometimes that takes a few tries. You get the batch we were excited about, not the first one.
Notes from the roasterIt'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.