Cartel’s roastery adheres to the strictest quality standards. Before committing to a coffee, we cup it multiple times throughout its journey to our doors. Usually this means a pre-shipment sample sent direct from origin, an arrival sample sent once it’s landed at a port in the US, and then a sample drawn from the lot itself once it’s been delivered to our warehouse. These QC-oriented sample roasts help us to ensure that every lot that comes through our doors is not only free of defects but truly excellent.

We also cup every single production batch to ensure each roast adheres to the standard we’ve established. This process is highly standardized in order to allow our team to track cup profile over the entire span of a coffee’s time on our lineup and translate it to minute adjustments on the roaster. We roast all our coffee on a Loring air roaster, which gives us a few advantages over a traditional drum roaster: it extends the shelf life of our roasted coffee significantly, it allows us to roast coffees more evenly edge-to-center (often called “inner bean development” or just “development”) at a lower temperature which helps to preserve each coffee’s innate character, and it allows for very exact adjustments in how heat is applied which means we can fine-tune roasts more effectively and repeatably.

This commitment to quality extends to cold brew, too - we taste every single batch of the cold brew we make on our TORR Hive brewer for our cafes and for wholesale, and we track extraction using a refractometer to ensure the ending extraction yield and concentration are aligned.