How Do We Select Our Coffees?

October 22, 2026

Here's something most coffee brands won't tell you: a coffee can be good and still not be Raro.

Good is easy to find in Colombia. It's one of the best places on earth to grow coffee. What's hard to find is the cup that makes you stop, look at the mug and go, wait, what is that? That's the one we're after. So every coffee we sell has to get through the same process, and it's not a gentle one.

Who's at the table

The selection happens with two groups tasting side by side: the Raro team and Amativo, our sister company, which works on cupping and sourcing. Different palates, same table. If a coffee only impresses one of us, it's not ready.

Step 1: The samples arrive

It starts with samples from the farms we work with, producers our exporter has known for 10 years, like Finca Milán in Risaralda, Las Brisas in Huila and Paraíso 92 in Cauca. Long relationships matter here. When you know a farm, you know what it's capable of, and you know when a lot is special.

Step 2: We cup them, blind

If you've never seen a cupping, picture a row of small bowls, freshly ground coffee, hot water and a group of people slurping loudly from spoons. It looks a little ridiculous. It's also the most honest way to taste coffee.

We follow the cupping protocol set by the SCA, the Specialty Coffee Association, so every sample is prepared exactly the same way and nothing hides behind a brewing method. Here's how it goes:

Grind. Each sample is ground coarse right before cupping, about 8.25 grams of coffee for every 150 ml of water.
Smell it dry. Before any water touches it, we smell the grounds. That's the fragrance.
Pour and wait. Water just off the boil, around 200°F, goes over the grounds. Then it steeps for about four minutes while a crust forms on top.
Break the crust. We push through the crust with a spoon, lean in close and smell. That burst is the aroma. Then we skim the foam off.
Slurp. Loudly. Slurping sprays the coffee across your whole palate. We taste each cup again and again as it cools, because a great coffee keeps changing.
Score. Aroma, flavor, acidity, body, sweetness, aftertaste and balance, on a 100-point scale. Anything from 80 up is specialty coffee.

We do it blind. No names, no farms, no prices on the table. Just the cup. That way nobody falls in love with a story before they've tasted the coffee.

Step 3: The three filters

A coffee has to pass all three. Two out of three doesn't count.

1. The score. 80 points is the line for specialty. That's the floor for the industry, not for us. We're looking for lots that score well above it.

2. A flavor that surprises. This is the weird part, and the most important one. A high score alone isn't enough. We want a coffee with something you wouldn't expect from coffee: fruit that tastes like actual fruit, flowers, sweetness that's hard to explain. If it tastes like a nice, normal cup of coffee, it's a nice, normal cup of coffee. Not Raro.

3. The process. How a coffee is fermented and dried after harvest shapes its flavor almost as much as where it grows. We look for producers doing interesting things here, from experimental fermentations to classic methods done with obsessive care. The process has to show up in the cup, not just on the label.

Step 4: The pick

The coffees that make it through all three filters are the ones that end up in a Raro bag. The ones that don't are often still great coffees. They're just not ours.

Step 5: The roast

Once we pick a coffee, it goes to Complemento, our roasting partner in Miami. Every Raro coffee is a medium roast, on purpose. Roast too dark and everything tastes like roast. Too light and some of the sweetness never shows up. Medium lets the farm, the variety and the process do the talking, which is the whole point of choosing them so carefully in the first place.