Say, you buy a coffee and love it. Mmmm, you say. What is that? 

To find out, you pick up the bag (or card) and read the information. Depending on where you're getting your coffee from, there could be an overwhelming amount of technical information. Everything from region, altitude, climate, varietal, processing methods, farmer, roast type (light or dark)—just to name a few. 

Cool, cool. But...

With so many variables, you might wonder what you need to look out for next time when buying a similar coffee. Are you looking for another Colombian? Or a certain varietal grown at 1000 feet?

Which one? 

Well, the truth is, every variable noted above is an unreliable gauge to knowing what a coffee might taste like—and, in turn, whether you will like it, or not. Today there are just too many variances. You can have two coffees from the same region that taste completely different, and the same goes for the processing methods, or any other factor. 

So what do you look out for when finding a coffee you like? 

It’s actually quite simple. The best and most important thing to consider when buying coffee is *drum roll* the tasting notes. 

What you might like to know about tasting notes

Firstly, they are subjective. We don’t send coffee to a person in a big coffee lab who determines the right tasting notes. When we’re deciding on tasting notes, the whole Timely Team is included in making suggestions. This is useful if you find that you often find the same flavours in our coffees as we write on the pack, because this means that you’ll probably keep finding the same flavours as us every time you buy coffee from Timely. 

But that’s not to say that we’re always right, as taste is just, well, a matter of taste. If we taste pineapple and you taste Uncle Billy’s Sunday barbecue, you’re not wrong. When we taste coffee, we’re merely offering our perception, not an objective assessment.

Finding your favourite coffee has never been so easy 

At Timely, we’re on a mission to make drinking your favourite coffees as simple as possible. That’s why we not only put the tasting notes on our bags. We colour code them, too. 

Whenever a new coffee comes through the door, we taste that coffee without knowing where the coffee came from or how it was processed. (This gives us a chance to taste without being biased by any specific details.) 

From here, we assign each coffee a colour that we feel best represents the flavour profile. So if you enjoyed a coffee with a particular colour, you're more likely to enjoy another coffee with the same colour next time. 

To find out more about our colour coding and if your favourite colour is currently in stock, go HERE.