FLOR & SEED

Flor & Seed buys its green in Nayarit, Puebla and Guerrero, states the trade tends to overlook, and pays above market for it, with agronomy engineers alongside the farmers on Natural and Honey processing. Working a single country this closely leaves a roaster nowhere to hide.

One of the two owners does the roasting, on a Loring that belongs to Dark Horse Coffee rather than to Flor & Seed, at that company's Mission Gorge facility. Three coffees hold the slow bar at all times, each assigned the brew method meant to show it best on the AeroPress or the V60, with Curtis batch brewers alongside and a Nimbus H-1500 treating the water; the retail shelf runs to three bags, two of them $19, that give a name and nothing about varietal, process or roast date.

The interior is mostly white and streamlined across 640 square feet, and the large murals carry the color, one of them a portrait of a producer friend in Chiapas. A row of seven pendant lights hangs over the working end of the bar, aiming both the light and the attention at the baristas' hands and the beans moving through them.