The Underdog

Strong & Reliable

A rich coffee, perfect for more conservative coffee lovers who don't like fruity notes. Expect a full body, notes of dark chocolate, plums, caramel, and roasted nuts. When brewed as an espresso, it has a high sweetness, very low acidity, a powerful body, and notes of nougat and nuts in sugar. When brewed as a filter coffee, it is a nutty, sweet coffee with notes of raisins, a slight acidity of red apples, and higher bitterness.

We treat everything we make with the same standard, and so The Underdog is roasted as an omni roast (i.e. suitable for both filter and espresso). But just by the choice of beans here, we're deliberately going for a rather lower acidity, a more heavy body and a full sweetness with a slightly higher bitterness than you're used to in our coffees. We think this coffee wont offend anyone, plus it works great on automatic coffee machines, so it's great for the office too.

Another idea behind The Underdog is sustainability. For this coffee, we use lots with lower cupping scores, ranging from 81-84 points.  In order to be called specialty a coffee must score at least 80 points. Such coffees account for approximately 7-13% of the world's arabica coffee production. However, in the new standard set by the specialty roasteries, these are coffees that do not reach the level you are used to from our regular production. 

The beans come from the same farmer, the same harvest and the same coffee trees as the coffees that score higher and thus make it into our regular line-up of single varietal coffees (which generally get a cupping score of 85 points or more). So there's no need to worry about The Underdog not tasting great because of this - we stand behind every coffee we sell 100%. The lower scores on these coffees are mostly due to the lower fruitiness, and these coffees are primarily thick, sweet and chocolatey, which is exactly the flavor profile we like for The Underdog.

Sustainability and fairness are the pillars we want to build on in our production. That's why we don't turn up our noses at lower scoring coffees, because the farmers' approach to them is the same as to the best, which they usually grow much less of. Every farmer has a portion of their harvest that falls short of the highest standards, and often that is the majority of their production. For us, it's still a great coffee that we're happy to pay the farmer a better price for than he would get on the regular market. And at the end of the day, we can offer you a coffee that saves you money and that doesn't offend both customers used to specialty coffee and bitter coffee advocates with its taste.

Roasted coffee beans, 100% specialty coffee Arabica, roasted and packed in the Czech Republic.