I’m making at least a partial tour of my local roasters’ espresso blends to exercise my recently upgraded home espresso setup (I’m tipping my location here, but have decided that’s fine for this account). I live in a sufficiently hipstery city that it’s going to take months to work all the way through at my rate of consumption, we’ve got at least 8-10 roasters in the area now, and …most… of them aren’t known to be wildly distasteful businesses.

First two candidates:

An 8oz bag of 4th Level Roasters’ Espresso Blend. Not terrible, but $18/lb, darker than I prefer, and “robusta forward” in that great body but unfortunate tire-fire flavor sort of way, so I don’t think I’ll get it again.

A pound of Nate’s Coffee’s Nate’s Espresso Blend which is $15/lb, and delicious. I’ve been meaning to visit their brick-and-mortar for a while, it’s in easy biking distance, and they have a lovely “Free local shipping OR $2 drink credit if purchased in their brick-and-mortar” deal on pound bags, so I rolled myself down one afternoon to pick up the beans and a cup of coldbrew made with their After Midnight Dark Roast, which was delicious enough that I might interrupt my plan and grab bag of that soon for some hottest-months coldbrew.

Barring that diversion, I think next is Magic Beans, a lot of folks seem to be in to them and their espresso blend isn’t super dark, which I usually prefer. garagebeand’s EspressYoSelf is also on my list.