I've tried to focus on coffee roasters in the bay area. There are plenty of folks doing coffee here, but it can be annoying to find the smaller specialty vendors, it's not necessarily something you can easily google for.
- Mother Tongue: They have rotating decaf offerings, so far both the ones I tried were really tasty, as were a couple of caffeinated coffees. Their roast levels are somewhat on the medium side of medium-light and they've all been really easy to work with while still tasting interesting.
- That Chromatic is interesting because it's a light-medium roast specialty robusta. You are supposed to brew it slightly differently (robusta apparently benefits from a cold starting temp), and it has a quite different vibe from normal specialty coffee. It seems like Chromatic usually keeps 1-2 kinds of robusta in their lineup which is neat.
- Queer Wave wins the branding contest easily. This one is on the darker side of medium.
- Flower Child is more hardcore third wave specialty, very light roast, lots of fruity/acid flavors. I have struggled somewhat with this kind of coffee both from a flavor preference standpoint and because they're just technically harder to brew. This one is quite interesting and very hard for me to describe. I enjoyed it though and have another order coming from them.
- This particular coffee from Cute Coffee is a heavily anaerobic processed one. It's not the first anaerobic I've tried, but it's much funkier than the others I tried previously. Very fermented, to the point of having an almost rotten smell to the dry beans. Also behaves a little weirdly in grinding and brewing (and, based on the look of the beans, in roasting as well). (It tastes much better as a beverage than it smells, it is indeed quite fruity.)
- Speaking of funky processing, Hydrangea is a new vendor that focuses specifically on those. I just tried a cup of the El Paraiso Lychee and it was delicious. Very floral and fruity and candylike but not high in perceived acidity, and apparently very easy to brew since I just guessed on the parameters for this one, not to mention it's only a couple of days off roast.
These are all from Oakland/Berkeley except Chromatic which is in San Jose. Some of these are done at a local shared roasting facility called "CoRo," (lol) which seems like a neat place. They also have a cafe there which features the coffees produced by the various folks who use the facility, which is cool and I would go check that out if I felt comfortable going places to eat and drink yet.
The anaerobic/experimental process coffee Discourse is interesting, btw. Basically it seems to break down to a lot of third wave folks really disliking these coffees because they are perceived as introducing flavors that obscure the terroir/origin characteristics and "purity" of the coffee. (The emphasis on purity is real and kind of creepy tbh) Whereas other folks are head over heels for it because it's novel, and because it allows the creation of flavors that might otherwise be impossible, and in the future potentially may enable coffees to be produced that mimic the origin characteristics of coffees that can no longer produced or become more expensive to produce due to climate change. (This is also kind of creepy)
I don't have strong feelings about how coffee is supposed to taste, I'm just always refreshingly surprised when it doesn't taste bad. But I do think that if, as at least sometimes seems to be the case, experimental processes can make coffees taste more fruity and interesting with less harsh acidity, that seems good to me.