Stumptown are great roasters. I love to experiment with local roasters. I travel quite a bit and I try to pick up a pound from a local roaster wherever I go. I used be pretty smug in thinking that the top tier roasters in San Francisco would beat a small town roaster every time. My opinion has changed, I've been super impressed by a lot of smaller roaster.

It seems like we are both aware that lots of beans not labeled as espresso are great for it. I tend to go for light to medium roasts for both pour overs and espresso. I also prefer malty/chocolatey profile beans over the citrusy ones. That is not a hard rule but light roasted citrusy beans can be overwhelming in espresso

Give Blue Bottle espresso a try if you haven’t. I swear they’re a whole other level.

We alternate between

• Kicking Horse Cliff Hanger
• Bar9 (found them when in Washington, delicious)
• Whatever we get each month from our Atlas subscription

I’ve been purchasing most of my beans at Whole Foods, they have a bunch of local roasters, you just have to do some searching to find ones with a good roast date. I pay ~15 USD for a 12oz bag but it goes from 12 up past 20.

My usual everyday bean is one of the Kroger "Private Selection" (nicer store brand) coffees. They're readily available whole bean, not produced by a company known for any exceedingly distasteful behaviors, under $10/12oz, and their selection of fair-trade regionals have a reasonable amount of character (well, their "Kona Blend" is in with the regionals, and probably only statistically contains a Kona bean in any given bag, but tastes pretty good anyway). Most of them are light of traditional espresso, but well in the bounds of my tastes.

I've ordered a couple things from Volcania (largish specialty roaster outside of Atlanta, does a lot of mail order business) recently, and they have been full of character. I'm still working through a bag of their Tanzinian Peaberry roasted to the light end of medium that behaves like no other coffee I've ever worked with. Extremely vegetal and winy, almost like a nice vegetable stock superimposed with coffee, and dense in a way that requires an unusually coarse grind to get reasonable shot dynamics in an espresso machine. Not something I'd want all the time, but it is a neat experience.

I have actually been looking for a classic Italian style blended espresso (dark roast, with a little Robusta in it) to play with, and found out a little roaster local to me has an interesting offering in that vein at $15/lb, I'm going to pick some up this weekend and see how it goes.

Here's my flex: I work at a roastery so I haven't paid for beans in years. My daily coffee is our Full Cycle blend from Nossa Familia in Portland OR.

I use Wegmans bulk espresso beans. It costs $18 for 2 and a half pounds. If I want something that tastes good, there's a local coffee shop that has dark roast beans that I love