Coffee with tone.

We're a small roastery making coffee we'd actually want to drink — every morning, for years. Quietly serious about the bean. Not precious about the rest.

A single coffee bag on a worn wood counter, morning light

Vancouver, BC — small batches, roasted to order.

What we're after

A bag worth the wait.

Tone started with a quiet frustration. Most of the coffee on shelves is fine. Some of it is good. Very little of it is the bag you reach for first thing the next morning, and the morning after that.

So we set out to roast that bag. The one you ration. The one you tell a friend about. The one that earns its place on the counter — not by being the loudest brand in the cafe aisle, but by being genuinely worth the price of the beans inside.

That meant being picky. We work with farms and importers we know by name, we cup what we buy before we commit, and we only roast what we'd happily brew at home that week. If the lot doesn't move us, it doesn't move into the bag.

Hands holding freshly roasted whole beans

On the beans

Specialty grade. Single farms. Cupped above 84.

Every coffee we sell is specialty grade — scored above 84 on the Specialty Coffee Association cupping scale before we'll write a check. That's not a marketing line. It's a hard floor.

From there we want to know exactly where the bean grew. The farm or co-op, the region, the elevation, the varietal, the process. If we can't tell you, we won't sell it. Traceability isn't a nice-to-have — it's how we know what we're tasting.

Then we roast in small batches and ship within five days of roast. A bag that's three weeks old is technically still coffee. A bag that's six days old is the reason you bought it. We protect that window.

The 100-bag drops

A hundred bags of something remarkable.

A few times a year we get our hands on a coffee that doesn't fit anywhere else in the lineup. A single-origin Geisha small enough to be a rounding error on the importer's invoice. An espresso experiment we want to try at scale before we believe it ourselves. A washed lot from a farm we've been chasing for two seasons.

When that happens, we roast a hundred bags. We number them. We send them out, first to the people who've been around longest, then to anyone left over. When the hundred sell, the run is finished — we don't reroast it, we don't backfill, we don't pretend the next one will be the same coffee.

It's the most fun part of the year, and the most honest way we know to share a coffee that wasn't going to be around long anyway.

See the current drop
A numbered Tone bag with a hand-stamped tasting card on linen

How we run

A few things we don't budge on.

  • Five-day promise

    Every order ships within five days of roast. The bag arrives at peak — not past it. Browse the lineup.

  • Named lots, not blanks

    If we can't tell you where the coffee grew, we don't sell it. Origin, varietal and process are on every bag.

  • Love it or it's on us

    A bag that isn't right is a bag we replace or refund — no questions, no hoops, no awkward forms.

Get in touch

Say hi, ask a question, send a bean tip.

Wholesale, press, a coffee you think we should be roasting — write us. Every message is read by a person who roasts.

Where Based out of Vancouver, BC
Hours We reply Tue – Fri, usually within a day.