How to Find Your Favorite Coffee with the Bean Discovery Engine
If you love specialty coffee but feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of roasters and beans out there, this guide is for you. The Bean Discovery Engine is a searchable catalogue of more than 30,000 specialty coffees from over 1,500 roasters worldwide. It lets you filter, compare, and find coffees based on exactly what matters to you, whether that’s origin, roast level, flavor notes, processing method, or something more specific like species or variety.
This guide walks you through everything the Bean Discovery Engine can do, step by step, so you can get the most out of it and find coffees you’ll genuinely enjoy.
How to Set Your Shipping Country
The first thing you’ll notice at the top of the page is a small globe icon next to a country name. This is your shipping country selector, and it’s important because the Bean Discovery Engine only shows you coffees that actually ship to where you are. There’s no point falling in love with a coffee you can’t order.
Click the globe, and a window opens with a search field. Start typing your country name, select it from the dropdown, and hit Save. The page will reload with coffees available in your location. You can change this at any time.
How to Filter Specialty Coffee on Desktop
On the left side of the page, you’ll find the filter panel. At the top it tells you how many coffees are currently showing (for example, “17,538 coffees found” for the United Kingdom). Every time you apply or remove a filter, this number updates instantly.
Your filters stay active as you browse. If you click into a coffee to read more about it and then go back to the Bean Discovery Engine, your filters will still be there. This means you can explore individual coffees without losing your search. The only things that reset your filters are clicking Clear All or changing your shipping country.
Here’s what each filter does:
Origin Type
Two buttons: Single Origin and Blend. Single origin coffees come from one country (and often one specific farm or region). Blends combine beans from multiple origins. Neither is better than the other; it depends on what you’re looking for.
Roast Type
Three buttons: Omni, Filter, and Espresso. Omni means the roaster considers this coffee suitable for both filter and espresso brewing. If you only brew one way, selecting Filter or Espresso narrows things down immediately.
Roast Levels
Five checkboxes: Light, Medium Light, Medium, Medium Dark, and Dark. You can select more than one. If you’re not sure what roast level you prefer, leaving this open and exploring is a perfectly good approach.
Caffeine Level
Four options: Regular, Half Caff, Low Caf, and Decaf. This is useful if you’re looking for decaffeinated coffees or lower caffeine options. The engine tracks these as distinct categories, so you can find them without having to dig through hundreds of product descriptions manually.
Origin Countries
This is one of the most powerful filters. At the top there’s a search field where you can type a specific country name. Below that, origins are grouped by continent: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. Each continent is expandable, so you can click the arrow to see all individual countries within it. You can select an entire continent or pick specific countries.
Regions
If you want to go even deeper than country level, the Regions filter lets you search for specific growing regions. Type the name of a region (like Huila, Yirgacheffe, or Cerrado) and the engine will show you coffees from that area.
Species
Most specialty coffee is Arabica, but the engine also tracks Robusta, Liberica, Eugenioides, and Excelsa. If you’re curious about coffees outside the Arabica mainstream, this is where you look.
Varieties
A searchable dropdown for specific coffee varieties like Gesha, Bourbon, SL28, Caturra, Typica, and many more. This filter is especially useful if you already know you enjoy certain varieties and want to find more of them from different roasters and origins.
Flavour Notes
Ten broad categories, each expandable into more specific subcategories: Berry, Cereal, Floral, Green/Vegetative, Natural, Nutty/Cocoa, Other Fruit, Roasted, Sour/Fermented, Spices, and Sugary/Sweet.
Click the arrow next to any category to see the subcategories underneath. For example, if you know you love coffees with stone fruit or tropical fruit notes, you can drill into Other Fruit and find exactly what you’re after. You can combine multiple flavour note categories at once.
Processing Methods
Five broad categories, each expandable: Decaffeination Methods, Experimental/Innovative, Honey/Pulped Natural, Natural/Dry Process, and Washed/Wet Process.
Processing has a huge impact on how a coffee tastes. Washed coffees tend to be cleaner and brighter. Naturals are often fruitier and more full bodied. Honey processed coffees sit somewhere in between. And the Experimental/Innovative category captures the growing world of anaerobic fermentation, carbonic maceration, and other modern techniques. Each of these categories expands to show specific processing methods within it, so you can be as broad or as precise as you like.
How to Read a Coffee Card
Once you’ve applied your filters (or even before, if you prefer to browse), the main section of the page shows coffee cards arranged in a grid. Each card gives you a quick snapshot of what you need to know:
The coffee name and roaster name sit at the top. Below that you’ll see the origin, including the region and country. Flavour notes are listed out so you can scan them at a glance. At the bottom of each card, you’ll find the roast level, processing method, and typology (which shows the species and specific varieties). Some cards also show a visual roast indicator bar.
Each card has a View Coffee button that takes you to the full bean page, and a small cart icon.
What You’ll Find on a Bean Page
Clicking View Coffee on any card opens the full bean page. Here you get the complete picture:
A large product image on the left. On the right, the coffee name, roaster name, and a detailed description of the coffee. Below that, the origin (with clickable country links), flavour notes, roast level, processing method, and typology with all listed varieties.
At the bottom there’s a prominent Buy from Roaster button that takes you directly to the roaster’s own website to purchase. The Bean Discovery Engine doesn’t sell coffee itself; it connects you to the roasters or a market place that sells the coffee on behalf of the roaster.
Below the Buy button, you’ll find a roaster info card with a short description of the roaster, their location, and two buttons: View All Coffees (which takes you to the roaster’s page) and Visit Website (which opens the roaster’s own site).
Exploring a Roaster Profile
Every roaster in the engine has their own page. It shows the roaster’s name, country, a description of who they are and how they work, and a link to visit their website. Below that, all their coffees currently in the catalogue are listed as cards, so you can browse everything a single roaster has to offer in one place.
If a roaster has additional content on The Way To Coffee, such as reviews or features, those will also be linked from their roaster page.
How to Use the Bean Discovery Engine on Mobile
On mobile, the layout adjusts to fit your screen. Instead of a filter panel on the left, you’ll see a small black filter button at the bottom of the screen. Tap it to open the full set of filters. The filters themselves work exactly the same way as on desktop.
A few things worth knowing about the mobile experience: when you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the filter menu, you’ll see how many filters are currently active. And once you close the filter panel and go back to your results, the black filter button also shows the number of active filters, so you always know at a glance whether you have filters applied.
Just like on desktop, your filters persist as you browse. Tap into a coffee, read about it, go back, and your filters are still in place. Clear All removes all active filters, and changing your shipping country resets them as well.
The coffee cards stack vertically on mobile, and tapping on any card takes you to the same bean page you’d see on desktop.
Filter Combinations Worth Trying
The real power of the Bean Discovery Engine comes from combining filters. Here are a few ways you might use it:
You want a light roast single origin Ethiopian coffee with berry or floral notes for pour over brewing. Set Roast Type to Filter, Origin Type to Single Origin, Roast Levels to Light, select Ethiopia under Origin Countries (inside the Africa group), and check Berry and Floral under Flavour Notes.
You’re looking for a decaf espresso. Set Roast Type to Espresso, Caffeine Level to Decaf, and browse. You might also narrow by processing method if you have a preference for how the coffee was decaffeinated.
You love natural processed coffees from anywhere in South America. Set Origin Countries to South America, then under Processing Methods expand Natural/Dry Process and select it. Leave everything else open and see what comes up.
You’ve tried Gesha variety coffee and want more. Go to the Varieties filter, search for Gesha, and select it. The engine will show you every Gesha currently available from roasters that ship to your country, regardless of origin, roast level, or processing method.
These are just starting points. The filters are designed to work together in any combination, so experiment and see what you discover.
Start Finding Your Next Favourite Coffee
The Bean Discovery Engine is free to use and updated regularly as roasters add new coffees and seasonal offerings rotate. Head to the Bean Discovery Engine and start browsing. If you have questions or feedback, get in touch.