City Boy Coffee is an artist-founded company that values coffee as a form of culinary expression. We source from farms that are passionate and meticulous about their crop and respect the planet and do our best to compensate fairly and transparently, publishing detailed information about the origin of our beans and the price we paid.
Coffee you can trust
Coffee shouldn’t be complicated. You deserve to know what you’re drinking and how it impacts the world. Our coffees are tasty and transparent, with rave reviews from experts and customers alike. We share everything from the origin of our beans to the price we pay to the farmers. Whether you join our coffee club or buy a bag, you can trust us to deliver the best coffee possible.
Our Origin Story
Growing up, our founder Matt Falber didn’t drink coffee. It was something for old people, and it was so bitter that it needed cream and sugar. His grandfather spoke about it like an addiction rather than a pleasure. Coffee wasn’t for him.
During college, other performing arts majors introduced him to the sugary drinks at Starbucks, the perfect companion for late-night study sessions. As he began working as an actor in New York, he became more interested in fitness. Those beverages, full of fat and sugar, felt like a dessert rather than something he should be drinking every day.
He started making coffee at home but added cinnamon to the grounds to make it taste better. Performing often took Matt in and out of town. One day, he found himself between shows, crashing on a friend’s couch. His friend took him to a coffee shop in the East Village, where he had his first good cup of coffee—a cortado made from specialty beans. Suddenly, something shifted. Matt started looking for “good coffee,” but he wasn’t sure why he liked some beans and not others.
After a trip to Italy, he began grinding fresh coffee and brewing by hand every day in a moka pot. A year later, he returned from doing two shows back-to-back in Maine and decided he wanted to produce something of his own. In early 2020, he traveled to Guatemala for six weeks to create a web series about how coffee is grown. He returned to New York just before the pandemic lockdown began.
While many people struggled to fill their time during the lockdown, Matt fell down a coffee rabbit hole. His web series connected him with coffee experts around the globe. When restrictions lifted, a roasting experiment with Regalia founder Paolo Maliksi turned into a new passion and eventually a thriving business. Matt continued to study the craft of roasting, approaching coffee with the same care he’d poured into his work in the performing arts. He also became passionate about the equity that coffee can create for hardworking farmers and communities. If you want to know more about how coffee can improve the world, check out his video The Real Difference Between Good Coffee and Bad Coffee.
Our Coffee
We are artists. We are nerds. This is not your grandfather’s coffee. We’re obsessed with bringing you the finest coffees around the world and we’re regularly willing to pay higher prices to get them. Our coffee is always roasted fresh in small batches for optimal quality but there’s a lot more that goes into bringing you something superior. Here are the things we look for when we buy coffee:
- Coffee from small producers or co-operatives that place an emphasis on quality.
- Farmers are compensated fairly for their work, bonus points for thorough pricing transparency.
- Coffee that is grown in an environmentally friendly manner (even when farmers are unable to afford pricey certifications).
- Coffees that are better than very good, at least an SCA score of 87. There’s got to be something interesting about them that makes them stand out, something special.
We also focus on single-origin coffee which means that when a coffee is gone, it’s gone. We of course, continue to replace our offerings with new and exciting seasonal coffees. That’s because coffee is a crop, just like wine. Other companies blend coffees to make them taste the same, often times blending a cheaper coffee with a more expensive coffee. While you might see an occasional seasonal blend for sale, we celebrate the difference flavors single origin coffees bring and are always tasting new coffees to find the next thing we want to share with you.
Our Subscription
We created Sphere Coffee Club for people who want to explore coffee every month by trying different flavors from countries around the world. While we’re not the first company to offer this, we founded Sphere after becoming excited and then immediately disappointed by the lack of passion and quality in a competitor’s subscription. We approach our subscription service like a wine club, but for coffee. Each month is carefully curated to contrast with the previous one, aiming to introduce our subscribers to a plethora of processing methods, coffee varieties, and cultures. No two months are alike, and every coffee we offer reflects the values we hold dear.