From a Brooklyn Loft to a Global Benchmark

Before there was SEY, there was a loft. In 2013, two friends — Lance Schnorenberg and Tobin Polk — began roasting coffee together under the name Lofted Coffee, working out of a rented space in Brooklyn. They were not yet a business in any traditional sense. They were two people obsessed with a question: what does coffee taste like when nothing gets in the way?

That question would define everything that followed. As they searched for a café space, they landed in Bushwick — then Brooklyn's most creatively charged neighbourhood — and opened SEY in 2017 at 18 Grattan Street. The name carries no fixed meaning. Lance and Tobin deliberately chose a word without baggage, a clean slate, a signal that SEY would be defined entirely by what it does rather than by a story told about it. The coffee itself was the statement.

Within two years of opening, Food & Wine named SEY the Best Coffee Shop in America. By 2024, a panel of 32 international specialty coffee professionals ranked them #4 in the world — the highest-ranked US roaster on the Roastful Top 100 list, above every other American roastery.

Roasting as Restraint

The defining philosophy at SEY is not what they do to coffee — it is what they refuse to do to it. Their roasting approach is built entirely on the principle of restraint: ultra-light profiles that preserve, rather than transform, the intrinsic character of each lot. In a world where many roasters use heat to "develop" flavour — building caramel, chocolate, and nut notes through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation — SEY deliberately stops short. The goal is for the coffee to taste, as precisely as possible, like the coffee.

This is harder than it sounds. Roasting light requires an exceptional green coffee to begin with — there is nowhere to hide behind a roast character. Every flaw in the growing, the harvesting, or the processing becomes audible in the cup. SEY's roasting philosophy is therefore inseparable from their sourcing philosophy: they can only roast light because they source exceptionally, and they source exceptionally because they know they will roast light.

Sourcing: Relationships Built on Transparency

Lance Schnorenberg handles the buying and travels to origin constantly — Colombia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala. SEY's sourcing is built on long-term direct relationships with producers and exporters who share their commitment to quality and sustainability. Lance has described the sourcing approach as treating each origin visit not as a buying trip but as an ongoing conversation: checking in on existing relationships, investigating potential new ones, understanding the specifics of each harvest before making any commitment.

Among their key recurring partnerships is an ongoing relationship with Daye Bensa in Ethiopia — the same exporter behind DAK Coffee's Jazz Fruits and Strawberry Kiss lots (Blog #64 and #65 at BrewFusion). SEY has sourced multiple seasons from the Bombe, Keramo, Buncho, and Ninga Hill areas of Sidama, publishing the price paid to producers on every product page — a practice that remains rare in the specialty coffee industry and that SEY describes as "a starting point to inform broader conversation around the true costs of production and the sustainability of specialty coffee as a whole."

Price Transparency: A Radical Act

Every SEY Coffee product page lists the price paid to producers. This is not a marketing exercise — it is a deliberate structural choice that makes SEY unusual among even the most respected specialty roasters. The reasoning is straightforward: consumers cannot make informed purchasing decisions about ethical sourcing if they have no data. Transparency about what roasters pay is "a starting point," in SEY's words, for understanding whether specialty coffee premiums are actually reaching the people who grow the coffee.

In practice, this means a customer buying a bag of SEY Ethiopian Bombe can see exactly what was paid at origin for that green coffee — and make their own judgement about whether the premium they're paying translates into meaningful value for the Bombe community farmers.

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