About
Coffee discovery should start with taste.
KnowYourBeans is a coffee discovery platform built on one idea: the best way to find your next favourite bag is through flavour — not brewing jargon, not hype, not chasing star ratings. Tell us what you like, and we match you with beans and roasters that fit your palate.
Why we start with taste
Most coffee is sold by origin, process, and roast level — language that means little until you've already bought the bag and brewed it. We flip that. Every bean on KnowYourBeans is described by how it actually tastes: the flavours you'd recognise in the cup. So you choose by what you'll enjoy, not by decoding a label. No technique gatekeeping, no leaderboards, no social games — just coffee, sorted by flavour.
How to read a bean card
Every bean on KnowYourBeans carries a flavour fingerprint — a picture of how it actually tastes, not where it came from or how it was roasted. Once you can read it, you can choose by flavour.
We describe flavour in three levels: a family (the broad category — Fruity, Chocolatey, Floral), a subcategory (the kind — Berry, Citrus, Dark Chocolate), and the note itself (the specific flavour you'd name — strawberry, lemon, bakers chocolate).
- ① The coloured ribbon across the top shows the families, each sized by how much of that flavour is in the cup.
- ② The stripes below break those families into subcategories.
- ③ The names running up each stripe are the specific notes. Bigger, more colourful stripes mean more of that flavour.
There are nine flavour families in total. Each opens onto its own subcategories and notes:
- FruityBerry — strawberry, blueberry
- ChocolateyDark chocolate, cocoa
- NuttyAlmond, hazelnut
- FloralJasmine, rose
- SweetHoney, caramel
- RoastedToasted, smoky
- SpicedCinnamon, clove
- EarthyWoody, mineral
- BrightCitric, wine-like
How the recommendations work
It's not a black box. The more you tell us, the sharper it gets.
1 · Rate
Rate beans you've tried on a simple 1–5 scale. Each rating teaches us a little about your palate.
2 · Profile
We turn your ratings into a taste profile: a plain summary of the flavours you gravitate toward.
3 · Match
We score every bean against your profile and surface the closest matches — plus a few deliberate stretches to widen your range.
Recommendations are shaped by what you actually enjoy. How we handle your data.
Where a bean sits on your palate
Every bean shows where it sits relative to the beans you've rated: dead-centre of your wheelhouse, a real shift, or new territory. The lit zone and the marker show how far a bean is from what you already love — both ends are good places to be.
In your wheelhouse
The more you rate, the sharper the read.
Real beans from real roasters
The beans you discover here come from real roaster catalogues, kept current as roasters update their line-ups. We lean toward independent roasters — the small-batch people who care where their coffee comes from. Finding a bean here should lead you straight to the roaster who made it, with a clear path to buy from them directly.
KnowYourBeans is free for everyone who drinks coffee, and we intend to keep it that way. Roasters who want more can subscribe to a self-managed profile — claiming their page and keeping their line-up current in front of people already searching by taste. That subscription is how we fund the platform, and it's the only thing roasters pay for: your recommendations are always based on your palate, never on who subscribes.