Early days...
Our personal coffee journey did, in fact, start with dark roasted coffee. Whether it was getting ready for another day of work on a cold, wintery morning or fueling up for a bike ride on a summer day—we drank dark coffee either way.
We thought (and still think!) that those bold, full-bodied cups hit the spot.
We spent a lot of time drinking Major Dickason’s at the Peet’s café in Harvard Square, or hanging out at 1369 in Central Square, Cambridge, catching up with friends and colleagues.
Peet’s—and many of the other “second wave coffee roasters” (e.g., Starbucks)—did a lot for the industry. It may be hard to imagine now, but they helped shift coffee back into a social, café-centered experience, with a renewed focus on quality over simply finding the cheapest way to inject caffeine into the bloodstream. They helped move us past the era of instant coffee at home—think Folgers and Sanka.
Drifting away...
We forced ourselves to stop drinking what we liked.
Look, we come from the software world. And being trendy in the coffee world is almost a prerequisite if you’re in software. Asking what’s the new, new hotness is part of our DNA—which led to us losing sight of what we actually liked.
During the 2010s, we found ourselves spending more and more time in coffee shops. Especially once we started our software agency, where a big part of our day was spent meeting clients and colleagues over coffee. Naturally, to stay ‘cool,’ we had to visit the hippest cafés—George Howell, for instance. These shops were onto the new trend of roasting coffee light. Very light.
This new approach was taking over—and we were told, with conviction, that this was what “good” coffee tasted like. We tried. We really tried. And we perpetuated the lie that we liked it, just to appear hip.
The truth is: we didn’t like it. But we drank it anyway because we wanted to believe we had “good” coffee taste and knew what we were talking about.
Could we go back to what we actually liked? We were told that drinking dark roasted coffee meant liking burnt, bitter coffee with no trace of origin—that doing so made us the club-wielding troglodytes of the coffee world.
Is that us?
Truth, dead ahead...
There’s no such thing as “bad” coffee. There’s only what you enjoy. And saying coffee can only be one thing? That’s just a marketing stunt.
Light roasts have their place—there’s real skill and science behind them, and some folks genuinely love that sparkling acidity and delicate, floral thing they do. If that’s you, we respect it.
But for us? It never hit the same.
We love our dark roasted coffee. Does that make us unhip in some people’s eyes? Maybe. Do we enjoy it more? Absolutely—and that’s what matters.
And if we’re being honest, we think a lot of people out there feel the same way. Folks who love the flavor and feel of a well-crafted dark roast, but maybe felt nudged away from it by the industry’s obsession with “brightness” and fruit-forward profiles.
We're charting our own course...
White Whale Coffee is our way of returning to the kind of coffee that made us fall in love with the stuff in the first place. But this time, we’re doing it with care, intention, and a roaster’s obsession for getting it just right.
We’re not just making dark roasts. We’re specializing in them. The industry has been so laser-focused on light roasts that we see an ocean of opportunity to experiment, push the envelope, and level up the art of dark coffee.
We’re digging deep into varietals, processing methods, and roast curves to bring out the richness, sweetness, and complexity that dark roasts deserve—but rarely get credit for.
This isn’t nostalgia in a paper cup. It’s a full-on commitment to making dark roast excellent—not burnt, not bitter, but bold, balanced, and better with every batch.
If this sounds like your kind of journey, welcome aboard.
