terminal.shop coffee first impressions

is this what a meme tastes like?

Related Listening

Posted on 2025-05-18

As a bonafide sucker fan of The Primeagen and idiot money waster coffee enthusiast, I was excited to try out some coffee from terminal.shop.

Ordering

If you don’t know, you can only order coffee from terminal.shop over SSH. Yes, really. 100%. I expected some level of jank in the process, but honestly the entire experience was really, really slick. I don’t want to ruin the experience, so, do yourself a favor and fire up the ol’ SSH machine:

ssh terminal.shop

I didn’t have my credit card on me, but they have an option to pop a browser open (where I have my card saved), which seamlessly hands off the sale, then hands it back to the terminal when payment is accepted. Again: really slick.

The Beans

I purchased the Flow and Segfault beans. Shipping was decently quick, and the bags look nice. The Cron subscription boxes look a bit fancier, but the “regular” packaging is nice too.

The Coffee

I’m brewing on my Gaggia Classic Pro Evo and grinding with a Niche Zero. I don’t feel like the Evo needs the temp-surfing that the earlier models do, so I just send it when the light turns red. Portafilter is the GCP stock porta with a fancy pants Wiedemann handle. I’m tamping with the Decent V6 calibrated tamper. Grind size is between 20 and 21.

I’m pulling doppio shots, 18g of coffee, and I don’t weigh my shots because I don’t have a scale that fits under, but I timed them to around 30 seconds, which I think is close to “right” for some values of right.

The verdict? It’s good! It’s not like, mindblowing but it’s totally drinkable. I think the tasting notes come through (not that I’m a seasoned cupper or anything) and I like what comes out of the machine. Both beans are tasty, and I don’t regret the purchase at all. I think I like them both about the same. That said, I don’t think that they’re about to replace my daily driver.

We usually get Speckled Ax Corduroy blend 5lbs at a time, so, it’s tough for really anybody to compete with super high quality, locally roasted coffee, and we have a lot of that in Portland. I absolutely love the coffee we get from Speckled Ax, but they’re a tough competitor! I don’t think anyone is expecting, like, Blue Bottle (to use a well-known roaster) but I do think the terminal beans are good.

Minor Gripes

My only bummer note is that the bags didn’t have a roasted on date on them. There is a spot on the bottom of the bag where it should go, but both bags were blank. Bummer! I do actually care when my beans were roasted (you should too!) and I think it’s a pretty big miss to not have that on the bag. I know that terminal.shop is a meme, but I think they should take the coffee part seriously.

I am reasonably sure that Prime and TJ (maybe they make Dax do it) aren’t like, out in the shop roasting the beans by hand, but whoever they are white-labelling through should put that info on the bag. I wanna know it wasn’t sitting in a warehouse for 6 months before it gets to me!

That all said, I would definitely order from terminal again, and signed up for a Cron subscription, so i’m excited to see what that brings. Thanks for the beans!