[ndsipa_pomu]

I'm in the UK, so that might not be particularly helpful for you.

I currently buy green beans from https://www.pennineteaandcoffee.co.uk/ as they're cheaper than other places that I've found. I used to buy (and still do on occasion) from https://www.hasbean.co.uk/ which I can heartily recommend. Their roasted beans are excellent too and I love the information they provide about the individual growers.

In terms of beans, I tend to go for Asian coffees such as Monsoon Malabar, Indonesian or Thailand (tends to be difficult to find).

Here's an example of a fermented Thailand coffee that doesn't muck around when it comes to flavour or aroma (a friend complains that it smells of cat pee): https://www.hasbean.co.uk/products/thailand-22-114

I usually buy around 8kgs of green beans at a time to qualify for free delivery and the advantage of green beans is that they keep much better (months at least). It's when you roast them that beans should be consumed with 2-3 weeks or so depending on how fussy you are about staleness. It's when beans are ground that they go stale extremely quickly, so ground coffee from a supermarket will inevitably taste a bit stale despite having it in a fancy air release bag etc.

[lapama]

I am impressed by how much the general population is driven by supply, instead of finding their way to quality, when it comes to coffee.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Quality coffee fell out of favour when instant coffee came on the market. Before that, it was common for people to roast their own coffee using a stove-top pan, but instant coffee meant that anyone could manage to have a coffee-like drink without worrying about roasting and the occasional fires that can result (it's quite easy to set fire to the chaff released from the beans). When people grow up with instant coffee, they often don't realise the difference until they're exposed to expensive coffee-shops.

It's a similar situation with tea as most people don't appreciate the staleness of tea-bags bought in supermarkets until they're given a quality loose-leaf brew. However, tea wasn't better back in the day as it was often shipped in bricks.

[lapama]

As an anecdote I would have never expected, English Breakfast tea standards are the poorest: broken leaves that fall apart while producing finer sorts.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I think English Breakfast tea leaves are deliberately broken when processing as it gives it a stronger flavour (might help it move around inside a teabag too). Tea leaves are oxidised to make black tea (as opposed to green tea) and tearing the leaves is sometimes part of that process to speed up oxidisation.