Blend Your Own Brew at Roasting Plant Coffee Co.

Javabot at Roasting Plant Coffee Co. 81 Orchard St. New York City.

Rin Raj stepped up to the barista and ordered the usual. A single cup of freshly-roasted Brazilian beans were ground and brewed as he watched. For $2.18, he walked out with 8-ounces of his favorite beverage.

“This is the best coffee in Manhattan,” said Raj as he left the Roasting Plant Coffee Co., where he is a weekend regular. Like many New Yorkers, he has discovered the only coffee shop in the city where customers can choose their own blend of beans for a single cup of joe. Raj said he has tasted all seven single-origin options, and experimented with mixes of several.

The first Roasting Plant outpost opened in 2007 at 81 Orchard St. on the Lower East Side. A second location was added the following year at 75 Greenwich Ave. in the West Village. Last year, the company was recruited to open a coffee shop in Detroit.

This is the growing world of third-wave coffee, independent shops that treat the coffee bean as a specialty product. The first wave began in the 19th century, when the espressos of Italian immigrants led to ubiquitous coffee drinking in American homes. The second wave was corporate coffee, served up by Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Peet’s Coffee and Tea.

Roasting Plant is taking on the third-wave with a patented coffee-making machine. Only three of them exist in the entire world. The all-in-one microbrewing and roasting machine can even produce a uniform grind of up to four types of beans at once. After whirring for 45 seconds, it produces one fresh, 8-ounce cup.

“We’re not trying to be arbiters of taste; we’re not trying to tell people what to drink,” said Roasting Plant owner and founder Mike Caswell, who invented the machine.

Brazilian and Guatemalan blend iced coffee.

Caswell, a former director of profit improvement at Starbucks, Corp. in Seattle, has a background in industrial engineering. His invention, dubbed the Javabot, is a system of transparent and matte metal pneumatic tubes that roasts, sorts, grinds and brews coffee beans in-house. The Javabot at the narrow Orchard Street shop sits on the floor along the right wall of the 20-foot deep-by-10-foot wide space.

“In an attempt not to limit the customer, we open the selection of flavors and let them take their own journey,” Caswell added.

If customers need help, Roasting Plant baristas are trained to recommend blends. But trends show that many more of today’s consumers have the coffee competence to choose a preferred flavor profile.

“We’re in a really remarkable era for coffee consumers,” said Murray Carpenter, author of “Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us.” “We know more about the conditions under which coffee is grown and coffee drinkers are becoming more savvy and sophisticated.”

Specialty coffee now makes up 51 percent of the $31 billion United States market, according to the National Coffee Association’s 2014 annual drinking trends study. For the first time, coffee grown in ideal microclimates has surpassed ordinary, non-regulated cups of joe.

At Roasting Plant, cards next to each option educate the coffee drinker on “notes” present in each bean, from blueberry to dark chocolate. Carpenter compared this new gourmet coffee taste to that of a sommelier, an expert wine steward. Caswell used the same analogy.

“I think in general the American, and even global, coffee consumer is becoming more and more sophisticated and knowledgeable,” Caswell said. “Like wine, if you have interest you will pursue it.”

“I like a lot of coffees from Ethiopia,” said Matt Arkin, a first-time customer at the West Village shop. “They have a lot of notes of blueberry and citrus, and it’s a pretty bright roast.”

He said his cup of Guatemalan coffee at Roasting Plant was as fresh as any specialty shop’s pour-over, a water-poured-over-grounds method that takes about three minutes for a microbrewed cup.

“It’s very good,” he said. “No complaints.”