Journey to Roasting, pt. 1: How it All Began
- Elizabeth Jerrell
- Jul 25, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 27, 2024
In this series, we share the how Coffee Hour Co. went from an idea to a reality, and the lessons we've learned along the way.
It all started roughly one year ago; it was Summer of 2023. Jacob and I (Ella) were visiting my family in Washington state, and we found ourselves in some sort of mood that summer… an entrepreneurial one. We were bouncing ideas off each other right and left, keeping the good ones in a shared Notes file (or at least, we thought they were good; looking back, ehhh).
My dad, an avid coffee drinker and OCA parish priest, has long had the idea for a coffee business supplying Orthodox Church coffee hours, which in most cases suffer from bad coffee. For decades, he would pre-brew his own coffee before church and smuggle it in to coffee hour from a Stanley thermos in his car. As hilarious as that sounds, we've since heard from several other coffee drinkers... he's not the only one to do this!
I had heard my dad talk about this idea on other occasions over the years, trying to get it into the mind of someone who would bring it to life. No one ever took the bait.
But like I said, Jacob and I were in some sort of entrepreneurial mindset last Summer. For whatever reason, we were eager to start something of our own. So we took the idea seriously!
After many a cafinated brainstorming sessions, we made the decision to try the business idea out using a dropshipping program. For those who aren't familiar, dropshipping is where another business creates your product and fullfills your orders. We used Path Coffee Roasters in New York state, and for anyone reading this in a similar position, we recommend them. For specialty coffee, the costs are fair and the product is great.
One advantage to starting out this way was the lack of overhead costs. It was mostly an opportunity to dip our toes into website design, graphic design, and business planning, which was very helpful to learn in isolation to the many other responsibilities of running a coffee business.
We opened our online shop at the end of December, 2023. It went decently well, but neither of us were satisfied for long. We weren’t selling a product that was fully ours. Not to mention, the margins weren’t great and our price point was higher than we’d like (and higher than what we anticipated would be sustainable).
Enter Coffee Crafters in Post Falls, Idaho, a coffee roaster manufacturing company. While in the Northwest for Christmas, we happened upon this company via Google searches and were thrilled to find they were right in our neck of the woods. We toured their warehouse and production space with the owner, Ken Lathrop. Ken created this company to fullfill a real niche in the coffee space: small roasters, who don't have 100k to spend on a roaster. He specializes in fluid beds targeting the micro-roasting industry. We had a wonderful visit with him, and by the end of the day we knew we'd found our roaster manufacturer.
The roaster we settled on is a fluid bed from Coffee Crafters: the Valenta 7. Most commercial coffee is roasted using a drum roaster, which basically stirs the green beans in a large, hot metal bucket. This means in order to control the temperature of the beans as they roast, you have to control the temperature of the bucket, which isn’t an easy or quick thing to do.
By comparison, a fluid bed roaster uses conduction to heat the beans: hot air is blown into the compartment holding the beans, creating a circular vortex. It’s the air that is roasting the beans, not really the metal. This means the temperature is significantly more controllable than in a drum roaster.
This also means that the learning curve is quite different. We don’t have an opinion as to which type of roaster makes better coffee, as do some avid coffee enthusiasts. But we do know that for us, as a small business starting out, the size and abilities of our fluid bed have been just what we needed. And it makes some excellent coffee.
Of course, it wasn’t quite a pack-and-plug experience. In the next part of this blog series, I'll write about receiving our roaster and getting it set up at our storefront.
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