My wife and I started a small home-based coffee roastery in 2018 for several reasons we thought we'd share as we introduce our new blog:
We love coffee. After roasting at home for several years and learning on a variety of systems we thought we'd share the happy results. We don't love massive industrial processes... we love coffee. A small roastery allows us to work with coffee rather than massive industrial processes.
We value natural and trace-able food for both health and ethical reasons. What better way to ensure a healthy natural product than to make it yourself? And how better ensure ethical sourcing than to jump in to the business and supply lines yourself? A small scale ensures close contact with every single batch we roast.
We prioritize our family as an economic unit. This means that if we can work together within the home to support ourselves and own our means of production, we'd like to do so. A home based business like ours, where part of our house is a licensed Food Processing Plant, affords us the opportunity to teach our children about running a business and impart real skills and crafts to them that are unique and valuable. We'd rather not teach our kids to be cogs in a massive industrial process...so we keep it small.
We prioritize the local community marketplace. This means that, when possible, it makes most sense for folks to be purchasing commodities from their neighbors. Doing so reinforces the civic fabric of our communities, makes us all more neighborly, and strengthens the polity. And by the way, the quality and our price of our coffee are highly competitive in the specialty coffee market. We're not on the take for a coffee monopoly... a coffopoly. We'd like to keep it small enough to belong somewhere and are pretty sure there are coffortunities enough for everyone. ...ouch.
