Portland, Oregon — 1999
It started with a single café, a vintage German roasting machine, and an idea that felt obvious but was almost unheard of at the time: go to where the coffee grows, meet the people who grow it, pay them what the coffee is actually worth.
We packed bags, boarded planes, and traveled to farms in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, Indonesia, and beyond. We drank coffee under tin-roofed drying stations, shook hands across language barriers, and made promises we have kept every single year since.
Why Direct Trade
The commodity coffee market prices coffee like a raw material — by weight, by grade, regardless of the extraordinary work that goes into growing it well. We rejected that model from day one. Direct Trade means we negotiate directly with farmers, pay above Fair Trade minimums (often significantly above), and build relationships measured in decades, not harvests.
When a farmer knows there is a reliable buyer who will pay a fair price year after year, they can invest in their land, their workers, and their craft. Better farming produces better coffee. It is not charity — it is a better supply chain for everyone.
The Roastery
Our roastery runs on vintage German drum roasters — machines that are 60-plus years old and still produce results that modern automated equipment cannot match. Operating them is a skill developed over years. Our roasters know each origin by instinct: how Ethiopian naturals behave differently from Colombian washed lots, how altitude affects density and heat absorption, how a two-second adjustment can shift a cup from good to exceptional.
Every batch is small enough to control and large enough to matter. Every bag that leaves our roastery is a direct expression of the work done by farmers on the other side of the world — and our responsibility is to do that work justice.
Good Luck.
That has always been our sign-off. Not because making great coffee requires luck — it requires skill, relationship, and obsessive attention. But because we know that getting a truly great cup of coffee into someone’s hands involves an extraordinary chain of human effort, and we are grateful for every link in it.