We love to brag about how our selected roasters are changing the coffee landscape. We’ve once again found a roaster that has found a new and unique way of facing the challenges of the industry. Topeca Coffee was started by a coffee farm in El Salvador. During the 2001 coffee crisis, they decided to truly cut out the middle man and started a roaster in the US. Now that Topeca has cafes of their own in Tulsa, OK, they are the first truly crop to cup company we have ever worked with.

When Jon Allen founded Onyx Coffee Lab in Arkansas one of the first things he did was get in touch with other roasters to ask how much they were paying for each of their coffees. Jon was disappointed that many roasters he reached out to were hesitant to answer what he felt was a simple question. Transparency is essential in the coffee industry. So many coffee producers live in poverty. Because of this experience, Jon decided that Onyx would value transparency in their coffee buying process. Anyone that buys coffee from Onyx can look on their website and see exactly how much was paid for their coffee. Onyx also shows the commodity coffee price at time of purchase and fair trade price, so customers can see how much more than those Onyx paid their producers.

It’s been quite some time since we featured a roaster from Coop Coffees, one of our favorite groups of roasters. This month we circle back to them by selecting Desert Sun Coffee Roasters from Durango, CO. Coop Coffees is a coffee importing cooperative that is owned by its member roasters. While a true direct-trade model is incredibly time consuming and expensive to run, Coop Coffees allows smaller roaster work together as one larger importer that prides itself in being able to cut out middle men to pay producers more as well as transparency that sets the bar in the industry. Previous Coop Coffees roasters we have worked with include Wonderstate Coffee (previously Kickapoo coffee), Larry’s Coffee, Bongo Java, Sweet Waters, Cafe Campesino, and more.

Portola Coffee is dedicated to quality, from crop to cup. As they say at Portola, coffee “can only be maintained or diminished once it is placed into our hands.” They understand the importance of a great crop, which is why they cup thousands of different coffees a year at source while only buying around 30 or less.

This month, Brothers Coffee goes back to our Vermont roots. While living in the Burlington area, it wasn’t uncommon to find some fresh Brio coffee in the local grocery stores. Despite now operating on the opposite coast, we’re excited to partner this month with one of our favorite coffee roasters, Brio.

While PT’s Coffee has won more awards than we can fit in this space, what we love most about this Kansas roaster is that they were one of the pioneers of direct trade. It’s not often we come across a roaster that was founded in 1993 – almost ancient, when compared to many of our selected roasters – that continues to stay at the forefront of the ever-shifting coffee-culture. But PT’s is all that and more.

Our pursuit of finding awesome roasters has once again brought us to Denver, CO, where we found our latest favorite roaster: Huckleberry. We were drawn to their desire to run a business that is responsible both to their producers as well as their local communities.

Crimson Cup is named for both the color of coffee cherry’s and the color of its founder’s alma mater, Harvard. As a recent Harvard grad Greg Ubert had a comfy job and a great future. But it wasn’t his passion. Ubert decided to drop everything and move back in with his parents in Columbus, Ohio to pursue his new passion: coffee.

As the name implies, Greater Goods is about the bigger picture and giving back through positive business practices. But they also recently added an impressive accolade to their repertoire: Food & Wine just named Greater Goods the best roaster in Texas. This roaster knows that when you’re on the ground with your farmers looking to make their lives better and their coffee better, the customer experience and end product becomes better as well. Their investments at source have paid off with excellent coffee being produced and roasted every day.

Over the last few years Brothers Coffee has had the wonderful opportunity to work with many roasters that have found new and unique ways to make the world a better place. It can be tough to lead our blog posts with something new about our selected roasters that we have never featured before!

Not the case with Copper Door. Copper Door is the first roaster we have worked with that is 100% female owned and the only Denver-area roaster that can claim this!