People ask me how big our roaster is. I think they're picturing one of those industrial machines that takes up half a warehouse, the kind with a hopper you need a ladder to reach. Ours holds about a pound of green beans at a time. One pound. That's it.
I say that with zero embarrassment, because that little drum is the reason our coffee tastes the way it does.
When you're roasting a pound at a time, you can't walk away. There's no setting it and checking back in twenty minutes. You're standing right there listening for first crack, watching the color shift, smelling the moment the beans stop smelling like grass and start smelling like coffee. Every batch teaches you something, and every batch gets the full attention of an actual person instead of a sensor and a spreadsheet.
That's the art of it. A big roaster is built for consistency at volume, which is a real skill and I respect it. But a small drum is built for feel. You learn what a particular lot of Nicaraguan Caturra wants, and it's usually not the same thing the last bag wanted. Green coffee isn't a uniform product; moisture, density, and screen size all shift from harvest to harvest. Small batches let us chase that instead of averaging it out.
Roasted here, not shipped here
Everything we sell gets roasted right here in Michigan by me or my brother. Not roasted three states away and drop shipped with our sticker slapped on it. We've already tried that and it was good, but didn't feel honest. When you order a bag from us, somebody in our family actually stood in front of that roaster and made decisions about it.
Which also means our coffee is fresh in a way that's hard to fake. Coffee starts losing what makes it good pretty much the moment it comes out of the drum. The stuff on a grocery shelf might have been roasted months ago. Ours was probably roasted this week, bagged into a 12oz valve bag, and handed off or dropped in the mail within a couple of days. You can smell the difference the second you open it.
I'm a little obsessed and I'm fine with that
I'll be honest: this stopped being a normal hobby a while ago.
I track yields. I know that 425 grams of green beans in gets me about 340 grams roasted out, and I know when a batch is running off that number. I've read the manufacturer's notes on my roaster more times than any reasonable person should. I think about chimney venting. I've stood in my shop at night doing back to back batches just to see how the profile drifts when the drum stays hot.
My wife has opinions about how much of the house currently smells like coffee.
But that's what you're getting when you buy a bag of coffee. Not a marketing department's idea of craft coffee. Just two brothers, a small drum roaster, a stubborn amount of attention, and coffee we actually want to drink ourselves.
Small batch isn't a limitation we're spinning into a selling point. It's how you make coffee that's worth being obsessed over.
Grab a bag and see what I mean.