129 | Two Big Lessons We Learned Running A Coffee Roastery in 2023

Most coffee shops offer pastries with their beverages, and it's becoming popular to have a breakfast food menu as well. Is having a food menu necessary? In this episode, we talk about some of the great experiences we've had at coffee shops as well as what are some of the businesses pros and cons of serving a food menu.

Narrative Coffee, here in WA, models excellence very well. Everything from their coffee program to their food menu is refined for a very pleasant experience. Alex Scariotta, the new owner of Narrative Coffee, shares more about what it they're doing at Narrative, his personal story of growth in coffee, and how important it is to build an exceptional team in coffee.

Starting a coffee shop or a coffee roastery are both challenging and a risk. After having started a roasting company and helped owners start cafes, we've noticed some of the differences between these two coffee businesses. In this episode, we take apart the pros and cons of starting both a coffee shop and a roasting company.

This past week, decaf coffee got the spotlight and it happened to be at the US Brewers Cup Championship. The 2024 USBrC winner, Weihong Zhang, wins first place competing with a decaf coffee. This is a huge turning point to see decaf crush at a competition and it wasn't even a Gesha! In this podcast episode, we talk about decaf, where we see this going, and some of our favorite decaf coffees we've had in the past.

A special episode with Jimmy The Barista where we talk about what his journey has been like creating content around coffee, how he started in coffee, and his mindset in growing as a creator. Listen until the end because there are so many insightful pieces of information for creatives, coffee shop owners, and roasters. Subscribe to Jimmy: https://www.youtube.com/@jimmythebarista Jimmy's IG: https://www.instagram.com/jimmythebarista/ Shop Our Coffee: https://bit.ly/36gPLRU

As a coffee roaster, offering wholesale to coffee shops is core to our business model. For us, however, it's not just about getting more coffee out the door. Coffee roasters and coffee shops should be working together to help each other thrive and succeed. In this episode, we talk about how we set coffee shops up for success when they partner with us.

As coffee roasters, we understand that we can only roast a coffee to the potential of the green coffee itself. In many cases, we're doing our best to try to maximize the potential of each coffee and minimize the loss it may go through in the roasting process. That being said, starting with quality, fresh green is plays a vital role to roasting good coffee. In this episode, we specifically talk about the impact aging can have on your green coffee. Shop Our Coffee: https://bit.ly/36gPLRU Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mirrorcoffeeroasters/ Mirror Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roaster located in Bellingham, WA.

Coffee competition has always intrigued us, and these last few months have been very busy because of that. Sergei just came back from competing in both cup tasters and brewers cup, and in this episode we talk about his prep, routine, and what it takes to compete on the national level.

Something we hear and are asked often is how we brew coffee based on origin. The same goes for our roasting approach as well. In this episode we talk about how different origins impact the brewing and roasting process and if it's even as important as we think it is.

When brewing pour over coffee, for the most part you're left with either a flat bottom or cone shape brewer. Both of the major categories come with their own nuances, flavor profiles, and recipes. In this podcast episode, we dive into our experiences with brewers like the Orea, V60, and Stagg brewer as well as how we approach brewing with them.