JOURNEYING INTO THE WORLD OF COFFEE ROASTING.
We’ve come a long way in four years: from the Pacific Ocean waves to the 2025 San Francisco Coffee Festival at Fort Mason. Standing at the window of the caravan can feel like being on a stage, but it hardly compares to the performance we pulled off at the coffee fest, where we shared our newly perfected coffee beans with fellow fanatics, many of whom travelled from miles away to attend the premier coffee culture event on November 8 and 9.
Since we started roasting in April of this year, we’ve embarked on a self-guided tour of the world through coffee, all from our cafe in the heart of Golden Gate Park. We tasted Papua New Guinea in a medium-dark roast whose chocolate-y richness shone in the cafe espresso. We explored the bright and citrus-filled light roasts of African origin in small batches from Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya. We delved into South American coffee, playing with a Mexico medium roast — perfect for drip — and a thrilling Peruvian Geisha premium bean, where a medium-light roast revealed complex layers of carmelized stone fruit. We returned to our roots in Guatemalan coffee, having for years used Tiny Footprint’s Guatemalan dark roast for espresso, drip, and decaf across our locations. The resulting Huehuetenango dark roast is rich with flavors of dark chocolate and panela: deep, smooth, and perfect for espresso.
And less than 7 months from our first roast, we brought our favorites to the SF Coffee Festival: the special Peruvian Geisha, the bright and floral Kenyan light roast, the toasty Mexican medium roast, and the rich Guatemalan dark roast. Over the course of the weekend we greeted hundreds of festival attendees with pour over samples of the beans. We watched customers’ eyes, already glowing with a caffeinated haze, light up at the vastly different flavors. Their stacks of tiny 4oz cups grew tall as they sampled specialty drinks from hundreds of vendors filling the warehouse floor.
Something about standing ready at the table, greeting new friends with a pour over carafe in hand, felt very vulnerable. A pair of baby redwoods, string lights, and a beautiful bouquet from the SF Flower Market made our booth feel like home, but the wide open Fort Mason warehouse filled with ten thousand echoing voices, an intensifying afternoon heat, and a constant stream of attendees was a far cry from our home base in Golden Gate Park. Our beans and our full business was on display, and it was intimidating. As we sweated in our fish bowl of a booth, beautiful though it turned out to be, our community turned out to surprise us as always. We sold a good number of beans, with a dollar of each sale going towards our Save the Redwoods fundraiser to dedicate a redwood grove on the California Coast (see link to fundraiser below). Friends from the Presidio and JFK mobile locations stopped by, surprised and excited to learn about our roasting adventures. We relished the opportunity to share our love for coffee with the wider community of caffeine lovers, and are reinvigorated to try new roasts, explore new ways of brewing, and even invent new ways of selling our products (ecommerce?! A new cafe?!?!) moving forward.
But all that can wait, at least for a minute. After a busy and exhausting weekend we’re thrilled to be back at home in Golden Gate Park. We still have a limited number of our special coffee roasts to sell at each of our locations, and will continue to set aside a portion of every sale for our Save the Redwoods fundraiser. We’ll see you there!
Written by our very talented barista and writer extraordinaire,
Lark Breen
