True Off My Chest

We don’t roast coffee. There, I said it. 

I mean, hold on, that’s not entirely true. Like, we do roast coffee, just not directly on a coffee roaster that is physically present in New Orleans. Come again? It’s a little tricky, I know, but we’re a coffee roasting company with no roaster. Here is where we clear the air, and talk about where we are in our coffee roasting journey and where we’re heading. 

In March 2021, after exploring the possibility of roasting coffee, we purchased two coffee roasters. The larger of the two is our production roaster, a 7-kilo Loring. This is a wonderful roasting system with a lot of advanced features. Loring roasters are manufactured in California, and as you likely know, COVID has created significant manufacturing delays. So while we initially planned to have the roaster here by December, this is really more of a moving target.

But what we do have is our sample roaster! It’s a teeny little Ikawa sample roaster, though, like the Loring, it has some tremendous features. We’ve been using it over the past year to evaluate green (i.e., unroasted) coffee samples and make purchasing decisions for Mammoth Coffee Company. This little sample roaster, which is really about the size of a Boston Terrier, while perfectly suited for our green sourcing needs, only churns out less than 50 grams of coffee in a batch.

So how is our coffee produced? For the time being, we’re collaborating with friends in North Carolina. Together, they’re taking the coffees that we’ve sourced, roasting them to our specifications (on the same roasting system that we’ve purchased!) and sending them back to our cafe in New Orleans. There’s a bunch of back-and-forth, and quality control checks in the process. And since we’re all using the same roasting system, we ought to be able to finesse the transition back to our roastery when the equipment is here and ready.

It’s a brilliant system and we’re really fortunate to have such wonderful friends in the business. It’s also a model that allows us to get into the roasting game, build relationships with suppliers and producers, and lay the foundation of our roasting company. But how long will we be in this phase? It depends! We’re looking at a couple different options for the roastery, so we hope to announce WHERE we’ll be roasting very soon. Then, we’ll get the necessary permits and begin construction. So we’re likely still a few months away.

But in the meantime there sure are some exciting coffees we’ve got lined up for you. Thanks for your support, and if you’ve had one of our coffees I encourage you to drop us a line with your feedback. Reach us at hello@mammothcoffee.co.