Expertise: roasting, entrepreneurship, café owner

Coffee insight: Nathan has found that their micro-lot coffees are generally at their best for about six to eight months, which he uses as a rhythm for creating new roasts.

Fun fact: Nathan started his roasting experiments with a rotisserie oven that had been converted into a drum roaster!

In 2009, Nathan’s sister, who was 16, was looking for more venues where she could perform as a musician, but her age was a limiting factor. Nathan’s family realized that not only were there limited venues for young musicians, but there also were few places in their community where people could gather in a focused environment to listen to live music. From that, the first incarnation of Dessert Oasis was born.

Originally, the business focused on serving desserts and creating a venue for their community to connect, and serving coffee was just one small aspect of their model. “That was really enough exposure to kind of get my interest piqued in the world of coffee,” Nathan explains. “I literally used to go to my parents with these profit-analysis charts as a 13-year-old, trying to explain why it would be financially feasible for us to being roasting our own coffee and actually improving what we were doing on the coffee end.”

Click here to find Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters’ Ethiopia Biru Bekele roast in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Nathan says wears many hats in his family’s business, Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, which has grown to a team of 65 people at four different locations, including an eight-person baking team specializing in their signature cheesecakes. He sources all of the company’s green coffee, heads the roasting department, and develops the company’s vision and financial strategy.

He’s also co-founder of Ace High Company, an all-natural-ingredient haircare company, which he founded with Dessert Oasis’s current director of finance in 2016. After friends in the haircare industry helped them discover their interest in experimenting with different hair products, Nathan and his co-founder started to play with creating their own. “We started brewing these little batches of pomade in our kitchen of the Rochester shop after hours, actually,” he recalls. Today they sell small-batch hair products worldwide, to haircare professionals and on their online platform.

Nathan is doing his part to create more opportunities for people who are passionate about making their careers in the coffee industry. “That’s one of the things that really drives me to want to continue the growth of this company…to create more of those career-type roles in our organization,” he explains.

Nathan wants to change how people think about working in coffee. “Over the years, we’ve met and worked with so many passionate, talented people who always have that compromise of that societal pressure to ‘get a real job’ or ‘get into your actual career.’” At Dessert Oasis, Nathan is proud that they’ve grown by finding driven people, like their baristas, who wanted to transition into full-time careers within the business.

Nathan says he hopes more consumers will come to understand the amount of work required to make a phenomenal cup of coffee. He shares with his regular customers all of the labor that goes into creating Dessert Oasis’s micro-lot coffees, but he says even they’re sometimes surprised by the amount of labor involved—from farming to sourcing to roasting to the art of brewing. “

“I think really the real craft of it is one of the biggest surprises to so many people still,” he says.

By forging long-term relationships with their importers and farmers, Nathan says that he’s able to better serve his customers, by providing high-quality, consistent, single-source micro-lot roasts.

After experimenting with blends, Nathan realized that his customers were truly drawn to their single-origin roasts, so that’s where he chose to put his energy: “Let’s just focus on really highlighting each origin, each lot.”

This model allows Dessert Oasis to provide coffee lovers with a seasonal rotation of unique coffees and serve as a market for small farmers, while also educating consumers about what makes each lot unique.

Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters: www.docr.coffee

Instagram: @desert_oasis_coffee_roasters

Expertise: roasting, education, safety, equipment sales and repair, Q grading

Coffee insight: The two biggest factors that cause equipment failure are ignoring preventative maintenance (which should be done every six months) and brewing with low-quality water.

Fun fact: Equipment doesn’t have to be a barrier to coffee! Allen’s brother doesn’t own a coffeemaker, so when Allen visits, he uses a blender and a scale to get the right ratio of beans to water!

Allen was working in the tech industry in the early days of the internet when a colleague offered him an espresso (with beans from the original Peet’s coffee in Oakland). “It was, like, ‘Sure, I want an espresso, whatever that is,’” he jokes. After that Allen found himself experimenting with home roasting and eventually left the tech industry altogether to found Zingerman’s Coffee Company in 2003.

Today Allen supports other industry professionals through his company, Pit Crew Coffee, which works with businesses from small mom-and-pop shops all the way up to national chains. But Allen also leverages his skills, knowledge, and connections to support and invest in up-and-coming coffee professionals, helping small, bootstrapping coffeeshop startups by providing free labor and at-cost equipment and support. “We just do that as kind of a service to the industry.”

Allen is helping other coffee entrepreneurs create successful sustainable businesses by sharing the best equipment and supporting them in making sure those high-investment items are working at their best for years to come.

“For whatever reason,” he explains, “people tend to just run the machine till it dies. You could have a $30,000 machine, that could be as much as a car. And you don’t just run it till it dies because you didn’t change the oil ever.” So Pit Crew Coffee works with coffee entrepreneurs to set up everything from water-filtering systems to preventative maintenance schedules to make sure their critical high-end equipment lasts.

Even having worked with the highest-grade equipment in the industry, Allen says to keep in mind that it’s always about finding a flavor profile that suits your tastes.

What’s he’s learned, he says, is that there is no single way to make an incredible cup of coffee. According to Allen, “There’s no one best coffee. There’s no one best prep method. There’s no one best coffee machine.”

And while, according to Allen, there are no absolutes in coffee, he does believe the one thing coffee consumers should make their baseline is the perfect ratio of water to coffee: 16 to 1. From there, anything goes.

Allen goes above and beyond to help ensure that the next wave of café owners have the foundation they need to be successful. Allen says, “We tend to do work with people, usually for the first year or two as they get started, when we just know it’s something they need and something they can’t afford.”

That support can range from helping bootstrapping café owners purchase equipment at cost to setting up a water filtration system to providing time and labor to help them with technical aspects of their new equipment. “We do that as kind of service to the industry,” Allen explains.

Pit Crew Coffee Service: pitcrew.coffee

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pitcrewcoffee/

Expertise: Sustainability, corporate social responsibility, education, Q grading

Coffee insight: “There’s no one right way to drink coffee…What your palate tells you is 100% the truth.”

Fun fact: Brandon bought his first espresso machine from a garage sale when he was 12 years old.

Brandon bought his first espresso machine at a garage sale when he was twelve years old. “I wasn’t a huge fan of what was coming out of it,” he jokes, but making drinks for other people spurred his interest in culinary arts and showed him the fulfilment he got from serving others.

As Director of Sustainability at Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea, Brandon focuses on creating and maintaining sustainable relationships with producers, which is better for the environment, creates greater equality and human connection, and improves the company’s bottom line.

“What we realized early on is to create sustainable purchasing, we have to not only take care if the entire value chain and make sure that people get paid what they deserve to get paid…,” Brandon explains, “we also had to make sure that we maintained relationships so that we could purchase that coffee year after year after year…”

Brandon says he’s motivated by research that shows today’s consumers are becoming more and more interested in purchasing sustainable products. In a recent study by Futerra, 87% of consumers said they would prefer to make a sustainable purchase over a non-sustainable one.

What it takes, Brandon believes, is educating consumers about the entire process and how much work, at every stage, goes into creating a great cup of coffee so that consumers understand why paying more for coffee is actually a good thing.

Brandon says that consumers should embrace their favorite coffee drink, whatever it is: “There’s no one way to drink coffee… What your palate tells you is 100% the truth.”

But he also thinks they should keep an open mind. “Explore and make sure that you give other things an opportunity,” he says, “so that if you do have that perfectly brewed cup of coffee, that’s scientifically proven to be perfect, you can at least try it and see what you think.”

Brandon fosters relationships with coffee farmers and processors through creating human-to-human, face-to-face connections. He frequently travels to meet with farmers and producers, sharing knowledge that can help their businesses become more successful, which also helps sustain the quality of Crimson Cup’s products. That can range from inspecting crops and mills to sharing new advances in processing techniques.

“I have been super privileged to get a lot of coffee education and a lot of certifications,” Brandon explains, “and so I go to these…producing countries, and I’m able to share some of that information in a sensitive way, because I don’t want to tell anyone what to do.”

Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea: https://www.crimsoncup.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crimsoncupcoffee/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandonbir/?hl=en

Expertise: roasting, entrepreneurship, social accountability

Coffee insight: While many consumers believe “direct trade” always means that roasters purchase directly from farmers, in practice, it often means working with community-minded importers who help foster those connections and can also offer on-the-ground support, like recommendations from trained agronomists.

Fun fact: Before beginning her coffee career, Sara spent time in several different industries, including roles as a science teacher for Teach for America and as a copyeditor and copywriter for Comedy Central.

Sara first took the leap into coffee seven years ago, when she was looking to make a career change after years in education and digital content, and started exploring the one thing she felt really passionate about—coffee.

When Sara relocated to Austin, she immediately sought out the roastery closest to her new home and started visiting regularly. She jokes, “I think I pestered them enough that at some point there were, like, ‘Do you want to work here or something?’”

In spite of having no work experience in the coffee industry, Sara says that she joined the company at “kismet-ically the right time” and found herself learning how to roast.

Sara is the co-founder of Sightseer Coffee, a roasting company focused on sourcing their green coffee through community-minded, environmentally conscious importers exclusively from women producers and co-ops, paying more-than-fair-trade prices for their coffees. She is also the co-founder of Rising Tide Coffee Collaborative, a co-roasting space that supports small roasting companies by offering equipment and education.

Click here to find Sightseer Coffee’s Dad Bod Blend in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Sara says that she was very lucky to have made her way in the roasting industry, and she’s committed to paying that luck forward by opening opportunities for greater diversity and more equity within the coffee industry—from moving the needle on women’s roles to creating space for small roasting companies to establish themselves and flourish.

In terms of Sightseer Coffee, it’s about helping women succeed and advance in an industry dominated by male decision-makers. At Rising Tide Coffee Collaborative, it’s about creating a community and a space where roasters can share equipment, knowledge, and support. She explains, “You can come do all the things you want to do here. You can get pretty damn big and still stay here. And we can do that for you in a way that makes things accessible and helps you learn as you go and lets you find success in a way that doesn’t require you to have a ton of capital.”

Sara says many coffee consumers don’t realize “how much work goes into producing in the coffee-producing countries.” But she believes that educating consumers is an important step in helping set fair prices for coffee. She says, “I think when you really start to look at what it takes to process coffee and all of those steps and how exacting it can be and how much work there is there, and then you think about how much money we pay for coffee, it’s really sort of mind-blowing.”

While 70% of the labor force on coffee farms worldwide is made up of women, almost all management and land ownership is in the hands of men, a reality that frustrated Sara.

She became interested in women-producer initiatives, and in her reading, she came across a quote from Kofi Annan about the importance of investing in women’s education and economic power.

“I remember reading that and having this, like, aha moment,” Sara recalls. “What a powerful way to support sustainability—social sustainability, environmental sustainability, financial sustainability—to support community growth [and] to support the people who are really making the coffee. One good lever to pull right there is just to invest in women.”

Her roasting company, Sightseer Coffee sources exclusively from women-owned farms and mills, paying above fair-trade prices for their green coffee, as a way to move the needle on this imbalance.

Sightseer Coffee: https://sightseercoffee.co/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sightseercoffee/

Rising Tide Roast Collaborative: https://risingtideroastcollab.com/

Former tastytrade Co-founder and Serial Entrepreneur Kristi Ross, and Executive Business Leader Craig Ross Serve as Co-founders of U3 Coffee, Creating a Unique Combination of Content Platform, Online Marketplace, and Charitable Arm

U3 Coffee Media offers high-quality, entertaining educational content and highlights the people behind the coffee, from farmers to entrepreneurs. U3 Coffee Exchange serves as a marketplace for sustainably farmed coffees including U3 Coffee’s own roasts. Consumers can also purchase multiple brands of coffee through subscriptions or one-time purchases, as well as merchandise and at-home coffee equipment. U3 Coffee’s charitable arm, U3 Coffee Bank, was created to give back to the farmers and support coffee entrepreneurs as they embark on their own unique journeys.

U3 Coffee plans to open U3 Coffee Roasters, located at 7430 Madison St, Forest Park, IL in Spring of 2024.

“I’ve spent 30 years in the financial services, trading, and brokerage industry and been through over 40+ mergers, acquisitions, capital raises, and startups in my career. Coffee was the fuel for my late nights and early mornings. What really inspired this new endeavor is getting closer to the bean in every way possible – connecting farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers to create an ultimate product experience and enduring connection. This is no easy feat given that coffee is a $85B+ industry in the U.S. alone,” said Kristi Ross. “While some would say that the coffee marketplace would appear to be saturated, we believe there is an immense amount of room for innovation.”

“Perhaps the most exciting part of our company is U3 Coffee Bank, which will allow us to share our profits to uplift and further support communities and up and coming coffee entrepreneurs. U3 Coffee is different. Our goal is to drive empowerment from every bag of beans to every cup and have consumers truly understand the coffee journey – the pride, challenges, and quality that farmers work hard to deliver,” said Craig Ross. “We seek to understand and share what we learn with the world through U3 Coffee Media, and we want to unite the entrepreneurial coffee community, showcasing premium brands in one online marketplace. Helping educate and provide transparency throughout the coffee value chain, all the way to the end consumer is at the heart of everything we are doing.”

U3 Coffee provides whole or ground coffee beans wholesale and retail as well as U3 Coffee merchandise and coffee equipment, in addition to allowing consumers to access a marketplace to buy other roasters’ coffee. In keeping with U3 Coffee’s socially conscious business model, U3 Coffee selects roasters with regenerative agriculture practices, and specialty coffees.

For more information about U3 Coffee, visit https://u3coffee.com/.

U3 Coffee set out to deliver the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans by creating the first coffee ecosystem to connect coffee farmers and co-ops; the entrepreneurs who broker, roast, and sell coffee; and coffee consumers. U3 Coffee uniquely combines content platform U3 Coffee Media, online marketplace U3 Coffee Exchange, and charitable arm U3 Coffee Bank.

U3 Coffee Exchange offers quality, sustainably farmed beans from farms around the globe for online purchase in the US. Consumers can also purchase multiple brands of coffee through subscriptions or one-time purchases, merchandise, and at-home coffee equipment. U3 Coffee Bank was created to give back to the farmers as well as support coffee entrepreneurs.