Chapter One - intro
Why coffee? I used to ask myself that question frequently. Why coffee? Why any product really? There’s an innate headache with producing a good, perfecting that good, marketing said good, then becoming successful in pushing that good to the marketplace. It hasn’t been an easy task. Especially with the oversaturation of cafes, boutique restaurants that serve specialty coffee, micro-batch roasters, and any other twisted mustache named venue you can find around your local farmers market.
And that’s why Dirty Boots Coffee Roasters was founded. As a gas station coffee connoisseur throughout my construction years, I found there weren’t any all-around good tasting coffees that didn’t come with gimmicky social media posts or priced at $25 for 12 oz (that’s 3/4 lb for the American’s reading this lol). I wanted a coffee that I could buy for an affordable price and drink all day if necessary… I’m in construction after all. We need that 24/7 Java sometimes.
So I started researching how I can get started. The generation we live in is amazing. I found so much information on the internet on how to start a business, how to roast coffee, how to market, how to everything. But that was just the start. I still needed to actually roast coffee. That was the tricky part.
I came across a sample roasting machine called the Ikawa Pro 50. It roasts 50 grams at a time which allows me to taste green beans from different farms with an automated roast profile. This allows me to try different beans using the exact same roast on each bean removing the human error of roasting.
After I purchased the Ikawa, I was off to the races. I bought 1 LB sample bags from beans all over the world. I roasted light, I roasted dark, I sent to friends, I sent to family, and some I threw away (we aren’t going to talk about the initial experiments). All in all, it was a great way for me to get my foot in the door and really try out this roasting thing after work and on the weekends. It took a few beans, but I eventually found the type of bean and region that I preferred so I dove in and purchased my first 100 lbs. of green beans from a region in Guatemala. It was time to get my Boots Dirty.
