Stumptown Coffee Roasters

Coffee is about pleasure.

It’s that moment when your hand is warmed by the mug, you raise it to your nose, inhale deeply, and then take a sip. That sip is the culmination of years of work, three-thousand-mile journeys, and passion. These are the steps we take to ensure that each sip is perfect.

Roasting

We believe that the roasting process should be transparent and that it’s our responsibility to honor the hard work already invested in the coffee by roasting it to showcase its distinctive qualities. Every roast cycle is like the arc of development in the belly of the roaster—each minute or experience is inextricably tied to the minute or experience before and after it. Our roasting team brings 121 collective years of roasting experience to work with them each day. It’s that depth of knowledge that allows them to welcome our longtime offerings back to the menu like greeting an old friend—warmly, with familiarity and a practiced eye for the nuanced ways the coffee may have changed from its last visit. Roasting is one of the most delicate and critical parts of the chain of events leading to a good cup of coffee. We attempt to highlight what makes that particular variety or farm exciting, rather than imparting our own fingerprint. We're here to bring out the best in the coffee, and if we do our job correctly, no one should even be thinking about the roast when they drink it.

Sourcing

"Traveling the world to visit producers reminds us of the differences in every region, every farm, and our approach to sourcing and roasting aims to highlight and honor these distinctions. It’s humbling to be welcomed by producers with generosity and hospitality; this is also something we try to honor and reflect, in turn, to our customers."

—Shauna Alexander,
Vice President of Coffee and Sustainability

Since our beginnings, Stumptown has searched the world for the best coffee out there. That coffee grows in mountainous regions of the tropics—farms perched at high elevations with warm days, cool nights, and distinct rainy and dry seasons. Microclimates, soil composition, coffee cultivars, and post-harvest processing methods can each contribute distinct dimensions to the cup.

Our coffee team spends about half the year in producing countries, meeting directly with our producer partners on their farms, at their mills, and in their cupping labs.

The effort is worth it. We’re not doing it the easy way by buying bulk, mid-quality beans anonymously from a trading house. Instead, we go right to the source of the best coffee—that farm atop a hill in Ethiopia, for example. We hike through fields, stand among coffee drying decks, and sit down to share a meal and talk about the crop with producers we’ve met many times.

We routinely pay producers well in excess of what they could receive on the commodity market, but we understand that our coffee demands more work—hand-picking each cherry at ideal ripeness and processing it with great attention to detail.