Four Barrel Coffee

If we can help a 900-person co-op in Ethiopia build a schoolhouse, of course we'll do it. If one of our coworkers needs some time off to care for a sick parent, of course we'll cover his or her shifts. If we need to take a red-eye coach flight to Frankfurt to score the perfect 1957 roasting equipment, of course we'll do it.

We're an independent, locally owned coffee roastery. We operate a pair of cafes, and we're partners in The Mill. We directly source almost all of the coffee that we roast for ourselves and our wholesale partners. And we take care of each other.

Where does great coffee come from? It comes from third-generation farmers and mill-workers in Latin America, Indonesia, and East Africa. And that's where we go to find it, forging relationships that ensure quality of life for our producers, and high-quality coffee for our roastery in San Francisco.

We want to improve the lives of people all up and down the coffee chain. That's why we spend months of every year on the road, visiting and cooperating with the folks who make it all happen, at the source.

We're old-fashioned... about roasting. We rely on highly trained people, not computers, to see through the intention of our roasting style. Our style highlights the intrinsic qualities of a coffee that drove us to buy it in the first place: cleanness, sweetness, acidity, complexity.

We roast on a hulking beast of a vintage German roaster—one that was made to hold consistent heat and let air flow through in simple ways controlled by a human being...just like you.