02 — Story
One drum, six farms, and a lot of Tuesdays.
Norra Roast started in the winter of 2019 in a former foundry in Lincoln Park, with a second-hand 12-kilo drum roaster and one café willing to take a chance on us. We still roast on that drum. It is slower than a new machine and we like it that way: small batches mean every roast gets watched, smelled and tasted before it goes anywhere near a bag.
We buy six coffees at a time, never more. That is the number we can know properly: the farm or washing station, the year’s harvest, and what the producer was paid. We work with two importers who publish those prices, and we print the farm-gate price on the bag next to the roast date. If a coffee stops being worth its price, we drop it and find another.
We roast light because we want you to taste the place the coffee came from, not the roaster. Everything is roasted on Tuesday, cupped on Wednesday, and shipped or on the shelf by Thursday. Drink it inside six weeks. After that it is still coffee, just less interesting coffee.
- Roaster
- 12 kg drum
- Batches a week
- Fourteen
- Coffees at a time
- Six
- Importers
- Two, prices published