the color coffee roasters story
Originally a home roasting project, Color Coffee Roasters is the culmination of years of obsession, backyard tinkering, and the desire to spread the gospel of delicious coffee. Our mission is simple: deliver a premium coffee experience to our wholesale and retail customers while restoring clarity to coffee. We provide wholesale roasting services to a variety of businesses and organizations including coffee shops, markets, restaurants, hotels, offices, co-work spaces, and more.
With a fanatical attention to quality, state-of-the-art equipment, and innovative techniques, our aim is to make coffee as approachable, accessible, and delicious as possible. Our Flagship Cafe, founded in 2016 in Eagle, Colorado, provides warm, hospitable service, consistently excellent coffee, and a fun, clean, bright, and functional community hub.
Why "Color" coffee?
The name Color Coffee stems from the relationship between the flavors of coffee and the colors associated with these flavors. Great coffee should provide a spectrum of fruity and floral notes that often correlate with the colors of the fruits themselves. For example, a coffee with a "red fruit" flavor may taste like raspberries, cherries, and pomegranates, while a coffee with "purple fruit" notes may evoke black currants, plum, and blueberries. This level of nuance is what really excites us and inspired our name. Drink Color* and experience the vibe we dedicated our lives to.
coffee Sourcing
At Color, we seek out the highest quality green coffee possible. We work with the best importers in the world to acquire fresh and vibrant beans from renowned and sometimes undiscovered coffee-producing regions. Our focus is on coffee sourced from single farms, co-ops, and villages, allowing us to showcase the subtle differences in flavor and cup characteristics of each producer and micro-region. Check out our latest single origin coffees here.
small holder farmers
We prioritize working with smallholder farmers for whom livable prices outside the commodities market are crucial. Whether you're tasting a single producer's lot or that of a community, all of our coffees have passed through rigorous quality control standards and are crafted to fully represent the work of those involved. Preserving the freshness and potential of the raw coffee and getting it to you as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance.
origins in our portfolio
The biggest single factor that makes a coffee great is the work and dedication of farmers and communities. We are grateful to work with some of the finest coffee producers in the world, often well off the beaten path, who need a strong link to the US marketplace.
We focus heavily on relationships where our investment means the most, continuing to develop long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships while bringing on new ones in the same spirit. Our biggest origins are Peru and Mexico, with Ethiopia coming in a close third. Additionally, we have been sourcing coffee from Kenya, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Colombia since our inception, with Colombia growing considerably.
In recent years, we've added Honduras, Brazil, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and El Salvador to our list of origins we're deeply excited about. You might also see coffees from Yemen, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, and Burundi on our menu from time to time.
color's Roasting style
Our roasting style is intended to highlight the terroir, or origin characteristics, of each coffee we source. Terroir, pronounced like "reservoir," is a French term used to describe the attributes unique to the microclimate, soil, and microbiology of the place where a product was produced. This means that the same coffee plant variety will taste different when grown on farms in different regions. It's easy to hide these unique qualities by roasting too dark or too light. Our approach to roasting is based on a quest to find the sweet spot that allows the coffee's inherent flavors to shine. Through our experience, innovative roasting techniques, and best-in-class equipment, we consistently uncover the terroir flavors we're after: colorful ripe fruit, caramel, candy, chocolate, and a variety of sugars.
Charlie Gundlach
OUR Founder
Charlie Gundlach started roasting partly out of curiosity but mostly out of passion for vibrant, complex, and fresh coffee. His home roasting experience led him to a job as a barista at Portola Coffee Lab in 2013. During his time at Portola, which would go on to win Roast Magazine's 2015 Roaster of the Year award, Charlie learned the intricacies of espresso preparation and single-cup coffee extraction and completed a roasting apprenticeship.
After a return to Colorado and a brief stint mastering the art of hospitality at Boxcar Coffee Roasters in Boulder, Charlie knew it was time to launch Color Coffee Roasters.
Let us send you some of our carefully curated and roasted coffees. If you're interested, please get in touch on our wholesale page or sign up for a color subscription to experience our full spectrum.
Color Coffee, Restoring Clarity to Coffee
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