Roasted revolution in Colorado Springs
As the food scene in Colorado Springs grows, so does the need for a better local brew. To fill those orders, new coffee roasters have set-up a friendly home in the shadow of Sun Mountain.
Photos and words By Teryn O’Brien
Not every middle-sized city has a plethora of local coffee shops and roasters springing up like daisies. But Colorado Springs does. With a population of just more than 415,000 and an urban sprawl feel, it’s surprisingly easy to be within a short distance — walking or driving — of a good cup of joe, hand-crafted by locally-employed baristas and brewed from freshly roasted beans.
Roasters are the heartbeat of the local specialty coffee movement. It’s also the first place one starts when unwinding the reasons behind emerging scene in Southern Colorado. It starts with beans and evolves to good business.
The care behind specialty coffee roasting
So what exactly is a roastery compared to, say, just a coffee shop itself?
“Once the coffee is grown and is imported to the States, it’s still unusable. So the core of (a roaster’s) business is to supply other coffee shops,” said Brett Bixler, president of Mission Coffee Roasters, located in northeastern Colorado Springs.
Bixler has been working in the coffee industry since 1991. Founded in 2013, Mission’s café is clean and fresh, with a decidedly working professional vibe, and it provides wholesale coffee to restaurants, coffee houses, churches, and nonprofits.
As he lays out the process, roasters develop relationships with importers and farmers across the world, buy the green coffee beans, roast those beans and sell them.
Toby Anderson, owner of High Rise Coffee Roasters, has an even simpler explanation of a coffee roaster: “Essentially, we purchase beans and roast them,” he laughs. His roastery, whose roots began in 1996 when he owned Wooglin’s Deli and bought his first roaster for the restaurant, is hidden in Old Colorado City within an eclectic, warm-hearted little shop.
Stepping into his roastery is like stepping into the magic of coffee. Light spills in from the garage door in the back, shining down on the bags of fresh green coffee just waiting to get roasted. High Rise doesn’t have a café, just a store where you can purchase 35–40 varieties of coffee that change on a weekly basis.
Anderson tells me a bit about the importance of picking out coffee.
“You gotta start with good coffee, and there’s a lot of bad coffee out there,” he said. Coffee is rated much like wine is on a scale of 1–100.
“I can honestly say for 21 years, I never bought for price. I always bought what was rated the best,” Anderson said.
He walks me through an entire roast from start to finish — as he places the beans in the roaster through the funnel up top, listening for the cracks that will ensure him the beans are roasting correctly, and dumping the steaming beans down into the cooling bin before placing them in white 25-pound buckets for storage. The continuous hum of the roaster is soothing, while the scent of the coffee beans is rich and full.
And the smell is the whole point of specialty coffee, Bixler of Mission informs me, because the aroma actually affects taste much more than taste itself, and each coffee smells differently due to its extremely unique origin in the world.
“The goal is to get the coffee to present itself — everything that it wants to share with you — but not to sand off too much of its characters by over roasting,” Bixler said.
Shannon Anderson — Toby Anderson’s daughter-in-law and in charge of High Rise’s online website — gives me this tip: “When you have whole bean coffee, it’ll keep it’s aroma around for maybe three weeks. If you walk into a grocery store and pick up a bag of coffee, you’ll notice the bag doesn’t expire for six months or a year. That’s really gross.”
So here, then, are parts of the answer to the why behind the specialty coffee buzz: Responsible sourcing, high quality beans, and appropriate roasting methods. People can truly taste the difference.
The vibrant community of coffee culture
Traveling downtown to speak with SwitchBack Coffee Roasters and Loyal Coffee gives me the final answer to the thriving coffee culture in the Springs: The collaborative, inviting community that surrounds the local coffee industry.
“There’s no competitive nature in a negative way,” said SwitchBack’s general manager Michelle Johnson, referring to the different coffee shops around the city. “I think we all compete to spur each other on, but it’s never putting each other down.”
SwitchBack was founded in 2011. Its founders, Kyle Collins and Brandon DelGrosso, first started roasting coffee in a friend’s garage in Old Colorado City.
Levi Schofield, one of SwitchBack’s baristas, gives a tangible example of how coffee shops come together through latte art throwdowns. The fancy designs that baristas create with the milk on top of a drink.
“It takes a lot of time, a lot of dedication to be able to do it,” Schofield said. “And it’s unique across every one of the baristas in town.”
Tyler Hill, one of the six owners of Loyal Coffee and head of marketing and PR, has plenty to add about the coffee community in Colorado Springs.
“The core of who we are is collaboration,” he said, highlighting the formation of Loyal Coffee. The six owners of Loyal Coffee come from different backgrounds working at The Principal’s Office, Colorado Coffee Merchants, Urban Steam, and The Wild Goose — all notable coffee shops in the area.
“One of our sayings — especially in coffee — is: ‘The rising tide raises all the ships,’” Hill explained. “In order to create anything beautiful, there needs to be collaborative work between people. I think Colorado Springs has learned that.”
Loyal is the newest kid on the block, having just opened its doors in the fall of 2016. Their coffee shop is beautifully designed: Spacious, hip, and logistical — all the way from the way the line forms in wintertime to the reasoning behind the seating. But it’s not pretentious. In fact, there’s a tangible humility within the deserved local admiration of their well-crafted café.
Hill describes multiple instances when various coffee shops came together to help Loyal get off the ground. SwitchBack let them use its roaster when Loyal was having issues. Pike Peak Coffeehouse let Hill practice for barista competitions on their special espresso machine. In return, Loyal has made a card called the Disloyalty Card — which encourages customers to go to a variety of local cafés, get the card stamped at each one, and then come back to Loyal for a free cup of coffee when they’re done exploring.
This inward community among baristas and coffee shops reflects what customers find when they enter a shop like SwitchBack’s, as Schofield describes: “The moment you walk in the door, you’re greeted, you feel at home, you feel like you have a place.”
Switchback’s café is certainly a warm atmosphere — from the bright, friendly yellow wall pillow that runs the length of the shop to the numerous green vines hanging from the walls.
Hill reiterates this desire in the way Loyal is operated. “At its core, its DNA, coffee is a very uniting thing,” Hill said. “With that same attention that we take to care about the farmer, we need to care about our guests here. We need to have integrity on both sides of the coin. You’re a human in my café, and I want to treat you like that.”
With that attitude abounding within the cafés here, it’s clear there are big things in store for Colorado Springs and the coffee community.
“There is so much room to grow,” Hill said. “There is so much potential. This community in particular is so invested in Colorado Springs right now, that the sky is really the limit.”
Johnson from SwitchBack — who is only 20, but has already found a career in coffee — “I love being part of a giant community,” she tells me. “I’ve been able to grow as a human, as a coffee professional, and have built relationships that will last me a lifetime.”
