The toasty smell of roasting coffee wafts out as Tanya Rao leans over a spiraling pool of ever-darkening beans. Around her, other roasters hunch over their own whirring machines, surrounded by bags of finished product.
Rao has been working out of CoRo, a coffee collaborative in southwest Berkeley, since 2019, when she launched Kaveri Coffee Works, one of dozens of roasting businesses that call the enormous space home.
The Bay Area has a long history of pioneering coffee businesses: Legendary roasters Sightglass, Four Barrel, and Ritual all started here in the early aughts. But in the last five or so years, roasting co-ops — among them, CoRo, Oakland’s 444 and Pulley Collective, and San Francisco’s The Archery — have fostered a class of up-and-comers, offering affordability through shared resources.
These spaces are not co-ops in the literal sense of being member-owned businesses. But they have the same kumbaya vibe: inclusive and communal, with an accessible point of entry. In this specialty world of earnest microroasters, ethical sourcing is often a priority, keeping costs low is paramount, and community is everything.
444 in Oakland, for example, is the roasting home for a dozen specialty operations at various stages of growth. There’s Signal, which has four brick-and-mortar cafes in Berkeley and Alameda; the trans- and Indigenous-run Queer Wave Coffee; Haight Street’s Coffee Out There; and cult-favorite Hydrangea Coffee Roasters, which sells a half pound of Colombian Gesha for an eyebrow-raising $44.
With access to communal space and equipment, plus a cohort of other small-business owners to lean on, the facilities make starting or growing a coffee company relatively easy. Combine that with low- and no-cost online marketing tools and a bevy of educational opportunities — everything from podcasts to digital workbooks to in-person classes with coffee pro Trish Rothgeb — and the facilities make starting a roasting business cheaper than ever before. The result? A new class of scrappy companies, making some of the most exciting coffees in the Bay.
At CoRo, members have access to an array of roasting and processing equipment, available to rent on a sliding price scale based on the type of gear and how long it’s needed. Kaveri coffees, for instance, are roasted on one of the 15kg Loring machines. Rao uses one to produce about 150 pounds of Indian coffee every two weeks. Like many of the businesses operating out of these co-ops, Kaveri is a deeply personal project — with a mission that goes beyond brewing a great cup. Rao grew up in Karnataka, one of southwestern India’s most important coffee regions; for her, Kaveri is a way to shine a light on the quality of her home country’s beans.
Bill Li, meanwhile, credits online tools and classes — specifically, an intro to roasting class with Willem Boot — with catapulting him from would-be roaster to specialty-coffee wunderkind. During the pandemic, rather than baking sourdough, he became fascinated with roasting; in 2020, he bought a 10-pound box of green coffee beans and started practicing in the kitchen on a tiny, affordable IKAWA machine.
His business, Hydrangea Coffee Roasters, wouldn’t exist without CoRo, where he works just one day a week on a 5kg Probat roaster, producing about six pounds of coffee ready to sell. He’s somewhat of a niche producer, focusing on light roasts. But fans cross bridges for Hyrangea’s extremely rare co-fermented beans that burst with the flavor of Jolly Ranchers and papaya. Li isn’t the only Bay Area roaster working with co-ferments, but he’s one of the most notable.
Sunset Roasters, run by husband-and-wife duo Phillip and Sara Roliz, has roasted at both CoRo and Archery. Like many of the businesses that work out of these shared roasting spaces, it’s deeply personal to the owners. Sunset, which sells drinks out of a truck at farmers markets, is known for options including pinolillo con café and an horchata latte with a cinnamon marshmallow, nods to the owners’ backgrounds: Sara is Mexican American, with roots in the Los Angeles area, and Phillip is Chinese, Portuguese, Nicaraguan, and Brazilian.
Phillip estimates that the cost of starting and maintaining a coffee business — build-outs and roasting equipment and beans — is 30% higher in San Francisco than in other cities. “There’s times I look at my wife, and I say, ‘I think we’re doing the hardest two things you can do in San Francisco: raising kids and running a small business,’” he says.
But the camaraderie of the shared roasting spaces, where the couple produce bags of natural-processed Ethiopia Adinew, helps keep him going. “It’s such a tight-knit community,” Phillip says. “In a world where real estate is so expensive, where labor is so expensive, we eat the cost together.”