The Roasting Process

The Art of Handcrafted coffee - Coffee is more Art than science

Coffee is prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Once ripe, coffee berries are picked, processed, and dried. The seeds are then roasted to varying degrees, depending on the desired flavor.

Bags of green coffee beans arrive on our dock every week and are hand blended and placed into the hopper. From the hopper, the green beans are dropped into the roasting chamber. The beans are then roasted for a period of time ranging from 13 to 16 minutes. At the end of the roasting cycle, the roasted beans are transferred from the roasting chamber into the cooling bin. From there the roasted beans are packaged whole or ground and delivered fresh to our many customers.

Our Roaster manufacturer has a storied past building great coffee roasters and they are well recognized within our industry as the top-of-the-line equipment maker. We travelled across the country to purchase this machine. Once there, we trained for days at their production facility. The training was intense and extensive. Just some of what we studied included recommended roasting techniques, roast profiling, and green coffee cupping. You'd be amazed at how many roasters have no education!

We employ and pass down the skills we acquired out west everyday to small batch roast and package our Lancaster County Coffee Roasters line of coffees. We focus on every batch - eyeing pretty much every bean from green to full roast.

It is also worth noting that often times our coffee is packaged "hot" - almost immediately after roasting.

We roast coffee every business day and sometimes on the weekend. Our inventory is constantly turning over so we don't have our coffees sitting around for months that most coffee roasters and other coffee wholesalers do - this is something we take pride in and you can read from our labels.

What is different about our coffee?

What is different is that we actually roast our own coffee right here in Lancaster! As opposed to many so called "coffee companies" around this area, we roast (in small batches) our coffee from it's green natural state to it's deliciously rich mahogany brown full roast color. Chances are that the coffee you are buying now was not roasted by the company you bought it from! We felt so compelled by this simple fact that we overhauled and retooled our business in order to pursue the goal of roasting the best coffees in this area.