We are closing up shop (mostly)

Thank you immensely for your trust in us as stewards of coffee these past few years. We have treasured the experience of being a small roaster, of bringing out the best in the green beans we have been granted, and in planning, packing and shipping treasures to you. But our journey as a roastery is coming to its conclusion and we’ll be closing our web store down. 

In many measures we consider the Tetrahedron experiment a success. We feel we have a great product, we have connected with an audience of loyal supporters, and we really enjoy what we do. We also learned to roast, taste, package and operate a small specialty coffee enterprise as a team. But when it came time to decide whether to scale up—and we almost immediately needed to scale up, because we could never quite keep up with demand—we found the burdens to be too risky for where we are in each of our lives right now, both financially and familially (that’s not really a word but you know what we mean).

In the course of this adventure we’ve learned a lot about roasting, and how to highlight many of the flavors from the green beans that come from their origin to our door. Our tasting palettes are forever changed from the process of sharing tasting notes with each other to settle on what best would please our customers (you!) and what tasting notes would look appealing (and be accurate) on our bags. Among our funniest tasting notes there’s, “9 volt battery” and “Underripe watermelon (not a bad thing) with beef gravy running through the middle.” Rohan would often compare coffee to Fru-Chocs, an Australian candy of dried apricots bathed in milk chocolate that he eventually had sent to us for comparison (they were in fact, really good).  

We have loved shipping coffee to you who are further afield, and also we most felt that we were fulfilling our raison d’etre when we were serving coffee to people in Alameda, which hadn’t really had much of a coffee scene before.