From 6,237 Feet

Grown High, Roasted just as high

Why every bean we roast finishes at the height it grew at

The Roastery · Est. 2007 · Jackson Hole

The Grand Teton wrapped in cloud
The Grand · In Motion

The Numbers up here

6,237 ft
At the roastery doorMeasured by USGS on South Park Drive, and we did not round up.
4,000–7,000 ft
Where specialty coffee growsOur roastery door sits inside the same band.
201°F
Where water boils up hereEleven degrees shy of a sea level boil, and the roast slows to match.
¼
Of the flame’s punch, goneGas burners lose about 4 percent of their output per 1,000 feet.
22 lb
One batch, start to finishSmall enough that the crew tastes every single one.
Burlap sacks of green coffee stacked in the roastery

The Long Way back up

Coffee is a mountain crop. Only the top few percent of everything grown anywhere earns the specialty grade, and that harvest comes off slopes between 4,000 and 7,000 feet. It is all we buy. From there nearly every bean on earth rides downhill to a port and roasts at sea level, a long way from the air it grew in.

Ours takes the long way back. Green coffee climbs to Jackson Hole and meets the drum at 6,237 feet, inside the same band of elevation where it spent its growing life. Nobody engineered that symmetry. The valley set our door at the right height, and once we saw what that meant we stopped treating altitude as a problem to solve.

Nearly all coffee descends to sea level to be roasted. Ours climbs back up to finish where it began.

What Thin Air Does to a flame

At 6,237 feet the air carries about 80 percent of the pressure it holds at sea level, and water boils at 201 degrees no matter how hard you push it. The flame notices too. A gas burner gives up roughly 4 percent of its output for every 1,000 feet it climbs, which strips about a quarter of the punch from ours before we strike a match.

Down low that would count as a handicap. Up here it is the method. Heat this gentle cannot scorch a bean, so the sugars that make a cup sweet ride through the drum intact, and the roast curve stretches out, slower and steadier, handing every batch extra time to develop. What a hotter fire would burn, ours has time to build.

Altitude Alone Never roasted a bean

Thin air is a head start, not a shortcut, and we have never treated it as one. Since 2007 our roasters have learned this elevation the slow way, batch by batch on 22 pound machines, small enough that nothing hides. The crew holds SCA certifications and every batch gets cupped before it goes anywhere, because a spec sheet has never once tasted coffee.

These are the same people you pass in the tram line at dawn and wave to on the river in July, and the attention they give a powder day is the attention they give a roast log. Your order is roasted after you place it and shipped the next business day, so what finished its journey in thin air shows up at your door days from the drum, not months.