The Best Indie Coffee Roasters For Your At-Home Brews

For all those other times, we need stimulating beverages (and a lot of them).

Let’s not deny it. Coffee helps us Get Stuff Done while remaining pretty blissed out (even on Mondays).

While we will drink any coffee variety, especially if it’s free, we do have some favorite local and small-batch coffee roasters. And since we’ve all been working from home, we have had plenty of time to test out all the beans. Our favorites are listed below, voted on by the coffee enthusiasts of Devetry.

Best Colorado Roasters

Here are some of the best roasters we’ve found on the front range and beyond.

Pangea: Located in Golden, Colorado, Pangea hand roasts their coffee beans and they are delightful. They’ve got all the standard beans plus Burundi, Sumatra, and Sulawesi beans in one and five-pounders. If you prefer to eat your coffee, they also have chocolate-covered espresso beans.

What’s cool about them: Their dinosaur-themed apparel and coffee coconut chaos beer.

Harbinger: Harbinger Coffee frequently brings in new, single-origin beans that are different and delishhh. Beans include Colombian, espresso, Ethiopian, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Rwandan, and Sulawesi beans, but we have an inside source that claims their Ethiopian beans are the best. Available for one-timers or subscription enthusiasts.

What’s cool about them: Every Saturday at their shops, they do a free cupping event, which if you don’t know, is tasting different coffees by sniffing and slurping.

Bindle: Bindle Coffe is another Ft. Collins roaster (in a reclaimed farmhouse to boot) that we love! They have a bunch of blends, but we want to feature their new-to-2020 Storehouse Blend. It’s a “50/50 blend of two Rwandan coffees; our Natural Rwanda Bukure and a fully washed Rwanda lot from the Kinini Village.” Apparently there are notes of “orange creamsicle” so we’re in. With every purchase, they donate a bag of coffee to a local health care professional.

What’s cool about them: Bindle’s coffee is purchased through direct trade which is a fancy way of saying that money goes to growers, not corporate overlords.

Sweetbloom: You might recognize Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters ultra-hip branding, but their coffee is legit too. You can order individual bags or sign up for a subscription. If you’re not sure what to get, analyze the aromatics, acidity, and sweetness notes they provide for each bag. PS they also have donuts on Saturdays. Um, yum.

What’s cool about them: They offer home brewing and espresso classes, plus others for semi-professionals.

Some Non-Colorado Roasters That We Like

We also employ some transplants, and they swear by these roasters.

Alpha Coffee: Alpha Coffee is a veteran-owned coffee roaster in not-too-distant Utah. They have a massive variety of light, medium, and dark roasts (and some in-betweens). The Dawn Patrol blend is our absolute favorite. It’s ideal for weekends when you’ve got a long drive into the mountains. By the time you’re at the trailhead, you’ll be itching to move.

What’s cool about them: Because Alpha is veteran-owned, they have a Coffee for Troops program which sends their best beans overseas for free.

Verve Coffee: If you’re a Californian, you might have heard of Verve. They’re located in Santa Cruz and offer single-origin, blends, instant coffee, cold brew in a can, dripkits, and something called “cascara” which (we just learned) is a coffee cherry tea from Costa Rica. Sounds incredible.

What’s cool about them: They use coffee roasting software to ensure each of their batches are perfectly consistent with one another. Mind-blown.

Small Planes: We’ve got a few East Coast transplants and they all vouch for Small Planes who roasts beans in Washington DC. They introduce new blends and single-origins each year and offer subscriptions to anywhere in the United States.

What’s cool about them: Nothing, in particular, they just have good coffee.

Counter Culture Coffee: Counter Culture is located in Durham, North Carolina, and to quote one of our developers, “they are the best!” They do limited release coffees, year-round beans, single origins, and organic coffee. All in all, they have about 30 varieties to choose from, plus a subscription option. They also have a ton of resources, so if you’re new to coffee, you can learn about the types of beans and roasting processes.

What’s cool about them: They have these neat rainbow spoons, which we really want.

Those are our top coffee roasters, each of which has been consumed by our team in massive quantities over the past few months.

So browse these websites, order your beans, drink up, and thank us later.