Angeles Crest Coffee Roasters is a family-owned micro-roasting company created out of
our passion for truly fine coffees. We think everyone should
be able to experience the fantastic variety of sweet fruity
aromas and rich buttery tastes available in some of the
world's best specialty-grade coffee.
Dave Hale, roastmaster and founder of our company, was
born and raised in Seattle, formally trained as an astrophysicist and held an academic
research position at the University of California at Berkeley.
Coffee roasting began for Dave & his wife Amy (a NASA/JPL
scientist) in physics graduate school, as a way to save money
on this ever-important staple. At that time, there was
no Starbucks in town (hard to imagine now!), but there was a small roaster-retail store which
didn't at first know what to do with our request for green coffee. Armed with a 10 penny nail and an aluminum
foil baking pan, Dave & Amy used their oven to transform those green coffee
seeds into something enjoyable.
That aluminum foil pan has long since been lost,
replaced with a half-ton, cast-iron Probat L5 shop roaster,
but what hasn't changed is Dave & Amy's passion for truly fine
specialty-grade coffees.
Angeles Crest Coffee Roasters does not mass-produce commercial
coffee. Instead, each batch of our coffee is
artisan-crafted, and hand roasted by a skilled individual.
Roasting exceptional coffee requires special attention to
detail and we work hard and take pride in what we do. We
select only the finest green coffee so that you get the finest possible cup.
We roast our coffees for the bean, which means that
each type of coffee has a particular roast profile which we
personally develop in order to bring out the best possible
taste. Many roasters have one or two roasts for every coffee
they produce which can make all coffees taste
alike; but we know that each coffee needs its own special
treatment and that our customers want to taste the coffee, not
the roast.
We personally select the raw beans we roast for their cup
quality. That means that we work closely with coffee
importers, farms and cooperatives from all around the world
and we sample current-crop offerings much like a wine taster.
We then purchase only exceptional tasting beans. It is labor
intensive and it can mean that we might chose to not offer
particular origins if their current crop didn’t cup well, but
you will always have the highest quality coffee available.
Taste is the primary goal but en route to that goal we
seek out coffee which is produced responsibly and in a
sustainable fashion. To that end we offer a variety of
responsible coffees including Fair Trade™, Rainforest
Alliance, Utz Kapeh, shade-grown and
organic coffees.
