About Us

Our Story

Like many (most?) longtime residents of the Pacific Northwest, David worked a stint as a barista and has been in love with great coffee ever since. At the start of pandemic, David took up roasting coffee in small batches at home.

MaryBeth brings an amazing palate alongside her love of baking from scratch and good food in general. During the summer months, she forages fruits and berries and then turns her hauls into jams and baked goods at home.

More recently, David and MaryBeth have both been roasting at Buckman Coffee Factory in Portland, a co-roasting facility that supports multiple local coffee roasters.

Our Devotion to Great Coffee

At a high level, roasting coffee is a simple craft that has been around for centuries. Take some green coffee, apply heat, and done. In practice, all kinds of variables come into play. Terroir, where the coffee is grown, has a huge impact on flavor. Control of the overall roast process is crucial as well. There is a balancing act between the flavors in the coffee from light roasts that emphasize the bean to darker roasts that bring more chocolate notes. And many other variables to work with.

There are structural reasons why the current trend in specialty coffee is lightly roasted with an emphasis on the bean itself, rather than the chocolatey or bitter notes that can come from the roast. Our darker roasts fill this void within the specialty coffee market. In fact, David took up home roasting coffee because he loves those darker roasts that have been missing in specialty coffee. While we do not roast as dark as a French roast, and we make some excellent lighter roasts, we appreciate the dark chocolate and slight bitter flavors that come from darker roasts. That said, MaryBeth enjoys lighter roasts, and we certainly have great lighter roasts on offer because of her roasting talents.

Our Values

We founded Fir Beans Coffee on two principles:

1. We love great coffee
2. We're tired of the financial enshittification of everything

We started roasting coffee because coffees we once loved stopped being good or disappeared entirely. How often do you see your favorite brand being bought up and within a year the product you loved became awful? It's tiresome. So, at least for the coffee we drink, we took matters into our own hands.

Those two principles guide how we approach coffee. While most coffee is treated as a commodity, we want something better, and we act to source better. We are still too small to work directly with the growers, so we work with a few importers that have cultivated direct relationships with coffee farms and mills of quality to source what we roast to make the best coffee we can. We favor coffee importers willing to pay more to the growers to encourage better practice throughout the supply chain from seed to cup.

We take the environmental impact of our business seriously, something that many small roasters do not prioritize. Our major impacts are the roasting process itself and our consumer packaging.

• First, we roast our coffee with a Loring roaster that has been designed to use much less natural gas as compared to regular drum roasters. Coffee requires high heat during roasting at extended temperatures that can't be achieved with electrical heat at volume. Unfortunately, natural gas is a necessary input. We purposefully roast with a Loring to minimize our overall impact of roasting coffee.
• Second, we make use of consumer packaging with an eye on sustainability. In general, good consumer packaging that protects its contents and maintains their freshness is a multilayer material which, because it is multilayer, cannot be recycled. Much of the packaging we see in grocery stores is plastic with a metal layer. The only option for disposal is to put it in a landfill after use. The plastic in this type of packaging is usually not designed to decompose. It breaks down into permanent microplastics, creating long-term plastic pollution problems. In comparison, our current packaging is made from recycled kraft paper lined with a polylactic acid (PLA) plastic film. Once the tin tie is removed, our packaging can be composted in industrial compost facilities and, failing that, is biodegradable. With our packaging there will never be a lingering microplastic pollution problem. It is not a perfect solution, but it is far better than most consumer packaging in use these days. Finding better, compostable packaging is one of our long terms goals as a business to reduce our environmental impact and our consumers' impact.