About Us

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. For example, we work with a few importers that cultivate direct relationships with coffee farms and mills of quality to get to a cup that will make our days better. 

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.