Sacramento Roastery Insight Coffee Adding Multiple Retail Locations

Facebook photo by Insight Coffee

Sacramento, Calif.’s young Insight Coffee is hoping to build on the success of its flagship roastery by building multiple new retail spaces.

Co-founders Lucky Rodrigues and Chris Ryan recently told the Sacramento Bee that one new coffee bar is scheduled to open in December in the Pavilions Shopping Center on Fair Oaks Blvd., while another will open later at the 16 Powerhouse mixed-use development in Sacramento’s Midtown. The Insight team today opened a mobile cafe, built largely by Rodrigues himself, that will largely stay at the Pavilion site until the brick-and-mortar store opens.

The original Insight roastery and retail bar opened at 1901 8th street two years ago, offering not only a full hot and cold drinks program, but numerous and regular classes for customers interested in source and home brewing. Here Ryan and Rodrigues share the basics of their combined roasting philosophy:

“Light” and “dark” are common terms that tend to oversimplify the roasting process. Light roast refers to the under-roasting of the coffee, which typically produces a product with less body and more acidity.  This generally leads to underdeveloped flavors for the coffee.  Dark roasting is the exact opposite: the coffee is roasted to the point where the roast flavor itself is more prevalent than the individual characteristics of the batch.  A “medium” roast, as the name implies, is somewhere between a light and dark roast.  By avoiding the potential faults of either under- or over-roasting, it attempts to create a smooth mixture of roast flavor coupled with the unique characteristics of the particular seed.  While there is certainly more complexity beyond these three roasting categories, our technique is more “medium” than towards the extreme ends of the roasting spectrum.

Insight’s flagship roastery and coffee bar. Facebook photo by Insight Coffee.