Unpacking Coffee with Kandace and Ray: Dapper & Wise

Photo by Needmore Designs.

This week’s Unpacking Coffee heads to the western suburbs of Portland, Oregon, to the city of Hillsboro, the home base of five-year old roasting company Dapper & Wise.

Dapper & Wise grew out of a single Hillsboro coffee shop called Insomnia Coffee, which now has four locations in the greater Portland area. D&W presented not only a smart business opportunity; it also represented a kind of reawakening for the Insomnia crew.

“In a lot of ways we were able to reinvent our passion for coffee,” D&W Owner Evan Aldrete told Kandace and Ray.

Behind the scenes photo at the Dapper & Wise roastery by Needmore Designs/Unpacking Coffee

K-Ray also chatted with Aldrete and D&W Creative Director Graham Doughty about the company’s newly released Biotre bags, plus a special box package for a limited offering from the La Falda farm in Colombia. But mostly, they talked about relationships, and how roasting extends company-wide relationships all the way to the consumer.

“Relationships are not just like, ‘I shook your hand and I bought [your] coffee.'” Aldrete said. “Sometimes you have to say, ‘Man, this was really good last year. What happened this year, and how can we, together, improve on this product?’ Those are things that we didn’t have access to before.”

Without further ado, it’s the final Unpacking of the year:

Unpacking Coffee is a show discovering new coffee roasters one episode at a time led by Kandace and Ray of the Portland-based studio Needmore Designs, which specializes in coffee, wine and lifestyle brands.