Chuck Patton at the helm of a Giesen WS1 inside a shared space at the Coffee Cycle roastery in San Diego. Courtesy photo.
A pioneering figure in the San Diego coffee scene in the early 2000s and 2010s recently re-emerged with a new roasting business and a dual focus on small-batch, high-quality coffees and seed-to-cup education and consulting.
Chuck Patton, who founded San Diego’s Bird Rock Coffee Roasters in 2002 and grew it into an award-winning roastery and small cafe chain, last month launched a boutique roasting brand called Chuck’s Roast. The sibling business is Patton Coffee Consulting, through which Patton will offer cuppings, coffee evaluations, roasting classes and other services.
Both businesses reflect Patton’s reignited passion for coffee following a brief hiatus from the industry. Patton sold Bird Rock to fellow coffee entrepreneur Jeff Taylor of PT’s Roasting in 2017, and soon after left the coffee business.
“I certainly needed a break from coffee so after the sale I went back to teaching English composition at USD,” Patton said. “After about a year, the thought of dipping back into the coffee business started to take hold. A lot of ‘what-ifs’ started to form: What if I could do it on an ultra-small scale? What if I could only roast coffees I really like? What if I made coffee education paramount?”
With online sales, Chuck’s Roast is focused on small batches of single-origin coffees. The company is debuting with a single roasted coffee from Yemen sourced through Cafe Imports.
“With this brand, I am getting back to what got me excited about coffee in the first place: finding that amazing coffee, working to develop a proper roast profile for it and then turning people on to it,” Patton recently told DCN. “I am not going to worry about finding a coffee that everyone will like. Based on the size of this operation, I will not be doing blends, decaf, or dark roasts, nor will I be worried about buying a coffee that is ‘too expensive.’ If I don’t really love the coffee, it won’t be sold via Chuck’s Roast.”
The new home of Chuck’s roast is actually inside the new Ocean Beach cafe and roastery of San Diego-born Coffee Cycle Roasting (DCN hopes to have more on this soon). Coffee Cycle founder Chris O’Brien was a Bird Rock employee of seven years before striking out on his own in Pacific Beach.
Inside, Patton is roasting on a dedicated Giesen W1S machine that he bought and imported during the COVID-19 pandemic and had since been sitting crated in his garage.
“[Chris] has done an amazing job growing his brand over the last few years and has developed an incredible following,” Patton said. “When he started to build out his new roastery/cafe in Ocean Beach several months ago, he reached out to me to see if I wanted to install the Giesen there, and I am glad he did.”
While much of the early success at Bird Rock might be attributed to Patton’s own passion for green coffee sourcing and direct trading activities, Patton said he plans to chill out a bit more on the sourcing front.
“I will be relying on some of the better coffee importers who I have worked with in the past, and I am looking forward to working with some of the newer green coffee companies out there as well who didn’t exist when we sold,” Patton said. “I will do at least one or two origin trips per year, mostly likely to Guatemala and Panama and possibly Colombia once my volume justifies it.”
On the education/consulting side, Patton said he also plans to break somewhat from the industry norms.
“The coffee roasting classes will differ a bit from what others are offering currently and will be more affordably priced,” he said. “I am also offering marketing consultation to coffee farms at origin.”
Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here.
Related Posts
Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
Comment