The Tailwind Roasting Collaborative in Chicago is Uplifting Small Businesses

Inside the new Tailwind Roasting Collaborative in Chicago. All images courtesy of Tailwind Roasting Collaborative.

In the notoriously windy city of Chicago, a new coffee roasting incubator business seeks to be the wind beneath the wings of small-scale or startup roasting operations.

Green coffee expert and coffee educator Sarah Cline Parker launched Tailwind Roasting Collaborative in the Goose Island industrial district last month, giving new lift not only to a handful of roasting businesses, but to a 1901 building that once housed the Peck and Hills Furniture Company, the largest furniture distributor in the country 100 years ago.

The 18-month buildout of Tailwind’s 6,500-square-foot co-roastery, cupping lab and storage facility will culminate in a grand opening on Saturday, Feb. 22, with a full schedule of classes, cuppings and a celebratory cocktail hour.

“It’s been a labor of love that’s been ongoing,” Cline Parker recently told Daily Coffee News. “Having a coffee roasting facility on Goose Island is not only incredibly convenient for folks who want to roast, it also just feels correct to be this connected to Chicago’s industrial history.”

Despite the city’s massive size, and its rich industrial and culinary histories, co-roasting spaces have generally been hard to come by.

After moving to Chicago from Colombia — where Cline Parker first got into coffee while simultaneously teaching English in 2016 — she began to develop a co-roasting business concept in 2020, as she was struggling to find reasonably priced local coffee education for herself. “I wanted to learn more and expand professionally, but it was difficult to find that coffee community in Chicago at the time,” Cline Parker said.

Since then, Cline Parker has gained a wealth of experience through positions at coffee trading company Caravela Coffee and now Crop to Cup. She has also worked closely with the founders of the Rising Tide Collaborative in Austin, Texas, sharing a similar ethos, according to Cline Parker, built upon “sharing knowledge, resources and great vibes.”

“There are currently no other dedicated co-roasteries in Chicago,” said Cline Parker, a licensed Q grader and lecturer. “We see ourselves as a kind of coffee incubator designed to help new roasters or cafe owners launch their businesses. It can be so incredibly difficult to enter into the roasting business with equipment and leases and the dreaded Chicago permitting. We are lowering the barriers to entry and allowing future coffee professionals to grow their businesses in a sustainable and economical way.”

Offering membership models as well as toll roasting, the Tailwind Roasting Collaborative boasts four different production roasting machines: a Diedrich CR-25; a Buckeye 25; a Buckeye 3.5 and a Stronghold S7. Experienced Pacific Northwest coffee professional Trevor Jermasek was brought on as Tailwind’s first employee and will lead the roasting programming.

Three separate production lines — including two ActionPac weigh-fill machines and multiple types of bag sealers — allow three different businesses to pack coffees simultaneously, while a Canyon machine is available for industrial grinding. The facility has pallet racking space for up to 100,000 pounds of coffee, plus additional space for storage among Tailwind members.

Overlooking the city of Chicago on the third floor of the industrial building, Tailwind also has access to a ground floor loading dock and two freight elevators.

The Tailwind “lab” includes a Kaffelogic Nano sample roaster and an Arc 800 sample roaster, plus cupping tables and gear to host cuppings for up to 20 people at a time. The facility is also stocked with quality-control equipment such as color meters, and moisture, density and water activity analyzers. An espresso machine is coming soon.

Within these digs, Tailwind plans to regularly host coffee classes, including cupping intros, roasting workshops and green coffee buying lectures.

“Because of my extensive background in green coffee, I offer regular green coffee buying classes and we will assist in cuppings, QC, and sample roasting as requested,” said Cline Parker, who maintains close ties to green coffee companies such as Crop to Cup, La Minita and The Coffee Quest. “[I’m] always happy to assist in navigating the wild world of green coffee sourcing.”

Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter. 

Related Posts