Inside the Red Bird Roasting cafe in Kelowna, B.C. All images courtesy of Red Bird Roasting.
Specialty coffee and craft beer, two beverage birds of a feather, are flocking together in Kelowna, British Columbia, with Red Bird Roasting opening inside the Vice and Virtue Brewing building.
The new roastery cafe is just down the block from Red Bird Brewing, which acquired Vice and Virtue earlier this year and hatched the coffee plans in an unused portion of the V&V brewery.
Occupying approximately 1,000 square feet, the coffee shop and roastery opened last month.
Jute coffee sacks adorn the upper portion of the tall walls, while Edison bulbs dangling from hefty wooden rafters help divide the height of the space and illuminate a bright red floor-level mural depicting coffee’s seed-to-cup journey.
The colors, materials, lighting and artwork align with the design of the Red Bird brewery down the block, where a mural from the same artists exists.
“We’re trying to evoke a similar feeling to the brewery tap room with natural wood and black accents,” Red Bird Roasting Co-Owner Peter Glockner told Daily Coffee News. “The main table also features a living Coffea Arabica plant that we named Joelle, compliments of our neighborhood plant guru, Matt, from Plant Gather two blocks away.”
Longstanding members of Kelowna’s business and craft beverage communities, Glockner and co-owner Perry Maxfield also own Cellar-Tek, a supplier of commercial equipment for wine, brewery, distillery and coffee roasting operations across Canada and North America. A Cellar-Tek showroom and headquarters is located next door to the roastery.
Roasting equipment sold by Cellar-Tek falls under its Coffee-Tek division, which sells the full line of commercial roasters and other equipment made by Israeli manufacturer Coffee-Tech Engineering.
A Coffee-Tech FZ94 Evo 2.4-kilogram-capacity electric shop roaster stands in one corner of the new cafe. Across the room, Red Bird baristas work a 2-group Nuova Simonelli Appia II espresso machine paired with a Victoria Arduino Mythos MyOne grinder perched atop a PuqPress M6 auto tamper.
A Nuova Simonelli MDX-S grinder is used for decaf and rotating single-origin espressos, and a variable-speed single-dose Turin DF83V grinder preps beans for manual pourovers.
Glockner said the company is likely to start tinkering with cold brew in the spring, while also experimenting more with coffee beers at the brewery.
“Red Bird Brewing currently has an imperial coffee stout aging in a cask, and we’ll definitely be looking to add some coffee beers to the line-up once all the core beers are fully dialed in at V&V,” Glockner said.
Red Bird Head Roaster James Balfour will soon fire up a Coffee-Tech Engineering Silon ZR7 7-kilo gas roaster, pending installation and certification. Sales of home brewing equipment are also soon to come, as are public tours of the roastery, tastings and other educational programming.
“Once the new roaster is up and running, plans are to start branching out into a wholesale business with local grocery stores, fruit markets, etc.,” said Glockner. “We’ll add espresso and pourover flight tastings in the roastery, similar to a wine tasting experience that you can find all over the Okanagan Valley.”
Red Bird Roasting Lab is located at 1037 Richter Street in Kelowna.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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