How We Roast — An Evolving Process
By Andrew Coe
Elevator Coffee turns 10 years old in 2026. Looking back, what stands out most is not a single win or milestone, but how much our roasting approach has evolved — slowly, incrementally, and often the hard way.
What we do today is the result of years of iteration, correction, competition, constraint, and cupping. A lot of cupping.
Here’s how that evolution unfolded.
Naive Confidence
Elevator began as a cafe serving other roasters’ coffee. But from the beginning, roasting our own beans was the goal.
I had been a passionate coffee hobbyist and home roaster for years, but I had never worked in modern specialty coffee or trained formally. Despite that, I believed we could build a roasting program that could stand alongside the many talented roasters in Portland.
In 2016, I entered the Cascadia Cup — a local roasting competition hosted across the street at Buckman Coffee Factory — using a small Behmor 1600 home roaster. I entered just hoping not to finish last.
That win launched Elevator’s roasting program. But it also marked the moment I realized how much I didn’t know.
Apprenticeship & Iteration
Winning a competition on a 1 lb home machine did not prepare me for production roasting.
I began roasting across the street at Buckman on a 1.5kg Proaster. I would work a shift at the cafe, then run over and roast small batch after small batch. It was inefficient and exhausting — but it was the best education I could have asked for.
For five months, we micro-batched constantly. We adjusted variables, cupped relentlessly, and compared our work to the seasoned roasters around us — Coava, Heart, Roseline, Upper Left. We attended cuppings whenever we could step away from the cafe.
With repetition in the roaster, we also developed our palates at the cupping table. Becoming a great roaster means not just being able to operate a roasting machine with great skill, the physical act of roasting is only one part of the equation, the other part is learning to identify and name what you are tasting on the table. We tasted every coffee we could get our hands on, and just as importantly, sought feedback from seasoned cuppers that could help us refine our tastes, and, importantly, show us where our mistakes were apparent.
Our style morphed frequently. We chased acidity, then sweetness, then balance. We learned how small changes to the roast changed outcomes. This included heat adjustments and airflow adjustments. We learned how each adjustment was not just an isolated change, but had compounding effects for everything that came after it.
Eventually we moved to a 10kg Proaster, but the mindset stayed the same: cup, adjust, cup, evaluate, repeat.
Pressure & Validation
In 2020, I qualified for the US Roasting Championships. The finals were delayed due to the pandemic, but the preparation process changed how I thought about roasting.
Competition forces you to rethink every assumption and decision. It forces clarity. Beyond that, it puts you in proximity with many other skilled roasters who are all doing the same. The conversations before, during and after competitions have shaped my thinking profoundly.
During the pandemic, we made the difficult decision to close the cafe and focus entirely on roasting. It clarified our identity. Roasting wasn’t an add-on anymore — it was the core.
We moved production to a new facility, ROAST, and began working on a fully modernized 1930s 12kg Probat. The machine allowed more precision, more consistency, and greater repeatability. Our results quickly surpassed what we had been doing before.
When the USRC finals were finally held in 2022, I placed 5th.
In 2023, I won the US Roasting Championship. Eight months later, I placed 3rd at the World Coffee Roasting Championships in Taipei — the highest finish ever by a US competitor.
Those moments were validating. But more importantly, they confirmed that our process — iterative, evaluative, methodical — worked.
Expansion of Complexity
Competition success changed our green buying.
Demand for our high-end coffees increased. We began purchasing more microlots. With that came an array of processing methods — natural, anaerobic, honey, experimental lots — each requiring a different roasting approach.
We could no longer rely primarily on washed coffees and familiar patterns. Each coffee demanded its own strategy.
This pushed our buying, roasting, and cupping skills significantly. It forced flexibility. It forced deeper sensory awareness. It forced us to ask not just “Is this good?” but “Does this fit in our lineup?”
Our style evolved again — still light, but more precise. Still focused, but in more directions.
Resilience Under Strain
As we were just hitting our stride with a larger, more refined menu, 2025 arrived with a new set of challenges. Supply tightened due to bad weather in Brazil, which produces over 30% of the global coffee supply. Simultaneously, there was significant flooding in Vietnam, the second largest producing country. And then tariffs increased costs even more. Uncertainty shaped the market, and we even saw speculative traders driving the market to record highs. We faced these challenges in the same way we have handled past trials. We worked diligently to find high value coffees and then bought what we could find — often in larger volumes — and managed inventory months in advance so we could sustain reasonable pricing and not have to buy in an emergency.
This year sharpened a different set of muscles: Evaluating value more critically, managing shipping timelines with higher scrutiny, understanding how green coffee ages, roasting intentionally across wider lot variability.
Constraint forced discipline. We simply had to do more with less. And it reinforced something important: great roasting isn’t just about ideal coffees in ideal conditions. It’s about adapting while maintaining standards.
Refined Identity
It’s a challenge to describe roast levels. Roasting is such a complex process, there simply isn’t a way to accurately characterize what we are doing with just one word. Today, I describe our style as “PDX”. I eschew general or historical roast level terminology on purpose, partly because I’ve had many people tell me they “don’t like light roast” but then enjoy the coffee we serve them.
But the fact is, our roasting approach is quite light. At the same time, it is developed enough to extract easily. That balance is intentional. We want clarity without underdevelopment, brightness without harshness, sweetness without heaviness.
But roast level alone doesn’t define flavor. Every decision — charge temperature, airflow, rate of rise, development time — shapes the final cup.
Every coffee receives its own unique recipe based on origin, variety, elevation, and processing method. Our starting point for every new coffee is our database of years of roasting experience, and then refining from there. We’ve increased our analysis tools, and even before roasting we are measuring the physical characteristics of the green coffee now including: moisture content, water activity, and density. These inform our recipe creation and increase our roasting precision even further.
Every roasted batch has always been evaluated through cupping. In addition, we analyze time, temperature, interior and exterior roast color, and weight loss. We taste for texture, sweetness, structure, and finish. We look for clarity and ease of extraction.
Jarrod’s roasting has elevated our consistency significantly. That consistency allows us to fine-tune rather than troubleshoot. It raises the ceiling of what we can achieve.
In 2026, Jarrod became a partner. We recently received the highest-scoring lot in the February PNW edition of Coffee Review. We are roasting better than ever — not because we have arrived, but because we understand the process more deeply than we once did.
And still, there is more to learn.
We are still students of the roast. Still adjusting. Still cupping every batch. Still chasing incremental improvement.
Because what defines our roasting approach isn’t a single win or style — it’s the belief that great coffee is built slowly, through attention, humility, and thousands of small decisions made carefully over time.
Thank you for being part of that journey.