A one-drum shop that grew into a warehouse — the long version
Roast & Rise started in 2014 in a garage on SE Hawthorne with a 1-kilogram San Franciscan sample roaster and about $4,000 in savings. The founders, Mara Halstead and Jonas Weir, met on a Q Grader course in Guatemala the year before and spent the six months after it drinking a lot of bad coffee and arguing about how to do it better.
The first wholesale account was a bakery two blocks away that agreed to try five pounds a week. The second was a bike shop with a two-group Marzocco no one had ever cleaned. By the end of 2015 the garage smelled permanently of chaff and Mara's landlord had politely asked them to leave.
We moved to the current warehouse on SE Salmon Street in 2016, replaced the sample roaster with a 15-kilogram Loring S15 in 2018, and added a second roaster in 2022. As of this year we roast about 42,000 pounds of green coffee annually — enough to keep 63 wholesale accounts and roughly 1,400 mail-order subscribers in fresh coffee.
Every coffee on our shelf comes from one of three channels: direct relationships we've built ourselves, importers we've vetted over multiple harvests, or the Cup of Excellence auction (rarely, and only for special releases).
We publish the farmgate price we paid for every lot on the bag. This isn't marketing — it's the actual price the producer received, before export, import, roasting, or retail. The industry average for washed Ethiopian coffee in 2025 was roughly $2.10/lb at farmgate. Our average was $3.85. We think it should be higher still, and we're working on it.
Co-founder, Head of Green
Q Grader since 2013. Handles all green buying and producer relationships. Spends about ten weeks a year at origin.
Co-founder, Head Roaster
Roasts about 60% of production himself. Wrote the roast profiles for every coffee we've ever released.
QC & Education Lead
Q Grader, SCA-certified trainer. Runs weekly calibrations and all public cuppings and brew classes.