YEG Coffee Story Part Three: The Roasters

by Mary Bailey and Curtis Comeau Photography

Part Two: The OG | Part One: The Independents

What have we discovered as we delve deeper into YEG coffee? Every coffee professional we talked to had their own story, and things often turned out much differently than expected.

Former city planner Peter West discovered that coffee shops were an ideal way to practise urbanism. Joe Parrottino’s pursuit of the best coffee blend led to Ace Coffee. Nuestra’s Nichola Hildebrand found coffee was the best way to revive a cool building and create community, even though she doesn’t actually drink coffee. Liberta’s Seung Paik and Sue Park, who also wanted to create community all over the world.

Aspen Coffee’s Alison Sails and Gordon Taylor enjoy a cuppa

aspen coffee
For Alison Sails and Gordon Taylor of Aspen Coffee Roasters? Coffee found them, in a bar in Maui.

They started chatting with an Australian couple (Craig Muzeroll and Veronica Rhodes) from Perth during the happy hour at Tommy Bahamas. “They had a coffee company called Antz Inya Pantz,” said Gordon. “What intrigued me was that they served 700 cups of coffee between 5am and noon.”

Australia has a thriving independent coffee culture and they hadn’t seen that in Edmonton. Still, they were curious. Their journey led them to Diedrich Roasters in Idaho.

At first it was a fun project, roasting coffee for themselves and friends. They were already busy—Gordon has an oil distribution business and Alison is a family doctor in Beaumont. But that conversation in a bar led to a family business with a roastery and two cafés. They formed the company in 2017 and started roasting seriously in 2020; opened a café, moved to the Ritchie space in 2023, then opened the second café in Zocalo earlier this year.

“I love it,” says Alison “It’s an interesting sideline, kind of a combination of science and gardening. I loved the process of roasting the beans. Our machine is a small batch roaster which does 12k of beans at a time. It’s like cooking, you can’t leave the machine when it’s running. The process is precise, yet there are so many variables.

A flight of coffee at Aspen

“My mom was chief roaster but now we have Avram Sanders who has passion and a taste for coffee,” says daughter Jasmine Venkatraman, who manages the cafés. “We have some really talented staff members.”
I asked Jasmine about their roasting style. “We like smooth fruity flavours, not over roasted, but we sell more nutty, chocolatey flavours.

“We looked for ways to embrace our community,” says Jasmine. “We thought hard about how to fit in with the Happy Beer Street concept, so we started coffee flights, which have taken off. We have worked with the Ritchie Community League on several projects. Currently we offer a Ritchie blend where $2 of each bag goes to the community league.”

Opening a second location can be fraught.

“Zocalo came about via a pop up with Good Goods. It turned out to be a great fit, it suits our vibe and aesthetic.”

The wholesale side of the business is where individual roasters run up against the prevailing notion that coffee is just a commodity. “You can always get cheaper coffee,” says Gordon; “but we are interested in value. We are a premium product.” Find Aspen coffee at the Glass Monkey, Derrick Club, Dining Car Café and roaster of the month at the Alberta Museum.

9951 76 Avenue and Zocalo, 10826 95 Street.

Transcend’s Poul Mark and his big orange roaster

Transcend Coffee

Poul Mark opened the specialty roaster/coffee shop, Transcend Coffee, in 2006.

“In law school I was into wine (still am) and from that, coffee. I thought I would open a coffee and wine bar. I knew nothing until I did some training in Vancouver, and that was my first introduction to the idea that coffee actually came from someplace. Then I watched the doc Black Gold (coffee farmers in Ethiopia trying to get a fair price for their coffee).

“Instead I opened Transcend. I bought coffee from an importer in Seattle. I started doing coffee tastings, eventually became a coffee judge. I was in Panama at a coffee competition and met a coffee producer who inspired me, walking the side of volcanos.

“These early experiences opened my eyes to what drives quality and to the coffee poverty crisis.

“That is how I got involved in coffee. I realised I can support a producer and not contribute to that coffee poverty cycle.

“It satisfies my social justice bent, but maybe not the best business model to pay a lot for coffee for years.

“There is a global coffee shortage and coffee prices are out of control, but producers still are caught in that cycle of never making enough money to even cover the cost of production.

“Most people think of coffee as a caffeine delivery system, it’s all about convenience and so Nescafe and Starbucks still rule the market, billions of dollars.”

There is a ray of light however.

“I do feel that the growing number of independents creates more awareness. It’s us against Tim Hortons and Starbucks, and that makes higher-quality specialty coffee more available.

“Coffee is a relationship. Producers need stability. For example, we have been buying coffee from Ricardo Pérez in Costa Rica for 15 years. We are fully behind the idea of transparent trade.

“We have had several locations, on 99 Street in the Western Living building, the old Pharoh’s Pizza near campus, we roasted out of the old Java Jive location, but the Ritchie Market is the best thing we ever did. Our coffee bar near 124 Street was kind of the opposite, it took a year and a half longer than expected; We would like to have two or three more locations because that makes us more efficient as a roaster, but I’m gun shy now. The challenge is that the average ticket is small, it’s about volume, so you have to have a lot of traffic.

“We have learned a lot. I would say that we had very specific ideas about coffee in the early days and came off as arrogant, hipsterish. We’re so much more appreciative of people coming through the doors now.”

What’s it like now? “We roast and sell bagged coffee, have two coffee shops and small wholesale business. We’d really like to grow the online but it’s a tough business.”

And what about that roaster? “It’s a K&M Probat UG22, manufactured in Germany in 2017,” says Poul. It’s a cast-iron drum roaster, which relies mostly on convection to facilitate the roasting of coffee. We roast 40lbs per batch. It’s one of the best small roasters available, and is a key element of our ability to develop coffee as well as we do.”

Ritchie Market 9570 76 Avenue, 12332 106 Avenue.

Rogue Wave Coffee team, from left Ply Pasarj, David Walsh, and David Laville

Rogue Wave Coffee Roasters

David Laville, Ply Pasarj and David Walsh own and operate Rogue Wave Coffee Roasters.

“We are on year three with a 15k Loring drum roaster from California,” says David Laville. “We like that it creates a good workflow. It recycles the hot air, so you don’t need an afterburner. It’s a closed system which creates a more stable environment; our extreme temperature changes are not good for roasting coffee.

David Walsh roasts coffee

We had a Giesen (Dutch) roaster but it was always needing parts.”

David, along with David Walsh started roasting beans in university.

“We would buy green coffee at Java Jive, take it home and roast it. We’ve been friends since Grade 7, born and raised on the north side. It was a hobby, novelty factor, the unknown, we would tell people we were roasting coffee.

“We got serious in 2015. You get older and start thinking, if not now, when? We decided to turn our hobby into a business and contribute to the fabric of Edmonton.

“Ply came on board later. He was a customer and a biochemist—he knows a lot about coffee extraction.
“Our niche is pour over. We love the café side, and we love what we do. We are essentially an online business, and it’s pretty robust. We exported to 50 countries in 2024, mainly Japanese roast coffee equipment which is geared to handcrafted coffee, not espresso machines.

“Our love for pour over coffee extends to every part of the business—the competitions, sourcing exceptional coffee, refining it, brewing it and roasting it. Handcrafted coffee.”

The finished product

I asked David what, exactly, is third wave coffee. I had heard so many different explanations of this term.
“Our interpretation: cafés and roasteries with an intimate knowledge of where the coffee comes from. The ethos of honouring the human labour behind the cup.”

Rogue Wave, 11322 119 Street.

Roastie Coffee’s Andrew Hayes roasting beans

Roasti Coffee Company

Andrew Hayes’ journey to the coffee business is unusual.

“I started roasting coffee because I couldn’t do anything else.”

Andrew left the University of Regina after severe post-concussion symptoms made it impossible for him to continue.

“I spent a few years trying to find answers, just trying to feel better. I had always thought I’d do something in sports, keep playing hockey in Europe, use my sports management degree, but working was out of the question.

“It’s a pretty dark hole when you are dealing with concussion and pain. I needed to find something calm, super chill, I could do on my own, when I did feel good.

“My Dad has a colleague in Brazil, Henrique Cambraia, who knew green coffee growers. They thought ‘hey you can put a little roaster in the garage and sell to friends. You don’t have to work normal hours.’ I could work when I felt ok. I thought, ‘if I can sell a couple of 60k bags of green coffee a month, I’ll be ok. Well, it worked out to more than a couple of bags, but that’s how it started. I could make a life for myself not working for someone. Best case? A simple life and make a cool product.

“So, I started roasting in my parent’s garage in 2017. Things grew pretty quickly, farmers’ markets, then door knocking… try to talk to a barista, drop off samples. My first customers were the Nook Café and Simon from Café Rista.

My mom was my right-hand man, pricing, packaging, getting to and from. She still helps with invoicing and accounting.

“After a couple of years, we needed to grow and found a space in an old strip mall that turned out to be very cool inside, we exposed a cedar ceiling and beams. The fire trucks used to fill up at the gas station that had been there, so they all became customers. Over time it’s turned into an amazing community hub.

Andrew enjoys the outcome

“It’s a special place—the little business that I was doing for myself now employs 16 people.

“Now, we help a lot of coffee shop owners get going with training and mentoring. There are probably 70 shops across the country that serve and sell our coffee in their cafés.

“We currently have a 12 K Probat Drum roaster from Germany. Such high quality, so consistent, it’s a different world. On our bar is the La Marzocco espresso machine. We partner with Jim and his son Gio at National Cappucino. The first time I went in there I had no idea what I was doing and they treated me with respect.

“At first I didn’t understand the impact buying coffee can have. We had a long-term relationship with Henrique, now we ship three containers a year from those guys, but other than that we would just pull samples from importers. We know now how important it is to have that direct personal relationship with all our growers in Guatemala and Columbia too. The key to that is transparency. We work with mostly smaller Canadian importers now, the monster importers cannot supply that transparency.”

19, 52 Brentwood Blvd., Sherwood Park.

In the November/December issue: Coffee Business Plus: The Columbian, Iconoclast, Square One.