In the outdoorsy Canadian city of Kelowna, British Columbia, a plucky coffee company by the name of Anarchy Coffee Roasters has found some structure with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar cafe.
The Anarchists kicked open the doors of the 1,400-square-foot space last month, offering locally baked pastries and in-house panini alongside espresso-based drinks and drip coffees. Beans are roasted on site in the company’s 10-kilo Mill City Roasters machine.
Punk rock concert posters cover the front of the bar, where a Nuova Simonelli Aurelia espresso machine stands ready beneath a menu board decorated with skateboard decks.
Anarchy Coffee Roasters Co-Owner and Head Roaster Bailey Mitchell told Daily Coffee News that he and co-owner Jesse Nelson took a largely DIY approach to the buildout, which happens to fit the brand just right.
“Our whole facade, if you will, is intentionally a little bit rough around the edges, and we’re very hands-on ourselves, so we just came up with the floor plan, acquired all the equipment, threw it all together and made it look like us,” Mitchell recently told DCN. “We tried to do as much of it ourselves as we possibly could.”
Former college buddies who also worked together in the ski industry, Mitchell and Nelson founded the roasting company four years ago after building some roasting equipment from scratch while following a shared passion for coffee.
The first barebones machine involved a heat source and a large metal pot that was rotated by a variable speed motor. The second was a larger drum-style roaster that more closely resembled conventional equipment, but only roasted about 500-600 grams per batch.
“That whole experiment was very helpful in my process, as far as learning the fundamentals of roasting,” said Mitchell. “They actually worked pretty well, all things considered. And then, as the passion grew, we decided to get an actual little 1-kilogram Mill City roaster and started growing from there.”
Today the company uses a Kaffelogic Nano 7 electric sample roaster to find roast profiles for production on the 10-kilo machine. Anarchy buys from various Canadian importers — including Toronto-based Republica Coffee Traders and Orange Brown Imports, and B.C.-based Root 86 Coffee.
“Their practices for importing check all the boxes as far as ethically sourcing and fair trading,” Mitchell said of each of the importers. “We’re in a community here that’s relatively new to specialty coffee… We just try to cover all bases and give a guiding path and an inviting start for someone to get into specialty coffee, and then lead them down into those nice, bright light roasts that folks like us really love.”
As the coffee program moves forward, the Anarchy co-founders are also intent on spreading their political philosophies in Kelowna, encouraging autonomous societal improvements through donations, events and other progressive disruptions.
“We’re big punk rock fans, and with that, we’d like to see some positive change going on in our communities and we like to have as much of a positive influence as we can,” said Bailey. “On top of that, we give $1 from every bag sales to those local outreach groups to get the money and supplies into the hands of people that know more than we do, to try to uplift people that just need a helping hand — and that to us is anarchism.”
Anarchy Coffee Roasters is located at 1880 Baron Rd C in Kelowna. Tell DCN’s editors about your new coffee shop or roastery here.
Howard Bryman Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
