O Kafes Coffee Roasters

The Red Cat is a farm-direct importer and roaster of specialty-grade coffee. Our concern is for the quality of the coffee and the fair treatment of the laborers who actually cultivate and harvest it. To achieve that end, and to create a perfect cup of coffee for our customers, we make yearly treks to the coffee farms themselves, whether that takes us to the volcanic slopes of Boquete, Panama, the high mountains around Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic, or estates in Costa Rica and El Salvador. We want to source our beans directly from the farms and the people who grow them. While visiting the farms, we look for sustainable practices in the processing of the harvest (i.e., the owner has a plan for using all the byproducts of the process for fuel, fertilizer, etc.), educational and health benefits for the workers, natural growing techniques, and a concern for the surrounding environment and wildlife. We know that happy workers and thoughtful management leads to the cleanest, best-tasting coffee beans. At the coffee farm we sample the varieties that the farm has to offer (this process is known as "cupping") and choose one that we think our customers in Birmingham will most enjoy. After arranging for shipping to the U.S., we roast the beans in-house in our Ambex roaster, using techniques we learned from one of the top roastmasters in the country. From the roaster we deliver them up to you as quickly and freshly as possible. The roasted beans travel all of 30 feet from the roaster to your cup! Still, the process is not complete after we directly source the beans and roast them in the coffeehouse. We're striving, as they say, for "god in a cup." How do we do this? We train all of our employees for weeks in the craft of making beautiful coffee drinks. They learn how to pull a properly timed shot of espresso, foam milk to the correct temperature and texture, and combine and present the two with attention to detail. We brew our coffee using the extraction method, which combines the traditional drip brew with the French press method of soaking the coffee to draw out flavorable oils.