Looking Back Part 2 - Firing Up

Moving on two years from our initial coffee inspiration in Hawaii - remember_ we wanted to make coffee a fun affair in Switzerland - we started having serious thoughts about making fun coffee happen at the end of 2009.

We imported a box of coffee from Coffees of Hawaii - remember_ these were the folks with the espresso bar catamaran at the Kona Pier. Unfortunately the coffee was roasted very dark and there was hardly any information about the coffee like a roast date or farm information.

So we started looking into roasting our own coffee. And then an old-school roaster who was eager to show us how to make the beans brown approached us... Things were happening rather fast and at the beginning of 2010 we were roasting our first batches of coffee on an old Probat UG22!

We named our roastery "Gipfelstürmer Kaffee" (meaning Peak Performer Coffee) as a reference to our passion of being in the great outdoors, to the beautiful Swiss topography and the claim of having excellent coffee. As we had a few wholesale accounts, we stuck with roasting and started setting up our own roasting space.