Why Coffee Roasters Should Brew Up Partnerships, Not Keep Secrets

Collaboration often stirs up anxiety—a worry that sharing trade secrets will leave you vulnerable. There's a fear that a partner might absorb your best practices and leave you empty-handed.

For me, though, collaboration has the opposite effect: it fuels innovation.

When the coffee industry moves forward, everyone benefits. If another roaster does something unconventional—like Counter Culture Coffee’s Cortado shoe with J. Crew or Kickapoo Coffee Roasters’ transparent minimum price guarantee—the whole sector gets attention. Specialty coffee remains relatively new to many people, so being creative, newsworthy, and fresh is a plus.

Coffee is dynamic at every stage, from farming to brewing, so there’s always more to learn. I run my business in a way that pushes us to innovate and sell coffee differently.

Craft beer is another industry I care deeply about. In many respects, specialty coffee is following craft beer’s trends. Watching the beer world inspires me, and one thing beer companies excel at is collaboration.

Consider Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which recently opened a second brewery in Asheville, North Carolina—about a two-hour drive from our roastery in Davidson. Their Beer Camp series is built on partnerships with other breweries. In 2017, I set out to emulate the core belief that working with competitors (for lack of a better word) offers more to gain than sharing secrets and profits costs us.

So why are beer companies eager to brew together, share a label, and split the spotlight, while coffee companies hesitate to partner on roasting?

In 2017, Summit Coffee Roasters took on two collaborations. The smaller one paired Summit with Methodical Coffee in Greenville, South Carolina, for a co-branded roast called Mixed Company. The larger project involved S&D Coffee and Tea, one of the biggest private-label roasters in the U.S., which needed help with a smaller specialty endeavor.

Collaborate and listen: Methodical Coffee and Summit Coffee’s co-branded roast.

Will Shurtz, Methodical’s roaster and co-owner, and I were both excited to create something unique. We’re relatively new roasters—Summit began roasting in 2015, Methodical in 2016—and just 100 miles apart, we sometimes compete for the same wholesale accounts. But Will, our teams, and I are all learners. We want to talk, cup, and brew together, and end the day knowing more about coffee.

Logistically, a post-roast blend made the most sense, so we put everything on the table—literally. Summit brought five single-origin coffees; Will added four of his; and we cupped them all together. Our group of five then spent an hour mixing, blending, and brewing on different devices to find the right combination.

The challenge in blending is to create something greater than the sum of its parts, which is never easy. Our 50/50 solution ended up adding depth to our natural Ethiopian and bright acidity to Methodical’s washed Colombian.

That exercise produced Mixed Company and a working friendship. I learned a lot from Will as a roaster and coffee professional, and he learned from us as well.

For the second project, S&D asked us to roast coffee for the America’s Best Cold Brew competition at Coffee Fest. The company has access to outstanding coffee and a highly talented team, but lacks a roasting machine small enough for this project.

S&D’s Steven Lim worked with Summit’s Evan Pollitt, our director of coffee, at every step. As with our own profiles, Steven and Evan sourced the right coffee, then refined its profile on our sample roaster in 300-gram batches.

With Evan’s coffee and roasting knowledge and Steven’s engineering background, we moved the roast to a production machine and made adjustments to deliver exactly what S&D wanted for their finished cold-brew product.

As I’ve noted on our website, I’m a firm believer in making the jump from good to great; settling for good often blocks that process. Part of that jump means never stopping learning. Classes and reading have value, but ultimately, learning side-by-side with other coffee professionals is how our industry will keep innovating.