From a farm in Antigua to a warehouse on Ankeny Street.

Guatemala first

Tomás Bdila grew up on Finca Las Cumbres, a 9-hectare farm his grandfather planted in 1968 on the slopes above Ciudad Vieja, just outside Antigua. The farm sits between 1,550 and 1,700 meters, in the shadow of Volcán de Agua, growing bourbon, caturra, and a small plot of villa sarchí the family has been selecting seed from for three decades. Tomás was picking cherry beside his mother and two sisters by the time he was eight, and running the depulper by fourteen.

What he remembers most is not the harvest — it's the price sheet. Every March, coyotes would come up the mountain offering 85 to 110 quetzales per quintal of cherry, a price that moved with the C-market in New York and never with the cost of fertilizer, pickers' wages, or a wet mill repair. "We grew coffee people paid $18 a bag for," Tomás says, "and some years we could barely pay the pickers on time. I knew the math was wrong long before I knew what to do about it."

He left Antigua in 2011 for Portland, where a cousin had settled, planning to study agriculture business. Instead he got a job loading green coffee at an importer's warehouse in the Central Eastside — and started learning the other half of the supply chain.

Portland second

Mara Ellison grew up in Boise and moved to Portland in 2009 with a duffel bag and a barista job at a cart on SE Division. She spent the next five years working her way through some of the city's busiest cafés, then talked her way into an apprenticeship as a production roaster on a 1962 Probat UG-22. By 2013 she was lead roaster, responsible for 2,400 pounds a week, and quietly frustrated: the coffees were good, but the roasting curves kept chasing darker profiles that flattened everything she loved about washed Central American lots.

"I kept cupping these beautiful Guatemalan samples — apricot, milk chocolate, this clean citrus finish — and then watching them go into the drum at a development ratio that turned them all into the same coffee," she says. "I wanted to roast the coffee that was actually in the bag."

How we met

In January 2014, the importer where Tomás worked sent a group of Portland roasters to Guatemala for harvest. Mara was on the trip. On the third morning, at a wet mill outside San Miguel Dueñas, she watched Tomás translate a picker's question about fermentation times into English, then add ten minutes of his own explanation about why the answer mattered. They ended up on the same rattling bus back to Antigua, arguing about roast development the whole way.

They stayed in touch. Mara cupped samples Tomás sent from his family's farm; Tomás drove over to her roastery on Saturdays to sweep floors and listen. By the fall of 2015 they were talking seriously about the thing neither of them could do inside someone else's company: a small roastery that bought directly, roasted light, and paid prices set by the farm's costs instead of the commodity market.

The warehouse on Ankeny

In March 2016 they signed a lease on 1,900 square feet of a former bicycle frame warehouse at 2417 SE Ankeny St. The building had a roll-up door, a leaking skylight, and, crucially, a gas line big enough for a roaster. They bought a 12-kilo Diedrich IR-12 that had been sitting in a storage unit in Vancouver, Washington, rewired the panel themselves (an electrician friend checked the work), and roasted the first production batch — a washed bourbon from Finca Las Cumbres — on June 14, 2016.

The café in the front of the warehouse opened that August with a two-group Synesso, a batch brewer, and four stools. We sold 11 pounds of coffee the first week. We still have the receipt book.

How we roast

Everything we sell comes off the same 12kg Diedrich IR-12 we bought in 2016 — it's been rebuilt once, re-drumed once, and it knows our coffees better than any software does. We roast light-to-medium, always. First crack is where the coffee lives, and our job is to develop sweetness without cooking out the acidity and origin character that the farm worked a whole year to build. A typical washed Guatemalan lot runs 9:45 to 10:30 total roast time with 1:15 to 1:30 of development; naturals get a gentler ramp and a shorter finish.

We roast every Tuesday and Thursday. Retail bags ship or hit the café shelf within 48 hours of leaving the drum, and the roast date is stamped on every bag. Nothing sits. If a coffee is gone for the season, it's gone — we'd rather run out than stretch a tired lot. You can see what's on the shelf right now on our coffees page.

The team

Bdila is seven people, and that's deliberate. Mara is head roaster and green buyer for Colombia and Ethiopia. Tomás runs origin relationships and green buying for Central America, and still spends every January on the farms. The rest of the crew:

• Dario Bdila — Tomás's younger brother, our roast assistant since 2019. He profiles every new lot and keeps the green inventory honest.
• June Park — barista and café lead, with us since 2018. She built our training program and pulls the best shot in the building.
• Sam Okafor — barista since 2021, runs our weekend cuppings and answers the nerdiest customer emails.
• Ruth Calderón — wholesale and fulfillment, the person who makes sure your café's order actually arrives on Thursday. She joined in 2020.
• Elena Vásquez — part-time bookkeeper and, as Tomás's aunt, the unofficial quality control for everything we say about Antigua.

We all cup together every Friday morning. Nobody's palate outranks the table.

Milestones we're proud of

2016 — First roast, first café, first direct contract beyond the family farm (ASPROCDEGUA, Acatenango).

2018 — We published our first transparency report: every FOB price we paid, printed and taped to the café wall. It's still an annual tradition.

2019 — Added Colombia and Ethiopia. Dario joined full-time. The skylight finally got fixed.

2021 — Wholesale outgrew the warehouse's back room, so Ruth built a real fulfillment system. Our wholesale program now serves 30+ cafés and restaurants across Oregon and Washington.

2023 — We started open cupping days: free, public, every first Saturday at 10 a.m. No sign-up, no lecture — just twelve bowls, a few seasonal coffees, and whoever shows up. It's the best morning of our month, and it has taught us more about what our customers taste than any survey ever could.

2025 — Nine harvests with Finca Las Cumbres and ASPROCDEGUA. Tomás's grandfather, now 91, still tastes every lot we contract. He is rarely gentle with his feedback.

Come taste it

That's the whole story, really: two people, one farm family, one old roaster, and a promise about what coffee should cost. If you're in Portland, the café is at 2417 SE Ankeny St — hours and directions are here. If you run a café and want to talk about a partnership, our wholesale page explains how we work. Or just order a bag and taste what January in Antigua turns into by June in Portland.