How did you get into specialty coffee, and what’s the story behind Velvet Sunrise?

I’m an old-timer to coffee in the sense that I've been roasting coffee for my personal use for over 25 years now, and it was a total coincidence that I found out about home coffee roasting. I happened to be doing some work at someone's house in my former career as a project manager for a civil engineering company, and they were roasting coffee in their kitchen. I didn't know at the time that you could do that at home, and that person was actually Derek, the founder of Merchants of Green Coffee who had a pretty prominent location in downtown Toronto for many years. It's closed now, but at the time, Merchants of Green Coffee were importing and selling green coffee primarily to home coffee roasters, so that's how I got started with home coffee roasting. Over the years, I branched out to get coffee from different suppliers like Sweet Marias, who a lot of home coffee roasters would know, and they do a great job of describing the coffees that they bring in, sourcing excellent coffees for home roasters.  I learned a lot about home roasting through that process and found some great coffees. I think the game changer for me was actually a Guatemalan coffee from Huehuetenango that I roasted at home. The complexity and sweetness was just so great, and I just could not find coffee of that quality or freshness outside the home. So, that is the reason that I eventually decided to try roasting for other people. We did that on a small scale in Stouffville, roasting one day a week and inviting people to come in and try the coffee and purchase the coffee for their home use. That caught on fairly quickly, and in 2010 I started roasting coffee on a commercial coffee roaster. 

What do you love the most about your job?

I can honestly say that I love the process of roasting coffee. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but that 12-15 minute cycle of roasting coffee never gets old to me.