Bonfire Coffee’s new roasting facility in Glenwood Springs smells, as expected, of coffee. Walk into the light-filled front room — “the lab,” founder Charlie Chacos calls it — and you’ll see a very small coffee and apparel shop.
But the real magic is in the back.
Bonfire Coffee’s new roastery is nearly double the size of its old facility, also in Glenwood Springs — 2,250 feet, compared to the previous 1,200.
“We’d definitely outgrown our space just with the volume that we were producing,” said Chacos, standing in the new warehouse.
“This space can hold a lot more beans, and we have a lot more workspace to just crank out product, so we could essentially double, triple our business — our volume — out of this facility,” he said.
The coffee company settled on a space in a West Glenwood business park just off I-70.
Bonfire’s new, larger facility also allows the company to store more green, unroasted coffee beans. Chacos says he hopes that improves the consistency of Bonfire’s roasts and allows it to expand production.
Bonfire concentrates most of its coffee bean distribution in the Roaring Fork Valley, but Chacos says it supplies wholesalers and other customers as far as New York and Florida. He hopes the new, larger facility will allow Bonfire to reach new markets — including along I-70 and into the Vail Valley.
‘A Ferrari’ roasting machine
The centerpiece of Bonfire Coffee’s new Glenwood Springs facility is in the back: a towering silver coffee roasting machine. The Loring S15 Falcon is fundamental to the business, developing green coffee beans sourced from around the world into Bonfire’s various roasts.
The 10-minute roasting cycle turns inedible green coffee into the drinkable and beloved roasted bean; head roaster Clay Gailey describes the machine like a luxury car.
“The Loring is very much like a Ferrari,” he said. “It takes off, it goes, and it stops exactly when you want it to. Everything is just so dialed in.”
The old machine?
“Kind of like driving a Mack truck,” Gailey laughs. “It takes a lot to get it started, and you have to really plan out the stop too. You’ve got to start applying the brake well before you're actually finished.”
The new Loring roaster — from a California-based company — has a capacity of 15 kilograms. It’s about 30% larger than the company’s old roasting machine and has a quicker turnaround between roasting cycles.
It’s also more efficient, and therefore more sustainable — an important feature for a business that’s built on a climate-threatened crop.
Head roaster Gailey said “a lot” of experimentation went into transferring Bonfire’s specialty roast recipes from the old machine to the new one.
“It was very stressful for a little while. Some minor crises of confidence here and there, but we got it through.”
The lab
The white-walled front room is a retail and espresso lab, “kind of [a] research facility where we do our sensory analysis on the coffees,” Chacos explained.
He says the space — which has an espresso machine and multiple espresso grinders — will allow better training for the staff of Bonfire’s flagship Carbondale cafe.
And he’s excited about the public-facing element of the roastery.
“One of our favorite things is sharing the knowledge of coffee,” he said.
Bonfire’s roastery has been in Glenwood Springs for 14 years, but “a lot of people don't know we're here,” Chacos laughs.
Now there’s a place for people to visit.
Chacos wants to host tasting sessions and other events at the facility — part coffee appreciation, part education.
He’s seen his customers’ taste in coffee grow alongside his business.
“When we first opened, definitely everyone was pounding our dark roast, and that's what they wanted,” he said. “We were trying to offer the other stuff, but the customers wanted what they were used to.”
A self-described “coffee geek,” Chacos says Bonfire’s single-origin roasts are his favorite, but he likes to mix it up.
Bonfire Coffee will host a grand opening party for the new roastery from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on June 11. It’ll include food, coffee cocktails, roastery tours, and giveaways.
