Our Story
THE COLOR COFFEE ROASTERS STORY
Originally a home roasting project, Color Coffee Roasters is the culmination of years of obsession, backyard tinkering, and the desire to spread the gospel of delicious coffee. Sourced and roasted with exceptional care and passion, our goal is simple: deliver a premium coffee experience to our wholesale and retail customers. We provide wholesale roasting services to a variety of businesses and organizations including: coffee shops, markets, restaurants, hotels, offices, co-work spaces, and more. Check-out our Color Family! With a fanatical attention to quality, state-of-the-art equipment, and innovative techniques, our aim is to make coffee as approachable, accessible, and delicious as possible. Our Flagship Cafe opened in 2016 in Eagle, Colorado and was founded on the principle of providing warm hospitable service, consistently excellent coffee, and a fun, clean, bright, and functional community hub. Book our beautiful meeting room or the cafe for an event! TOP COLOR NEWS: Color Roasters were recently featured in Vail Valley Economic Development Success Stories!
CHARLIE GUNDLACH
COLOR COFFEE ROASTERS, FOUNDER
Charlie started roasting partly out of curiosity, but mostly out of passion for vibrant, complex, and fresh coffee. His home roasting passion enabled him to get a job as a barista at Portola Coffee Lab in 2013, a new micro-roaster in Orange County, California. During his time working the bar at Portola, he learned the intricacies of espresso preparation and single-cup coffee extraction. As Portola grew, he joined the production team and completed the roasting apprenticeship of his dreams. Portola would go on to win 2015 Roast Magazine Roaster of the year. The mountains were calling after a return to Colorado and a brief stint mastering the art of hospitality at Boxcar Coffee Roasters in Boulder, it was time to launch Color.
WHY COLOR COFFEE?
The name Color Coffee Roasters, stems from the relationship between the flavors of coffee and the colors associated with these certain flavors. Great coffee should provide a spectrum of fruited flavors and often times these flavors correlate to these fruits. For example, a coffee with a “red fruit” flavor, may taste like raspberries, cherries, and pomegranates. Or, a coffee with “purple fruit” flavor may taste like black currants, plum, and blueberries. This is the level of nuance that really gets us excited and is what inspired the name Color Coffee Roasters.
COFFEE SOURCING
At Color, we seek to find highest quality raw (green) coffee we possibly can. To do this, we work the best importers in the world to acquire fresh and vibrant green coffee from the world’s most renowned and sometimes undiscovered coffee producing regions. Our focus is on coffee sourced from single farms, co-ops, and villages. Working on this level we can showcase, with a greater level of detail, the subtle differences in flavor and cup characteristics of each producers and micro-region.