Roastery

Innovation is our first ingredient.

We pride ourselves on our innovative & proprietary processes, integrated with technology, which set our coffee roasting & manufacturing apart from our competitors in a big way. We never roast a bean until after a customer places their order, ensuring maximum freshness.  Our process is designed to maximize efficiency and reduce waste and environmental impact.

There’s a lot of technology behind the perfect cup.

Brothers and owners Jason and Douglass Barrow come from backgrounds in process management, holding certifications in Six Sigma and ISO 9000 process improvement methodologies.  Our back-end technology system is specifically designed for the roast-to-order coffee business to seamlessly run all aspects of the operation from management, to order entry, inventory, roasting, packing, and distribution.

This technological integration allows us to deliver Just-In-Time roasting for our customers at a national scale. We service 300,000 residential households and several hundred wholesale customers each week to deliver the freshest roasted coffee possible. In addition, we are a USDA Organic certified handler, and we follow the manufacturing best practices of HACCP.  Our online retail channel (bocajava.com) is a full service website that rivals our largest national competitors, with over 10,000 pages of content, 20,000+ Customer Reviews, a customer login portal and ticketing system, all built with the most current web technologies to keep us ahead of the curve.

Way more than “fresh-roasted”, our coffees are made to order.

Every bag of our coffee is roasted after a customer places an order.  Whether it’s one bag of a unique flavor or a large retail order for hundreds of pounds of roasted coffee, each one is handcrafted by our artisan roasters specifically for each order.  We take freshness one step further with one-way air valves integrated into all of our product packaging.  This type of sealed bag helps keep coffee fresher longer by reducing natural degassing that causes flavor loss.  Finally, we guarantee you’re getting the freshest coffee possible with a “roasted-on” date on the back of every bag.  Freshness has a HUGE impact on flavor and our customers know the difference.

High-altitude roasting allows for the best possible flavor.

Many people ask us why roasting coffee at a high altitude makes such a big difference in the flavor.  Basically, roasting at altitude is compared to baking at altitude where lower temps and shorter roast times create a much sweeter, smoother cup.

When we roast our coffees here in the beautiful Mile High City (Denver, CO), we are able to avoid the two most common tribulations of roasting coffee: baking, and scorching. “Baking” occurs when coffee is roasted too long causing inadequate structural expansion and resulting in flavor that is flat and lacks intensity.  The longer the coffee has to stay in the roaster the more “baked” it tastes.  “Scorching” occurs when coffee beans are roasted at too high of a temperature causing lack of development and resulting in flavor that is wild, woody and unappealing.

Just like with baking, water boils quicker at altitude so the moisture in the bean “boils” quicker and causes the first “crack” to happen much quicker. This allows for a shorter roast time which is favorable for positive sucrose development, producing a sweeter coffee.

Our focus on sustainability starts with our roasting facility.

In support of our business goal to “make the world a better place through coffee” we must start with our roasting facility.  Our continuous improvement methodology means that every day we are focused on finding new ways to lead the industry in preserving the communities in which we live, fostering environmental sustainability, and reducing waste wherever we can.  Going green takes ongoing effort, but we’re taking swift action in the right direction to make a difference.

To create our world-class roaster, we’ve taken an old factory building from the 1930’s 1920 and brought it into the 21^st century.  Among many improvements, our facility is now USDA Organic certified and complies with EPA standard for clean air emissions.  We help reduce environmental waste with broad range recycling efforts that include donating used burlap bags to local farmers, re-using plastic containers for coffee deliveries and fostering office-wide recycling.

But, we’re not done there.  As our business grows, we will continue to place a high priority in making sure our facility is doing more than its part to protect the environment.