What is your coffee origin story? How did you get into specialty coffee?

I was filming a show in Vancouver twelve years ago, and I was living right beside Matchstick on Maine Street and 15th Ave. On my days off, I spent a lot of my time in coffee shops. At this time, I knew I liked good coffee, but I didn’t know much about specialty coffee. 

One day, I went to the back to use the washroom and I noticed a Diedrich 5KG in the back and someone roasting on it, and I thought to myself, “What the heck is that?!”. I asked her (Rafaela), and she told me it was a roasting machine, and she invited me back the following Sunday to show me the roaster and walk me through the roasting process. I came back, and she told me about roasting, her goals, and more, which is information you can’t get at the front of house. She continued to teach me after that day, and she taught me about different coffee species and varieties, and how they are cultivated and processed. The more she taught me, the more interested I became, which eventually turned coffee into a passion. I started going crazy and tried as many coffees as I could.

I went on to create a coffee company called Black Drip Coffee Roasters, but things got in the way. When I came back to Toronto, I started trying to figure out how to create another brand. One day, I was in the kitchen baking during the pandemic, and my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, was trying to get involved, and I was like, “Leave me alone! Don’t touch the dough!”, to which she replied “Ooh… Angry baker!”, and then I thought, “Wow, thats a good name.. How about The Angry Roaster?”.

What’s a goal you have for the future of the company?

This brand really has so many directions it goes in terms of storytelling, and another goal I have for The Angry Roaster is to figure out how to bring my love for film into the brand. We did it first with design, and then with storytelling on the backs of our coffee, which are actually written by writers in the city. Most recently, we even wrote a TV show; it’s an over the top comedy called The Angry Roaster and His Quest For Happiness. It’s a half hour sitcom and it’s about a roaster, myself, who struggles with manic depression and finds his way into building this company. A lot of it is make believe, as the character is on the run from the cartel after he found a special bean in Mexico that could make people feel almost euphoric. We just finished the script and had table reads for it. Now, we’re just in the treatment process trying to get together a package to pitch it in hopes someone picks it up!

The more I learned about coffee, the more I found that there’s a lot of things to be angry about, and anger, for me, is an emotion that you can cultivate in a positive light.