Why I'm Building Roast Local
We found our favorite coffee shop by accident. That felt like a problem worth solving.
My wife works in healthcare. I work in logistics. Neither of us knows anything about the coffee industry. We just like good coffee, and we have two small kids, a two-and-a-half-year-old and a three-month-old, which means our weekends mostly revolve around nap schedules, diaper bags, and the aimless Sunday drive. You learn to love those drives. The baby sleeps in the car, the toddler watches for trucks, and you end up in places you didn't plan to go.
That's how we found Catkin Coffee.
We were on Highway 101, somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula, and we passed through Quilcene, Washington. Population 600, maybe. The kind of town you'd miss entirely if you blinked. But there was a coffee shop right on the highway, and we needed caffeine, so we stopped.
It was just a husband and wife running the place. He roasts the coffee himself. She was behind the counter. Our oldest found a little play corner in the back and immediately forgot we existed. The coffee was really, really good. Like, we looked at each other across the table good. We stayed way longer than we planned.
We keep going back. It's become one of our spots.
But here's what bugged me afterward: we only found it because we happened to drive that road on that day. If we'd gone a different way, we never would have known it was there. And I started wondering, how many other places like that are out there? Small roasters doing amazing work in towns nobody's heard of, completely invisible unless you stumble onto them.
So I started looking. And the answer is: a lot.
I just wanted a list
That's really how this started. I wanted a way to find good coffee wherever we go. Camping on the coast, skiing at Bachelor, visiting family, road-tripping through Idaho. Not Starbucks, not Dutch Bros. The places where someone actually picked the beans and cares about the roast.
Google Maps doesn't help. You search "coffee" and get a hundred pins. Chains, gas stations, and local spots all jumbled together with no way to tell who roasts their own beans and who's pouring from a box. Yelp's not much better. Four stars could mean anything.
Wine has Vivino, beer has Untappd, but coffee has nothing like that. So I figured I'd start building the thing I wished existed.
Turns out there are hundreds of them
I started with the Pacific Northwest because that's where we live. Oregon, Washington, Idaho. Those are the states we drive through, camp in, take the kids to. Then I kept going. Montana, Alaska, Northern California, British Columbia, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming. The whole region we think of as home.
What I found kind of blew my mind. Oregon has 170+ independent roasters. Washington has nearly 200. Idaho, over 70. Little towns I'd barely heard of, Pocatello, Sandpoint, Maupin, Quilcene, have people roasting genuinely world-class coffee. Over 500 roasters across 10 states and provinces. Most of them completely unknown to anyone who doesn't live down the street.
These aren't hobbyists. They're sourcing from specific farms, winning competitions, building real businesses. They're just hard to find.
What Roast Local is
It's pretty simple. Every roaster gets a profile. Who they are, what they roast, where they are. You can browse by state or city, explore a map, save places you want to visit. It's the tool I built for myself to find the next Catkin.
I'm one person doing this on nights and weekends because I think it should exist. It's early. But the profiles are live, the map works, and there are over 500 roasters on here already.
Built for roasters too
Every roaster gets a free profile. If you're a roaster, you can claim yours, update your info, and start showing up where people are actually looking. I'm not interested in charging small roasters just to be found. The free tier is real and it's staying.
Down the road, I want to build tools that help roasters see who's discovering them and turn that into business. But the basics are free. That's not changing.
If you're a roaster, come claim your spot. If you're someone who's ever found an amazing coffee shop in a town you'd never heard of, that's exactly what this is for.
Roast Local is a free discovery platform for independent coffee roasters, starting in the Pacific Northwest. Over 500 roasters. 10 states. Your next favorite coffee is already on here. roastlocal.com