From Green Coffee to Your Cup: How Our Coffee Gets to LaShaw Ranch Roasters
When you open a fresh bag of LaShaw Ranch Roasters coffee, there’s a whole lot that happens before those beans ever make it into our roaster.
It all starts with green coffee, the unroasted beans that eventually become the coffee you know and love. And getting those beans to our roastery isn’t quite as simple as running to Spokane when we’re getting low. There’s a little more planning, a lot more weight, and usually a pallet or two involved!
It Starts With a Call to Our Main Man, Jon
When it’s time to order green coffee, Amanda gets on the phone with Jon, our go-to guy at our coffee distributor.
Jon gives us the intel: what origins are currently available, what’s in stock, what’s looking especially good, and what makes the most sense for the premium coffees we want to offer.
Green coffee can change from harvest to harvest and shipment to shipment, so having someone knowledgeable on the distributor side is incredibly valuable. We aren’t just looking for coffee, we’re looking for coffees that meet the quality and flavor standards we want behind the LaShaw Ranch Roasters name.
Then the Order Is Placed
Once Amanda and Jon have everything figured out, we place our green coffee order.
From there, the beans begin making their way toward us. They’re coming from a distributor’s warehouse, and that freight process typically takes around 5–6 days before the coffee reaches Spokane.
That’s why keeping coffee in stock takes some planning. If we suddenly sell through more coffee than expected, we can’t simply drive into town and grab another bag of green beans that afternoon. Our next supply may already be several days away.
Pallet Pickup Day
Once our shipment arrives at the Spokane warehouse, it’s time for one of the heavier parts of the process.
We head into Spokane and pick up a full pallet of green coffee and sometimes we’re bringing home two pallets at once.
Those pallets are loaded with bags of unroasted coffee that will eventually become everything from the blends you drink every morning to the bags heading out to our wholesale partners and customers across the country.
We load it up, haul it back to LaShaw Ranch Roasters, and get everything unloaded and ready for production.
Then We Get to Work
This is where green coffee finally starts looking, and smelling, a little more familiar.
Once the beans are back at our place, the roasting begins.
Batch by batch, those green beans are transformed into the freshly roasted coffee that gets packaged, shipped, delivered on our wholesale route, brewed in our coffee house, and eventually poured into your mug.
So the next time you open a bag of LaShaw Ranch Roasters, know that those beans had quite the trip before they reached you- from a distributor warehouse, to Spokane, onto a pallet, back to our roastery, and finally into the roaster.
Premium coffee takes planning, good relationships, and a whole lot more than just roasting beans, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. ☕🤎