It all started with a 48-hour roasting session in a garage.
As 225 details in a feature in the new issue, Cafeciteaux co-founders Christopher Peneguy and Stevie Guillory spent those hours making bags of roasted coffee beans for Christmas gifts.
Peneguy had made a hobby of brewing beer and distilling liquor, but it was Guillory who introduced him to coffee bean roasting. Guillory had ordered beans from Sweet Maria’s, a coffee bean supplier in California that sells packs of the still-green coffee beans to home roasters.
“We started roasting those, and it was better than anything we could buy around here,” Peneguy says.
After the first roast, the two friends were hooked.
“We kind of just dove in feet first, without really knowing where to go with it,” Peneguy says.
They bought a small commercial roaster, and spent six months learning how to properly roast coffee beans to their deep brown color and flavor.
In July 2014, their company, Cafeciteaux, sold its first official bag of coffee beans. They would eventually relocate to a warehouse on Airline Highway, where Cafeciteaux is located today.
With Cafeciteaux’s small commercial roaster, the pair not only roast a substantial amount of coffee, but they can change the heat and gas throughout the roasting cycle to accentuate different flavors.
“It’s a more distinct flavor, and on top of that … we’re able to trace our coffees back to the farm. I can tell you the guy that grew the coffee and who processed them, where they were processed—the whole trip, from origin to us,” Peneguy says.
