Four years after introducing his first bicycle-powered coffee cart to the San Diego market, Chris O’Brien, owner and founder Coffee Roasting CycleLast autumn he took up roasting.
O’Brien has spent more than a decade working in the coffee industry, including seven years as a barista in La Jolla Bird Rock Coffee Roastery Location.
Starting out of a passion for cycling and coffee, Coffee Cycle soon moved into a brick-and-mortar retail location in Pacific Beach, where business picked up again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year.
“The pandemic has really highlighted how incredibly dependent our business, the quality of our product, and the quality of our service is on third-party suppliers,” O’Brien told Daily Coffee News. “Bringing the same focus and love of roasting that we already put into our service efforts seemed like an opportunity to make sure we were offering our customers the best, most consistent cups of coffee possible while also mitigating some of the sourcing challenges of the past year.”
We have previously served coffee from reputable roasters such as Bird Rock and Madison, Wisconsin JBC Coffee RoasteryCoffee Cycle currently roasts coffee on a Diedrich IR-5 and Quest M3 roaster through an agreement with a nearby company Acento Coffee Roastery.
“The response has been overwhelming. We are grateful to our team for stepping up to the challenge, to our customers for embracing our modern direction, and to the local coffee community for helping us along the way,” said O’Brien. “The launch of our roasting program was the culmination of years spent building our coffee shop business and creating a mighty, diverse community. A coffee shop can be such an essential place in the community, but we need to do more than that.”
The Coffee Cycle café features coffee machines from the brand London AND Decent EspressoThe Londinium is a manual, spring lever, two-group espresso machine, and the Decent Espresso machines have been programmed to mimic the pressure and flow rate generated by the Londinium lever and piston.
“We regularly measure extractions with an Atago refractometer in both the espresso bar and pour-over bar,” says O’Brien. “In the shop, we don’t operate batch brewing; instead, we operate immersion drippers for every cup of sizzling or iced coffee. The immersion drippers allow us to be super consistent and make it basic to multitask.”
While the 450-square-foot retail store may seem tiny, O’Brien says, “Compared to when our bike cafe was down the road, it’s really grand now.”
Coffee Cycle also offers tiny coffee classes for the public to enjoy. Introductory classes cover the history of coffee and colonization, coffee production and consumption around the world, and the basic chemistry of coffee extraction and roasting.
“By giving our community a broader picture of what coffee means to the world, we have the context in which we can make better, more ethical decisions about our coffee consumption,” O’Brien says.
Coffee Cycle is located at 1632 Grand Ave, San Diego, CA 92109. Tell us about your modern café or roastery here.
