The Royal Blog

Looking to learn all about Espresso? Join us for our first-ever webinar “Good for Espresso”, a deep dive into one of our favorite brew methods on Thursday, October 8th at 11 AM PST. The Crown’s Alex Taylor, Candice Madison, Chris Kornman, Elise Becker, and Sandra Elisa Loofbourow will chat, debate, and field your inquiries about […]

Editor’s note: Lowell Powell, partner to Royal’s Marketing & Outreach Director and Catracha Coffee Founder Mayra Orellana-Powell, is the architect of the Catracha Quality Project and a driver behind many of the coffee processing innovations taking place on the ground in Santa Elena’s coffee community. His essay here was a response to Royal’s Home Roasters […]

Editor’s note: A different version of this article originally appeared in Daily Coffee News on August 4, 2020.   Consent and Participation: On Photography at Origin Consent in photography is a complex topic, and one that has been explored in great depth by anthropologists, philosophers, legal minds, and academics of all casts. It is also […]

Publisher’s note: check out our fresh crop Ethiopias. In December 2018, a small group of us drove the mercifully paved high route from Yirga Alem, in Sidama, to Shakiso, in Guji, arriving in the dark. Early the next morning on our way to the farms we stopped at a café for fatira, a flaky breakfast pancake cut into squares, bowls of honey, and boiling hot macchiatos. The early sun was a disco ball in […]

By Elise Becker, Crown Barista COVID-19 has changed many things about how we go about our day-to day. In fact, it’s why I’m writing articles and recipes instead of serving drinks. So many brewing guidelines are floating around right now, and people who are used to picking up coffee from their local shops or drinking […]

This has been a particularly difficult and emotional time for many of us, particularly for our Black and Brown employees and communities. We all know the coffee industry in the United States is overwhelmingly white. I cannot imagine how weird it must be for a Black person working in this industry. Royal is committed to […]

By Rosi Quiñones Coffee production has a legacy of inequality and abuse, so projects like Mayan Harvest that shake up the legacy power dynamics by rewarding the hard work of small scale farmers and giving women a platform to provide for themselves really excite me. When you empower a woman, you lift her entire family […]

Well, who’d have thought that just over a month after wondering publicly whether the novel coronavirus would put an end to public cuppings, nearly the entire world would be thrust into an unprecedented lockdown. Here in the Bay Area, we’ve been sheltering in place since Tuesday March 17, and it brings me only the smallest […]

Extolling the Virtues of Dark Roasts By Nate Lumpkin with illustrations by Elise Becker, Crown Baristas Man, I really love dark roast coffee. I love walking into a place and asking for a “coffee” and getting a cup that burns the heck out of my mouth and tastes like tar smoke. I love diner coffee, […]