Ember Coffee Co.

Our roaster left us We had signed on, built a menu around their beans, and trained our team in Big Lake on their espresso. Not long after, they were gone. We spent a few weeks calling around and pulling shots with whatever we could get, apologizing at the counter to people who had come in for a drink we could no longer make the same way. Nobody at that company was cruel about it. We were an account number, and account numbers get closed. So when Fresh Cup ran a piece in August called 10 Things Your Wholesale Roaster Wants You To Know, But Is Afraid to Say, we read it twice. Garrett Oden had surveyed thirty roasters, from six thousand pounds a year up to five hundred thousand, and asked them what they wished their cafes understood. Most of them answered anonymously. Of course they did. The roaster and cafe relationship runs on goodwill, and it is hard to tell someone who pays your invoices that the invoice is late. We would have thought about it too. We would rather say ours out loud, before you order anything. The coffee was paid for months ago We buy our green coffee through Cafe Imports in Minneapolis, and our Colombia comes through Samaria. Both are importers. We are not standing in a wet mill in Huila shaking hands with a grower, and we are careful never to say that we are, because the paperwork behind our coffee is an importer position sheet. We would rather you know that than hear a nicer story. We pay about six dollars a pound for green coffee, roughly three times the commodity price, because we are buying a few bags at a time from lots we have tasted rather than buying containers. That money leaves months before the coffee reaches our roastery in Big Lake, and long before any of it reaches your shop. By the time you place your order, that coffee has already been chosen, paid for, and carried across an ocean. The invoice you see is the last step, not the first. A dollar a pound is about a nickel a cup One roaster in the Fresh Cup survey did the arithmetic that most of us have never had the nerve to do in front of a partner. A one dollar per pound increase on wholesale coffee works out to about five cents per drink. Here is the same math with a pound of ours. A pound is 453 grams. A double shot pulls about 20 grams, which gives you 22 drinks. A dollar more per pound costs you four and a half cents on each one. Round a latte up by a dime and you have covered the increase twice, and nobody standing at your counter will notice. We say that gently, because the dime is not the hard part. The hard part is being the person who changes the menu board. Prices move, and you hear it from us Green coffee is an agricultural product traded on a commodity market, so its price moves whether anyone wants it to or not. In the same Fresh Cup survey, 52% of roasters said they will raise prices in 2027, 45% said they will hold, and one said they will come down. We will not pretend we can sit outside that. What we can promise is how you find out. You will hear about a price change from us, in advance, with the reason attached, and never as a surprise line on an invoice you have already committed to. Perhaps that sounds like a low bar. It was not cleared for us when we were the shop on the other end of it. Net 15, and the call we would rather get early Our standard wholesale terms are Net 15. Distributors run on Net 30. If you would rather pay by card at the time of the order we will set you up that way instead, which carries a three percent card fee, and delivery is free on anything over $200 net. Two of the roasters Fresh Cup surveyed put late invoices near the top of their list. One of them put it plainly: Pay your bills on time. We're not your bank. Financing is the most expensive part of this. Anonymous roaster, 150,000 lbs per year, Fresh Cup, August 2026 We are not going to put it that sharply, because we have been the shop that was short in February and we remember exactly how that felt. So here is the version we would rather you hear. If an invoice is going to be late, call us before it is late. We can nearly always work something out in advance. After the fact it gets harder for both of us. Roast-to-order has a schedule behind it We roast to order and ship the same week. Nothing sits in a warehouse waiting for someone to want it, which is the reason your first bag tastes the way it does. It also means we cannot make coffee appear on a Tuesday afternoon because the count came up short on Monday. Coffee needs to rest, too. Beans keep releasing gas for a few days after they come off the roaster, and espresso pulled the morning after a roast behaves differently from espresso pulled four days later. Coffee ordered on the day you run out arrives technically fresh and practically awkward. We have found that the shops who keep a spare week on the shelf almost never call us in a panic. It is the cheapest insurance in the building, and it sits right there next to the flour. What we will and will not print on your bag We can build a blend for your shop and put your name on the front of it. Twelve of our partners already sell one. Brigitte's Cafe has a house blend with their logo on the label and our coffee inside, and every bag someone carries out the door is their name going home with a regular. The minimum on a custom label is 25 bags. We carry certified organic coffees and Fair Trade Organic coffees, and we carry coffees that hold neither certificate. 10,000 Lakes is certified organic. Our Ethiopia Yirgacheffe is certified organic. Others are grown clean and carry no paperwork at all, because certification costs money and we have not paid it on every lot we buy. So if a seal matters on your menu, ask us about the specific coffee you want and we will tell you plainly what that one holds. We would rather answer per coffee than wave a word across the whole shelf. We also will not tell you we buy direct from farmers, because we buy through importers. Cafe Imports handles most of it and Samaria handles our Colombia. It is a less romantic sentence, and it is the accurate one. What we will do is put the farm, the region, the elevation and the variety on the bag. Pick up one of ours and look at the front. The farm printed there is the farm the coffee came from. We test for mold and mycotoxins as well. Coffee is a crop, and crops can pick up mold somewhere between the farm and the bag. It is a flavor problem before it is anything else. We test because we will not hand our own kids something we have not checked ourselves. If you are thinking about roasting your own Five roasters in the survey used their answer to talk cafes out of roasting. We are not going to do that. If you want to roast, roast. It is a good craft, and some of the best shops we know roast their own coffee. What we would ask is that you look clearly at what you are picking up, because sourcing green is a separate business from running a shop. It arrives with agronomy, logistics, a commodity market you do not control, and a machine that needs somebody standing in front of it on a Tuesday morning when you would rather be on the floor with your team. If you decide to go and do it, tell us. We will help you think it through. We would rather lose an account cleanly than have someone leave us quietly. What you are buying The coffee is the easy part to describe. It is air-roasted on a fluid bed rather than a drum, which keeps it smooth and low in acid, and it has been voted Minnesota's best coffee four years running in the Star Tribune Minnesota's Best reader awards. We roast from more than fifteen origins and we will build a blend around your menu. The rest of it is a phone number that gets answered. Jeff coaches our partners on growing the business side of their shop. Elisa trains counters on how to offer a second drink without anybody feeling sold to. If you are dialing in a new espresso at seven in the morning, you can text us, and one of us will pick up or start a video call and watch you pull the shot. Matt Taus at The Hen & The Hog in Albertville moved to us from a national roaster. Duluth's Best Bread up in Duluth, Jill's Cafe in Richmond, Brigitte's Cafe in St. Cloud and Olde Main Eatery in Elk River order every few weeks. Not one of them is an account number here. You can see the rest of the shops pouring our coffee on our Find Ember Near You page, and the terms and ordering side lives on our wholesale coffee page. Existing partners reorder through the wholesale portal. If you would like to taste it first, we will send three coffees chosen for your shop. We call before we ship, so that we send you the right ones. The call is free, and so is the coffee.

A short one from the two of us, to the regulars who show up most. You are the reason any of this works. We opened Ember to make a place worth coming back to, and you turned it into Minnesota's Best shop, a roastery, and jobs for people we love. A few things happening this fall: the Big Lake shop is open Mondays again after a few years dark on the day. Fall drinks are back on the board. And September's Roaster's Choice is a Kenyan micro lot called Elephant Head that we roasted deeper than most. The part that gets us teary eyed is that we would not be here without customers and friends like you. So thank you. No ask today. Matt and Elisa

A mom stood at our counter in Big Lake this spring holding her phone. She'd read something about mold in coffee, and she wanted to know whether the pot she'd been making her husband every morning for nine years was a problem. She wasn't being silly. She'd read the same things everyone reads. What are mycotoxins in coffee? Coffee is a crop. It's picked wet, dried in the sun, bagged, shipped across an ocean and stored, and every one of those steps is a chance for moisture to sit where it shouldn't. When it does, mold can grow. Some molds leave behind compounds called mycotoxins, and the mycotoxin in coffee that people mean is almost always ochratoxin A. That much is real. Mold in coffee is a quality-control problem, and it's been studied for decades. Is there mold in coffee? The number you've probably seen If you've gone looking, you've run into a figure. Ninety-one point seven percent of samples contaminated. Ninety percent of store-bought coffee. Half of everything. Those numbers come from real studies, and they get used in a way the studies don't support. The 91.7% figure traces back to a survey of green coffee, the raw unroasted beans before anyone has done anything to them, and it counted mold presence rather than toxin in a finished cup. Detectable and dangerous are different words. Almost every alarming version of this you'll read online quietly swaps one for the other. Pooled surveillance of coffee people actually drink finds ochratoxin A detectable in roughly 53% of samples, often at parts per billion. Samples that exceed the legal safety limit are a small minority of those. Where mold in coffee comes from Mold needs moisture. Below about 0.65 water activity, which measures how much moisture is free for something to live on rather than how damp a thing feels in your hand, mold doesn't get going at all. The particular molds that produce ochratoxin A want conditions considerably wetter than that, and they want warmth with it. Coffee that's dried on schedule and held dry afterwards gives them very little to work with. Coffee that sat wet in a heap for three days gives them a great deal. What predicts contamination better than anything else is defects. When researchers separated defective beans out of Brazilian arabica lots and tested them on their own, the black beans averaged 25.7 micrograms per kilogram and the sour beans 11.3, against low single digits for the lots they'd been sitting in. The problem concentrates in the beans you can see are wrong. Every bag we roast carries a roast date on the front. See what's fresh this week. Arabica vs robusta Which one has more mycotoxins? You'll read that robusta is the problem and arabica is safe. Surveillance does find ochratoxin A somewhat more often in robusta, roughly 37% of samples against 26% for arabica in one comparison. The gap is real, it's smaller than the framing suggests, and the reason for it has little to do with the bean itself. Robusta is more often dried with the fruit still attached, grown at lower and more humid elevations, and strip-picked, which sweeps ripe, unripe and overripe cherries into one bag. Every one of those practices raises risk in arabica too. Brazilian arabica that's strip-picked and dried in the fruit behaves much the same way. How a coffee was grown and handled tells you more than which species is printed on the bag. Does roasting destroy mycotoxins? Roasting destroys most of them. Published reductions of ochratoxin A run from about half to essentially all of it, depending on how dark the roast goes and where the coffee came from, and darker roasts destroy more. You'll still see it claimed that roasting does nothing to mycotoxins in coffee. That one's easy to check, and it doesn't hold up. Is coffee mold dangerous? What the limits say The European Union caps ochratoxin A in roasted coffee at 3 micrograms per kilogram. The United States sets no limit at all, which sounds alarming until you look at why. The FDA tested 514 coffee samples between 2008 and 2022. One of them came back above even the internal threshold the agency uses to decide whether a sample needs a closer look. We're not going to pretend the science sits still, either. European regulators moved to a more cautious framework in 2020, stepping away from a single safe-intake number and toward a method that pays closer attention to people at the high end of exposure. Coffee is one of several everyday foods that contribute, alongside grains, wine, dried fruit and spices, and in most studies it isn't the largest one. Anyone telling you the matter is entirely settled in either direction is ahead of the evidence. Why we test for mycotoxins We've found that the flavor arrives before the risk does. The Specialty Coffee Association's green grading standard counts a single fungus-damaged bean as a full primary defect, the same weight as a full black or a full sour bean, and enough on its own to keep a lot out of specialty grade. The tasting notes for it read like a warning label: fermented, moldy, earthy, dirty, phenolic. Those are the same beans the researchers found carrying the highest readings. Buying to a specialty grade throws them out before anyone gets to the question of toxins, which is the plainest reason we buy the way we do. Coffee with a mold problem tastes wrong long before it becomes a health question. We also send samples out. Ours go to IEH Analytical Laboratories in Seattle, an ISO 17025 accredited food-safety lab that runs ochratoxin A and aflatoxins by HPLC and LC-MS/MS. We name them because a testing claim you can't check isn't worth much. If you want coffee bought to a specialty grade and sent out for testing, ours is here. Browse our coffee, or set up a subscription so it arrives fresh instead of sitting on a shelf. What we're not going to tell you We won't tell you that anything we sell is certified mold-free. No such certification exists. The phrase isn't defined by the FDA, the USDA or anyone else, which means any company can print it on a bag. We won't tell you that your coffee is the reason you're tired. A lot of people tell us Ember sits easier on their stomach, and we hear it often enough to pass it along without dressing it up as a medical finding. Air roasting lowers acidity. That part we can stand behind. Keeping mold out at home The useful moves here are unglamorous. Buy whole bean and grind it as you go, since pre-ground sits around longer. Keep it sealed somewhere dry and out of the fridge, where it picks up moisture every time the door opens. Drink it within a few weeks of the roast date, and buy from anyone willing to print that date on the bag. Then stop worrying about it. Back to the counter She asked one more thing before she left. She wanted to know whether we were telling her all this because we wanted her to buy our coffee. Partly, yes. We'd have told her the same thing if she'd walked out with nothing. Ready to taste the difference? Shop our air-roasted coffee. Every bag is roasted in our own roastery in Big Lake, Minnesota, and dated the day it comes off the roaster.