We recently connected with Jeff & Rocky Rolfzen and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeff & Rocky, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

In 2023 we sailed our sailboat up to the San Juan Islands on the Washington coast. We had no plans but came with an open heart and found we enjoyed it and decided to stay. We left everything behind that we had in Tacoma which we retrieved later but still arrived and lived at anchor for months before finally settling down and honing in on Lopez Island. Due to our independence on the sailboat people noticed us roasting coffee on board and after we got more established in the community the opportunity to take over the brand of Lopez Island Coffee Roasters came to fruition.

Jeff & Rocky, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We source, roast, and distribute coffee from a small island in the archipelago known as the San Juan Islands. We had lots of commercial coffee experience in our household already and toured as a band for years before Covid wiped all the shows off our schedule and forced us to rethink our plans. On an island we have to get creative about how we bring in coffee since shipping is hard and much of it is DIY. We end up delivering every bag of coffee ourselves to the 10 or so stores that stock us as well as picking up big 60-70kg sacks of coffee by the pallet on the mainland as needed. Despite all of this we still can provide high quality coffee, consistently and affordably which is a big challenge on the islands. Most products like ours are 2-3 times the price for the consumer or much lower quality.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We do all the roasting and packaging of the product. We both worked in cafes when we were younger and Jeff, the head roaster, worked as a roaster for a couple different places in the Midwest. When we were a touring band we had a small coffee roasting set up in our rig that we would use to keep coffee fresh and in cheap supply. We eventually transitioned to living full time on a 41 foot sailboat and continued roasting our coffee on the water. These unique environments and experiences have helped us further understand the variables in the product as well as seeing coffee up close on a national and international level from our travels. Using the network of coffee importers and sourcers we knew from back in our cafe days we’ve been able to jump right in with an understanding that can take some people years to develop. There are other small roasters in the island chain and we do our best to share our experience with them so we can all thrive together.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Markets and demos! We have been pretty aggressive about rebranding the image and persona of the roastery to let people know that we are highly skilled, passionate, and very transparent about what we know and don’t know. We hit the local markets and do pop-up events regularly that focus on things like the difference between dark and light roast coffee, how a dollar spent on our coffee circulates the local economy vs a big brand competitor, and just how different coffees can taste from around the world. Customers like buying into the story of the brand and it’s important not to just tell them that story but to include them in it. We live in a small community and it’s vital that the story of our brand honor the fact that it’s named after the island we live on by including the community and their thoughts into our decisions.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lopezislandcoffeeroasters.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lopezislandcoffee
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lopezislandcoffee

Image Credits

Taken by the team!