We started working with Dillanos Coffee Roasters in 2010 when Greg was impressed enough with their roasting operation, their team, and their willingness to go above and beyond what any wholesale customer had previously asked of them to think that switching to a roaster located in Washington State was a good idea for Gregorys Coffee.
He was right, of course. Our partnership with Dillanos, first and foremost, led to us serving really terrific coffees. In addition to improving our house blend, we were able to step up our single origin coffee game. Dillanos, along with importer Sustainable Harvest, had relationships with excellent producers such as the Chacons, of the inspiring Las Lajas farm, whose willingness to constantly improve and experiment with processing brought us both the honey-processed Las Lajas coffee and their naturally-processed Perla Negra.
Our espresso also took a huge step forward, with the Kerasi 327 blend putting in work for over a year, before being replaced with the first version of Night Vision. We got to fly out to Seattle to help put together that blend in person. It was a formative experience in our coffee education, and it made all of us especially proud of Night Vision, which we would end up tweaking throughout the years while keeping that heavy chocolate flavor that it was built around intact. Dillanos’ willingness to actively work with us on tweaking and developing blends helped us constantly improve the quality of our coffee.
The Night Vision blend at first included Las Lajas, and was later based around coffee from a Brazilian farm called Fazenda Sertao, which Greg and Bailey (way before she became our Director of Education) got to visit in 2011. Maciej and Greg got to take a trip to the Las Lajas farm a year and change later. Those origin trips not only taught us about how coffee gets from farm to cup, but also helped develop in all of us values that we then pass on to our managers and baristas. Going to origin instilled in us a sense of responsibility to all the people who spend massive amounts of physical and mental energy on the coffee long before it reaches our shores.
The team at Dillanos has worked for years to provide us with great coffee and make all the logistical stuff that goes with physically getting that coffee in our shops as easy as possible (the latter of those two tasks is often underrated in its difficulty). Phil Beattie is world class as far as crafting espresso blends - buying coffees, fitting them together, and figuring out how they should be roasted (he also just roasted the coffee for the winner of this weekend’s US Barista Championship). Chris Buck has been a constant help in all aspects and one of the best people we’ve had a chance to deal with in our time in specialty coffee so far. Keith Hayward is a never-faltering source of encouragement and excitement, whether it be support for our team-building events or just wanting to know how our lives are going. Back when we initially went with Dillanos as our primary roaster, Anna Gutierrez made the trip to NYC and worked individually on the espresso bar with nearly every barista on staff and contributed to the early stages of development of our system of training and reviewing our staff. Michelle Stanley is a customer service powerhouse, with thousands of pounds of coffee per week, next-day orders, and sometimes strange requests from our managers being absolutely no sweat. It almost goes without saying (but why not just say it) that without Bjorn Dhase the coffee we’re serving wouldn’t be roasted at all, let alone expertly roasted. Carissa Campbell, when we’ve gotten the opportunity to work with her, has been awesome. None of this would have happened without Lon LaFlamme, who met Greg in 2007 and, after writing us up in the Coffee and Tea Journal in 2010, convinced Greg to take a trip out to Sumner. David Morris and Chris Heyer have built a company of amazing people and the whole Dillanos team has given us the opportunity to learn, flourish, and develop. We can say pretty objectively that we would not be anywhere near where we are today without them.
So, in case the elegiac tone of this post hasn’t given it away, it’s with no small amount of emotion that we’re writing to announce that we’re moving away from Dillanos as our main roaster. We’re very proud to include Dillanos as a part of our history and can’t thank them enough for the position they’ve helped put us in. We’ll write more about our future plans very soon - we wouldn’t be leaving such a terrific partner if we didn’t have future plans we were very excited about - but for now, we just wanted to say:
Thank you, Dillanos.
Gregorys Coffee