Hi folks! Welcome to Craig’s Coffee.
My name is Craig Batory, founder and owner of Craig’s Coffee located in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood.
A little (or a lot) about me; I started my coffee career in 2011 before I knew I even wanted to get into the coffee biz. I was attending university in Los Angeles and met Eric Stogsdill, owner of Alana’s Coffee Roasters. Eric had a small but mighty coffee roasting operation, through which he taught me the some of the basic steps of roasting coffee and purchasing green coffee. After a few years of roasting and working farmers markets with Alana’s Coffee Roasters, I joined the crew at Caffe Luxxe, a roastery and multi-cafe business in Santa Monica, California.
I spent a few years at Caffe Luxxe, getting trained in David Schomer’s Espresso Extraction Methods and co-managing their cafes (David Schomer’s espresso methods here). Without even knowing it, Caffe Luxxe owner’s Mark and Gary gave me the skill set to eventually open my own roastery. You can check out. I also used my background in social media nd marketing to help Caffe Luxxe with their website, email marketing and social media.
In 2014 I moved to Detroit with my life partner and left the coffee industry to pursue a “desk job” where I continued to hone my web building and marketing skills. But it was only 18 short months later I was pulled back in to coffee. In 2017 I moved back to California and became the Quality Assurance Manager at Mr. Espresso in Oakland, California.
At Mr. Espresso, I was tasked with tasting (or as we call in the coffee industry, “cupping”) several dozen cups of coffee every day to ensure their quality for Mr. Espresso customers. And to taste coffees that had potential to be Mr. Espresso offerings. I thought I knew a lot about specialty coffee already, but it was at Mr. Espresso that I really began to master the craft of being a specialty coffee professional. I learned more about origins, harvesting methods, processing, purchasing, and roasting. If you haven’t heard of Mr. Espresso before, I highly encourage you to check them out. They recently opened their first cafe in downtown Oakland, CA., and it’s absolutely stunning.
After a few years at Mr. E, I returned to Detroit to continue my pursuit in coffee. I worked for Daily Coffee News, Barista Magazine and Edible WOW covering all things coffee (and sometimes food.) I also became a panelist and coffee tasting judge for Coffee Fest, a conference/trade show/competition space for all things coffee. In January of 2020, I took everything I knew and started Craig’s Coffee as a side hustle, roasting for friends and family in my basement. Then, as you probably know, a few short months later Covid struck and shut everything down. Which ironically pushed me into committing to coffee roasting full time, and taking my side hustle into a full blown coffee roasting company.
I’m slowly building out the roastery more and more, and have limited retail and cafe hours. But I’m continuing to grow each month and will continue to expand my retail hours!
I’m currently working with a bunch of amazing brands, and taking on more customers as I grow. I offer coffee at wholesale, at my roastery, online, and as a subscription, where you can get coffee delivered to you automatically every month!
About Coffee Service and Retail Hours
Craig’s Coffee is now open for hot coffee, cold coffee, and tea on Thursdays and Fridays from 8:00 am to 12 pm.
And on Saturdays from 8 am to 2 pm. On Saturdays we have breakfast burritos from Tacos Hernandez, espresso short bread cookies baked by my life partner, and other sweet offerings from Sister Pie.
I am also partnering with other local businesses to host pop-ups during Saturday coffee service. Stay tuned to my Instagram page, @craigs.coffee.company for updates.
About my Roasting Operation
I currently roast at 412 Peterboro St., my new and brick and mortar roastery.
Coffee is available online for purchase online, at the roastery during retail hours, and in grocery stores around Metro Detroit. Check out the full of my retailers HERE. .
Coffee is roasted TO ORDER every Tuesday and Wednesday. Typically there’s a 24-48 hour turn around on retail orders. So if you order your coffee on Friday, it will be roasted and shipped/delivered Tuesday. If you order coffee on Tuesday, it will be roasted and delivered/shipped the next day, Wednesday. (You get the gist?) We try our best to complete local same-day orders, pending on time.
Cold Brew and Cold Brew Concentrate are also available! We’re working on being able to ship our cold brew and concentrate. Currently cold brew and concentrate are available for pickup to local customers.
Some more nerdy stuff about coffee….
All of the coffee offered from Craig’s Coffee is 100% traceable - when I use the word “traceable”, I mean that I know exactly where the coffee is coming from; this includes who the farmers and/or the cooperatives are who grew the coffee, the name and region of their farms, the processing station for which the coffee was turned from a fruit into a “bean”, along with other pertinent info involved in traceability. Most times, I know exactly how much the farmer is making in the sale of their coffee. This isn’t that hard these days with current technology. Half of the farmers I work with are just a WhatsApp or Facebook message away. So when (and if) you hear the term “direct trade”, it doesn’t usually mean the Roaster was involved with the “trade” of goods, aka the roaster paying the producer directly for coffee. It just doesn’t happen that way anymore, and never really happened that way. This is because it’s nearly impossible and somewhat illegal for a producer to ship their green coffee from their farm directly to a roastery, especially in the United States… There a series of checkpoints and requirements that raw grains (raw coffee) have to pass through. More often than not, when a roaster refers to “direct trade”, it means that they and the producer (the farmer, the farm owner, or the processing station) have agreed on a quantity, a price, and a third party exporter to help broker the deal and ship the coffee from origin to destination.
Buying green coffee typically isn’t the magical journey that it’s made out to be. It involves massive amounts of raw goods, huge sums of money, and airtight logistics. Not to mention one bad winter or dry summer can ruin an entire crop for producers. There’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of people involved. Not to mention the “C-Market” and how the stock market and global economy determine the minimum price importers can/should pay. And at the end of the day, it’s just coffee. But I’m proud to say that I try to involve myself very deeply and invest in all of my relationships with all the producers and importers I work with. There’s a ton more I can say about this… if you feel like nerding out with me, stop by the roastery!
If you have any questions about coffee, where it comes from, what it looks like, or anything else, feel free to reach out to me at drink@craigs.coffee.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy bean juice!