We offer the Thornton Family Coffee Roasters brand in 5 pound bags and 12 ounce consumer packages. We also offer custom roasting and blending for our private label customers. If you wish to either purchase our brand or work with us to develop your own personalized blends or single origins, contact us! Your passion is our passion. Our lab is equipped with top quality sample roasting and cupping, as well as espresso, drip, and manual brew methods. This allows us to taste coffees efficiently, develop blends and profiles, and provides a top shelf training environment.
Every step we take toward purchasing our raw coffees and roasting them at Thornton Family Coffee Roasters revolves around preserving their original quality at the grower level. We experiment through sample roasting and cupping to determine how best to use them in blends or for our single origins. Any compromise to even one step of the production process removes a small level of quality. Our focus is to make sure every step is managed at the highest level.
We look forward to working with you!
If you want to learn more about our approach, please read on:
The production of coffee, starting from the grower and ending with handing a cup of brewed coffee to a consumer, include 8 fundamental steps. Within each of these steps lives the possibility of a mistake, compromising the starting quality level from the farm. Ensuring there are no mistakes through these steps is our best insurance toward protecting our investments spent in our green coffees.
In every coffee, regardless of origin or quality, lives an opportunity. That opportunity: to taste a coffee that is as good as the quality the location within a coffee origin can possibly allow. In other words, not every origin or region allows growers to produce a great coffee.
Coffees that taste phenomenal must start with a grower who is producing their raw coffee in a location that offers climate and elevation conditions best suited for high quality coffee. They must grow, pick, and process this coffee with the primary goal of preserving its greatest opportunity. This is the same case with lower quality coffees. They must preserve its starting quality to prevent their final product from being compromised. Regardless of what is done through the remaining fundamental steps, from the seed to the consumer, a breakdown at any one of these steps will cost quality.
The management of each step through the production of coffee, starting with the grower and ending when a cup of coffee is handed to a consumer, must maintain a high level of understanding surrounding the best way to preserve its quality. This understanding is realized through experience of having been involved in each step.
Thornton Family Coffee Roasters gained an understanding of these steps through journeyman learning by doing them for over 30 years. We do not cut corners. We do not compromise, regardless of the quality we buy. Below is a list of 8 steps we consider the most important elements:
Growing, picking, washing, milling, packaging, and storage previous to shipping.
Storage while awaiting shipping, and shipping to a final destination safely and expediently.
Storage in a local warehouse or inside the roasting plant, while awaiting being roasted.
Proper roasting while protecting taste attributes realized at the grower level using skills realized through trial and error with a primary focus of protecting previous investments made in every previous step.
Freshness: the importance of realizing coffee goes stale quickly after roasting is a key element. Brew coffee shortly after roasting. Again, it's about protecting the investment. The staler coffee gets, the less its value.
Grinding and extraction is a super critical step. A grind level that does not match the brew method can cause over or under extractions, ruining the work of every previous step.
Coffee brewing methods are standardized through the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). Through trial testing, the SCA has developed general standards for espresso, drip, and manual brewing methods. We like to use these standards as a starting point. But also, brewed coffee goes bad quickly, especially if it's sealed in a pot or sitting on a burner. The importance of knowing how long brewed coffee can sit before it starts to lose its unique character is often trivialized and can ruin the efforts of every previous step if it's not executed properly.
The delivery of a coffee beverage to a consumer can ruin the consumer’s impression of the true quality if the delivery is done using anything less than a friendly courteous approach.
When these steps are followed properly and to the highest level of integrity, the investment a roaster makes in their raw coffee supply chain will be protected all the way to the consumer. Our customers who use our brand need to know how to execute their part of these steps. If you need help with this, we want to help!
The Thornton Family Coffee Roasters wholesale brand follows these steps while purchasing phenomenal coffees. If you choose us as your private label roaster, regardless of the quality you select for your brand, we still follow these steps without compromise, with the primary goals of protecting your investment and providing you with the coffee you want to serve to your communities.