MICRO ROASTER OF THE YEAR
Higher Ground Roasters
by Rivers Janssen
THERE ARE PLENTY of good reasons to start a coffee roastery,
but sometimes all the overlapping motives can be reduced to
a single pivotal idea. “We just got tired of drinking bad coffee,” says
Alex Varner, co-owner of Higher Ground Roasters in Leeds,
Alabama.
Winner of Roast magazine’s Micro Roaster of the Year award—presented
to the country’s best roaster with an annual output of less than
100,000 pounds—Higher Ground is one of a growing number of specialty
coffee micro-roasters in the Southeast that are directly confronting
the region’s commercial coffee roots. It’s no easy task in
an area that lacks an established specialty coffee tradition, one where
many consumers still list flavored coffees as their coffees of choice.
Higher Ground has done so, moreover, while committing to a sustainable
business model in all aspects, from purchasing renewable energy to donating
one percent of all gross sales to environmental and educational nonprofits
to selling only certified-fair-trade, organic and shade-grown coffees.
In short, Higher Ground has taken a road rarely traveled in Alabama—and
done so quite successfully.
From the start, roasting exceptional coffee was Higher Ground’s
number one goal. Varner and co-owners Josh Kelly and Glenn Smith founded
Higher Ground in 2002 with a straightforward mission: “to purchase
the best coffee available anywhere, to roast it to perfection, and to
make it available fresh, to anyone.” All three already had experience
working in coffee—Smith had owned and managed coffee shops before,
while both Varner and Kelly put in their time behind various coffee counters—but
it was Kelly who suggested opening a roastery after serving an apprenticeship
with a small local roaster.
 “I felt like the roaster I was working with wasn’t
pursuing quality like it should,” Kelly says, noting in
its defense that the local roaster only roasted coffee once
a week for its retail shop. “Plus, I didn’t think
they were really utilizing the tool that cupping can be within
the roasting process.” Like many coffee obsessives, Kelly
started researching and studying the industry on his own time
and quickly came to an inevitable conclusion. “It was
evident that either a change needed to be made there or I needed
to make a change myself.”
When Kelly, Varner and Smith started Higher Ground, their ambition
and enthusiasm initially drove the business and helped them
overcome the challenge of developing an audience for sustainably
farmed specialty coffee virtually from scratch. “The first
couple of years were tough,” says Varner. “No one
here had heard of fair trade, and organic wasn’t all that
well known either. But we were happily surprised how many people
came out to support us and kept us afloat through the years.”
It was challenging from a coffee perspective as well, as it
wasn’t always easy to satisfy Kelly’s thirst for
knowledge. “Birmingham has a really nice, unique roasting
community as far as the amount of roasters,” he explains. “But
even though the region has roughly a million people, there are
only two very large roasters—Royal Cup and Red Diamond—and
two or three independent micro-roasters in town. So the wellspring
of information you can pull from Birmingham is limited.”
“We had a solid foundation when we started,” Kelly
says, “but there’s also been a lot of ‘learn
as you go’ along the way. And we’ve learned a lot.”
That much is clear, as Higher Ground’s coffees cupped
very well according to Roast’s panel of Micro Roaster
of the Year cuppers. The roasting skill displayed by Higher
Ground is even more impressive given Kelly’s background
as a self-taught cupper, a relative rarity in the industry. “Initially
I didn’t have all the terms intact, but I still had a
good working understanding of the tastes and profiles of certain
coffees,” he says.
 These days, Higher Ground relies on far more than its owners’ coffee
instincts, having implemented a hands-on roaster training program
modeled after the SCAA’s roaster apprenticeship program
and continually training employees on the finer points of cupping
and identifying cup characteristics. It’s all part of
helping transform the Birmingham area into a market that truly
understands and values specialty coffee, even on a limited basis.
The Coffee
Higher Ground roasted roughly 89,500 pounds of coffee last year on its
30-kilo Dietrich IR-24 roaster, all of it certified-fair-trade, organic
and shade grown. The decision to roast 100-percent-certified coffee wasn’t
taken lightly. Part of it was a business decision, as it gave the company
an immediate niche in an otherwise semi-homogenous market. Part of it
was a philosophical decision: the owners decided that coffee quality
should be about more than just flavor, and should encompass such criteria
as adequate shade cover on coffee farms, chemical-free production, and
small family and cooperative farming. And finally, Varner says Kelly
wouldn’t have had it any other way. “Josh decided if he was
going to put his life into roasting, he wanted to do it in a proper manner.
And that meant roasting all sustainable coffees,” Varner explains.
Higher Ground’s coffee lineup now includes coffees from single
origins like Guatemala, East Timor, Bolivia, Mexico, Sumatra, Ethiopia
and Peru, along with a number of blends affiliated with Alabama-area
nonprofits, such as the Alabama Environmental Council, the Appalachian
Trail Conservancy and the Literacy Council. Because Higher Ground donates
one percent of its annual gross sales to environmental and educational
nonprofits, these “nonprofit blends” have proven successful
in many smaller community-oriented cafes, which use the coffees to raise
awareness about local issues. The nonprofits themselves often sell the
coffees as well, which helps get Higher Ground into the hands of more
new customers.
As with most successful micro-roasters, Higher Ground has developed
close relationships with a variety of coffee importers and farming co-ops—a
necessity for roasters looking for consistent sources of topnotch coffee.
These relationships, which include taking trips to origin when possible,
also have a philosophical basis. “Aside from making the industry
more personal and intimate, it allows every actor to be more invested
in the success of the coffee,” says Katy Seto, marketing director
for Higher Ground, citing the value to a roaster of understanding how
much care a grower puts into the coffee. “It’s huge for the
effort that we put into the cup,” agrees Kelly.
 Once a new crop arrives, the company follows a familiar routine,
cupping the coffee carefully and then determining the ideal roast over
a span of several weeks. Shipping, on the other hand, is anything but
leisurely, as Higher Ground always roasts and ships on the same day for
maximum freshness. In fact, the company holds freshness at such a premium
that it doesn’t require minimum orders, helping ensure that a retail
shop won’t sit on unused coffee for several days.
Perhaps the biggest challenge Higher Ground faces is getting
the coffee into people’s hands for the first time. The company
doesn’t have a retail location, so it either has to depend on its
wholesale clients or find creative ways to hold tastings, such as at
roastery open houses or through nonprofit fundraisers. “You can
tell the customer that your coffee is the best, but they won’t
realize it until they taste it against someone else’s,” Kelly
says. “We try to help people overcome their ruts.”
A Sustainable Business Model
As part of the decision to sell certified coffee, the company decided
from the start to integrate sustainable concepts into every aspect of
the business. Varner brought several years of environmental activism
with him to Higher Ground—he ran a model garden farm in Alabama
immediately prior—and works with Kelly and Smith to continually
push the business in a more eco-friendly direction. Among the company’s
initiatives is a program called “1% for the Planet,” which
earmarks one percent of the company’s annual gross sales to environmental
and educational nonprofits; financial and volunteer support for several
other nonprofits, including Freshwater Land Trust, Oxfam America, the
Alabama Rivers Alliance, the Georgia Crop Improvement Association and
the Southeastern Foot Trail Coalition; and the purchase of wind power
credits from Renewable Choice Energy to offset the company’s energy
usage.
On a more tangible in-house level, Higher Ground uses only recycled
and eco-friendly materials (when available) in the plant, including paper
products, cleansers, business cards, packing supplies, as well as sample
bags made of compostable corn plastic. To combat atmospheric waste in
the roasting process, the company bought an afterburner that reduces
98 percent of the roaster’s emissions. Even such items as the company’s
mugs (also biodegradable corn plastic), Frisbees (100-percent recyclable
plastic), T-shirts (unbleached organic cotton), and syrups (organic)
meet the criteria. And as with any good sustaina-business, Higher Ground
minimizes waste through a recycling and composting program, including
donating the roaster’s nitrogen-rich chaff to a local organic farm
for composting.
The sustainable business model extends its efforts on behalf
of employees and the community. Each of the seven employees are encouraged
to work in the native plant nursery—located in the Higher Ground
courtyard—or at various promotional events, where they can educate
customers, work with local farms on composting or help the company’s
nonprofit partners develop coffee blends. Furthermore, all the employees
are encouraged to further their general education, whether through Spanish
immersion courses, computer training, photography or something else.
And, when possible, Higher Ground gives employees the opportunity to
travel to origin. They can’t do it as often as they’d like,
as the company is still quite small, but they’re moving more in
that direction. “It’s an extremely educational experience
for all of us, it’s fun, and it helps us grow more intimate with
the producers and the coffee itself,” Kelly says. 
There’s ample evidence that the approach has been successful in
Birmingham, particularly among customers also affiliated with the nonprofit
community. The Appalachian Trail blend, for instance, is served at several
shelters along the trail and sold at many trail stores, leading hikers
to inquire about the coffee upon returning from the woods. Sometimes,
the reach extends well beyond Birmingham. David Walters, owner of Smart
World Coffee in Morristown, N.J., started serving Higher Ground coffee
just over three years ago at his retail stores. Walters switched to Higher
Ground for two reasons: one, he wanted a company that believed in sustainability
up and down the supply chain (his previous supplier sold both organic
and conventional coffees); and two, he wanted better quality and consistency.
Higher Ground easily met both criteria.
“I’ve been in the health food business for years, and I see
both people who really care and people who are in it for the money,” Walters
says. “These guys are great because they’re really sincere
about what they do. They care about coffee and they care about the environment.”
The final piece of the Higher Ground puzzle is often the most
challenging: making sure Birmingham-area consumers understand why the
company does what it does. To that end, employees often spend ample time
working in the community. Varner and Kelly have taught seminars at Samford
University and Birmingham Southern University on green business and sustainable
agriculture, while Varner has lectured on shade coffee at the Birmingham
Zoo. The company also holds a number of open house events at the roastery
for the community at large, along with weekly training sessions on Fridays
for new and old customers. And the company maintains a resource center
at the roasting facility, with articles, books and other reference materials
that cover everything from business plans and shop designs to coffee
chemistry and barista training.
The Next Stage
As for the future of Higher Ground, Kelly and Varner don’t have
grand plans to expand but would like to keep the business growing at
a moderate, natural pace. “We hope to take more trips to origin,” Kelly
says, “and to pursue more wholesale and Internet sales.” For
his part, Varner would like to continue pushing for more and better environmental
initiatives. Higher Ground is in the process of converting all its local
delivery vehicles to biodiesel, and hopes to form a second biodiesel
co-op in the Birmingham area. And although the company is in the planning
stages for a new building, it has yet to determine which green technologies
the owners will pursue in its construction.
As a whole, however, Kelly, Smith and Varner are pleased with
the pace of growth and with their push to promote sustainability within
the Birmingham community. Kelly finds it particularly gratifying to be
part of an industry that’s flexible enough to take such issues
seriously. “The coffee industry as a whole just seems a little
quicker to change when things aren’t working in the business place,” Kelly
says. “Whether it’s supporting sustainable farming techniques—such
as farming organically or on small farms—or backing the slow food
trend by promoting French press coffee over using a pot, the coffee industry
seems to lead the way.”
RIVERS JANSSEN is a freelance writer and editor based in Portland, Ore.
He can be reached
at riversjanssen@gmail.com
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