Let's get to know one another.

Hi there, my name is Roger Buzby and my wife Sarah and I own and operate Mainely Coffee.  We're a small operation dedicated to hand-roasting specialty coffee with attention to quality over quantity.

Now, having said all that, you may be wondering what it really means, who we are and how did we decide to become coffee roasters in the first place? These are all excellent questions so let's break it down and get you some well-deserved answers!

My wife, Sarah, is a registered nurse with a bachelor's degree who has been in that profession for twenty years. I am a worship leader, part-time preacher, and entrepreneur who has owned many businesses over the years including repairing old video game systems and buying and selling used books. We live in Millinocket, Maine along with our two beautiful daughters. We like hiking, movies, games of all types as well as being foodies and enjoying a good cup of coffee, tea, and/or hot cocoa.

In the beginning, we thought that coffee was coffee and one coffee was basically the same as every other coffee. In 1998, while on a cruise of the Western Carribean we stopped in Ocho Rios Jamaica and had our first taste of freshly roasted coffee. It was a life-changing moment.  We bought some and brought it home and soon we stopped drinking coffee almost entirely. Why? Simple, we couldn't find a coffee that tasted as good as what we had in Jamaica!

A few years later a friend of ours told us about a new coffee shop in Winston-Salem, NC (near where we were living at the time). They were roasting their coffee daily on-site. We tried it and immediately fell in love. This was what we'd been looking for. Unfortunately, we were unable to go very often as the price was prohibitive for us at the time. We had two young children and going out for coffee was a luxury we could rarely afford.

Fast forward to Christmas 2011, my brother Nathan sent us some coffee as a gift. In the letter accompanying it, he told us that he had roasted it himself, at home. It was so good! We asked him how he had done it and he said he'd bought a home roasting appliance. We couldn't afford one but did discover many other ways to roast coffee at home. So, I went to a thrift store, picked up an old popcorn popper and ordered some green coffee online. Within a week we were turning beans brown. I say turning beans brown rather than roasting because at the time we didn't really know anything about the science, let alone the art, of roasting coffee.

It didn't take long for us to realize that there was a lot more to roasting coffee than just applying hot air until the oils came to the surface. We were excited about roasting coffee and shared that excitement with others by creating the Maine Home Roasters Facebook page in 2012. Over the next six years, we read books, watched videos and experimented with various ways to adjust and fine tune our roasts. We shared this through the Maine Home Roasters social media but it eventually became clear that the vast majority of people, while they found coffee roasting interesting, weren't really interested in doing it themselves. We frequently were asked if our coffee was for sale, especially after someone had tasted it.

That brings us to November 2017. We had been trying to start a subscription box service marketing the coffee of roasters from around the State of Maine. Unfortunately, we were more excited about this than most of the roasters we contacted. That's when we decided to take the plunge and become commercial coffee roasters.  It took us a few months to convert our addition into a commercial roasting space and get our licenses and certifications in place but by mid-March, we were up and running.

So there you have it, how we got into coffee roasting and why we're such sticklers about quality. It was quality coffee that rekindled our interest in coffee and it was learning about the science of roasting that sparked a passion for pursuing the perfect cup. We will never stop learning or experimenting as we continue that quest and we invite you to join us.