Lulu's at the Octagon (Santa Cruz): There is a venerable tradition to coffee roasting in America. We humbly embrace that tradition. For 25 years, rather than follow the latest fads, whether they be ultra-dark or ber-light coffees, we have, day in and day out, roasted the coffee that we want to drink. Our roast profiles tend to the middle of the color spectrum (very early into second crack, for you home roasters out there), where a caramelly sweetness manifests. We generally eschew the carbon that develops in very dark roast profiles, and the sour acid notes that remain in coffees in which the roast has been stopped prior to second crack. We roast our coffees 5-6 days a week in small batches on a very nice, fire engine red, quarter-bag drum roaster named Gabriel-Mathieu de Clieu, although he prefers to be called Francois. We present each of our coffees roasted to the apex of its flavor. And while each coffee we roast has a defined and distinctive terroir that we highlight with our roasting, at its core, roasting coffee is about caramelizing sugars. So that's what we do. Really well. You're gonna like this stuff.