Local Coffee Roaster Teams Up With Local Band to Fight Chester River Runoff

Cafetin owner Tim O’Brien (3rd from left) with (l to r) Sam Guthridge, Marc Dykeman and Ben Armiger of Chester River Runoff.

Wake up, Chestertown! There is a new local coffee roasting company in town to help fuel your mornings. Chestertown’s own Cafetín Roasting Company may be just getting started, but it has big plans to bring fresh, high quality and sustainable coffee to Chestertown and the Eastern Shore.

You may already know their coffee from the Chestertown farmers’ market or have tasted it at Evergrain Bread Company, where it is brewed and served. Owner Tim O’Brien wants to make a statement about his company’s commitment to quality as well as social and community projects. His small company has just announced it is teaming up with local bluegrass favorites, Chester River Runoff, to offer a great coffee blend named for the band. At year’s end, 5% of the sales of the blend will be donated to a Chester River watershed project.

“We love their music and the band shares our concern for the health of the river, so we just decided to team up, have some fun with it and make a good brew that also helps the Chester,” said O’Brien. As the company’s sales grow, so too will the size of the donation. Hopefully, when people enjoy a cup of “Chester River Runoff,” perhaps while listening to the band, they will be reminded that the Chester was not always the color of coffee and be moved to support protection efforts.

Owner Tim O’Brien and his family moved to Chestertown three years ago after living many years in Costa Rica, where he worked in international development, and where they own an award winning coffee plantation. O’Brien commented, “My wife grew up on the Eastern Shore and my daughter was born in St. Michaels. When we decided to move back to the US we wanted to come back to the shore and raise our family.” After looking around at many towns, they knew Chestertown was the place as soon as they drove over the bridge. Next came the question, “How do we make this work?” The answer came easily enough: coffee!

The O’Briens bought the coffee farm in 2004 and built a processing plant there as a social project to help improve incomes of local coffee farmers in the remote mountain village where Tim was a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1994-96. Support and betterment of local economy has always been included in their business model. Their friends in Costa Rica called the little project “Cafetín” (pronounced café teen), meaning “Tim’s coffee,” based on their (mis)pronunciation of Tim’s name, but also “coffee break” in Spanish. They couldn’t have known that their Cafetín “social project” would grow to win national awards and gain acclaim from international coffee roasters.

Cafetin Roasting Company aims to redefine people’s idea of what good coffee tastes like, while respecting the people who grow it by maximizing the coffee’s potential. Good coffee roasting is a totally manual process; it takes a skilled hand and focus to do it right, resulting in a smooth tasting, delicious product that retains the characteristics of the coffee variety or region where it is grown. “We know how much work it takes to grow great coffee, so we do take it very seriously. But really we just want people to enjoy it, however they like to drink it, and know they are supporting a local and sustainable product,” states O’Brien.

Cafetín Roasting Company was founded in Chestertown in July 2012, and is now one of just a handful of coffee roasters in the US that can truly claim to be a farm to cup product. In Chestertown, that is as local and farm direct as coffee can be.

www.cafetincoffee.com and www.chesterriverrunoff.com