From Seed to Cup

Fourteen years ago, Hannah Ulbrich went out with her children to deliver newspapers and came home with a coffee roasting business. Copper Door Coffee started as a humble roastery in a neighbor’s garage, but under Ulbrich’s leadership, the company has grown into a veritable empire, encompassing seven cafes in Denver, soon to be eight, a thriving wholesale business, and an entire ecosystem of educational programming, workshops, and inspirational classes. Additionally, Copper Door Coffee uses its economic bandwidth to empower women-led agricultural collectives in rural Latin America and elsewhere, enabling them to develop their businesses, create equity, and strengthen their communities.

Copper Door Coffee officially turns 20 this October and now employs over 40 people. Its public cafe next to the Denver Botanic Gardens is an aromatic oasis of caffeinated bliss. Creating a roadmap to scale the business, however, has been a trial-and-error process for Ulbrich, who previously worked as a high school English teacher. Her story is the stuff of underdog legend and, simply put, restores faith in the American Dream. In 2010, as the financial crisis reverberated through the global economy, Ulbrich and her family lost their home to foreclosure. They ultimately relocated from Phoenix to Denver to be closer to family and began rebuilding their lives. When her neighbor casually mentioned he was selling his roaster, she made him an offer on the spot, and he accepted, despite already having a buyer lined up.

The Ethics of Scale

Ulbrich took out a loan to purchase that first modest roastery. At the time, she had no professional experience in the coffee business. “I have a high tolerance for risk,” Ulbrich explains. “I grew up in a chaotic environment without any structure, and I wanted to own something and end the poverty loop in my family.” 

She had previously worked as a high school English teacher; however, Ulbrich soon found that her background in education lent itself to building a business. “Both parenting and working with high school students have taught me how to manage people, communicate expectations, model accountability, and earn trust,” she says. Her work hasn’t gone unnoticed. Ulbrich was recently awarded a fellowship from the Tory Burch Foundation, which seeks to increase “women’s economic power by supporting entrepreneurs to build businesses that last.” The fellowship provides a highly selective cohort of women with access to mentorship, capital, and the kind of institutional knowledge that founders need to succeed.

Since that first coffee roaster, Ulbrich has upgraded to a more industrial-grade machine, a drum roaster affectionately named Cecilia after the song by Simon and Garfunkel (“Oh Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily”). “I had to fail in order to learn,” she says, laughing. The names of her coffee also reflect her humor and signature feminist style. “Shady Lady,” for example, is a roast that mixes beans from Colombia, Ethiopia, and Sumatra, with notes of black cherry, mixed berries, and lemon zest, while “Midnight Mama,” a French roast, includes hints of tobacco, walnut, and dark chocolate.

According to Michelle Bachelet, Former UN Women Executive Director, women statistically reinvest 90 cents of every dollar they earn back into their communities and families, with a focus on nutrition, health care, and education. Lani Dobson visited Copper Door’s farm partners in Guatemala this past spring and saw how this kind of investment can be a lifeline for rural communities. Dobson is Copper Door’s head educator and espresso machine technician, but her official title is coffee engineer. “Weeks and weeks of labor go into harvesting coffee beans,” she explains. “I’ve been a barista for over 10 years, but I never had that opportunity to see the agricultural side firsthand.”

Dobson found that it’s often a single family doing all the labor to pick and process the beans. The farmers weren’t able to scale their operations and weren’t generating enough revenue, but Copper Door is working to change that by supporting women-led co-ops. “We’re thinking about equity all the way from seed to cup,” Dobson says. “The cooperatives we support aren’t just helping the farmers collect all their coffee and process it; they’re also building banks and daycares and investing all that money back into the community.”

A Cultural Product

Huehuetenango, the region in Guatemala that Dobson visited, is located in the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes mountain range and is extremely remote. “We took a little military plane to get there, and then we drove for two hours into the mountains,” she recalls. “It’s a very different culture from Guatemala City. A majority of the region is Mayan, so we had multiple translators.” Dobson explains that because the community is so secluded—the closest hospital is hours away—meaningful employment is scarce. “A lot of the men moved away to find jobs and send money back home, so the farm work then fell to the women,” Dobson says. “The women had a choice: either lose the farm or handle the farm. And those farms mean a lot to them, so it would have hurt to let them go.” Several farmers also told Dobson that if Atlas, the Seattle-based company that imports their coffee, hadn’t shown up when it did, many families were planning to shut down their farms and leave the region, and they would have lost the whole community.

Dobson began working as a barista and roasting her own coffee while studying dance in upstate New York. After graduation, she relocated to Denver and found a job listing online for a “coffee educator” and had to do a double-take. “I had never seen a salaried education position at a coffee shop,” she said. “Because of my background in dance and teaching dance, I had experience designing lesson plans.” Her work includes developing curriculum for Copper Door’s baristas but also for the general public. “I do a lot of private classes for people who’ve never touched an espresso machine and are trying to learn,” Dobson explains. “I also teach brew science, latte art, a matcha class, and I do a cupping class where we talk about how to taste coffee and develop our palate.” In addition to her work with Copper Door Coffee, Dobson also maintains a creative practice as a dancer and installation artist. In fact, many of Copper Door’s employees are also engaged in the arts. It all contributes to the ethos of cultural vitality that Ulbrich has built into Copper Door’s mission since the company’s early garage days.

As Ulbrich and her team continue to grow Copper Door Coffee Roasters, working with women in marginalized communities has become a core tenet of their values-led mission. “When we first started, we were just buying coffee like everybody else,” Ulbrich confesses. “But then we started working with our importers, and we realized there were a lot of farms run by women, but they weren’t making enough coffee to export it themselves, so I asked if I could try their coffee, and then I realized I could partner with them and pay them more than they were getting.” Her conscious decision to seek out and support these women-owned farms represents a broader commitment to intentionality and making every dollar count. Ultimately, the most important lesson Ulbrich has learned through her work, and hopes to impart, is that “being intentional at the grocery store and with our choices in general helps everyone down the supply chain,” she says. “Every purchase matters.”