A Look Inside Charlotte’s Coffee Roasters – Charlotte Magazine

As successful business expansions go, it doesn’t look like much. The walls are white, the office and warehouse spaces barren save for a table and a few chairs. “Come back in six months,” says Matt Yarmey, who founded Pure Intentions Coffee Roastery in a garage off Old Concord Road a dozen years ago. “There’ll be some paintings on the wall. We haven’t had a chance to give it our personality.”

It’s a weekday morning in late July at this office park on Choate Circle in deep south Charlotte, almost literally in the shadow of Carowinds. Yarmey, a 40-year-old former accounting consultant, has relocated his roastery here for a pair of financial reasons. It offers more space—16,000 square feet compared to the 10,000 he’s outgrown in North End, the better to roast and sell more coffee. It’s also a refuge from the exorbitant price of rental space near the city center. When he moved from the garage to North End in late 2015, he says, you could lease warehouse space for about $10 per square foot. Now it’s close to $30. His North End lease expires in September. “We’re bursting at the seams,” he says. “I had to buy two shipping containers because we had no room for anything.”

That’s why he’s moving his operations down here. Yarmey congratulates me for being the first person who’s not a Pure Intentions employee or building inspector to cross the threshold. He says he aims to have everything in place by Aug. 15. “We’re about a quarter of the way done,” he says as he walks me around the near-empty warehouse. “So this whole space right here is going to be filled with racking for all of our supporting accessory products. That’s our new roaster. We’re gonna move our current roaster into that empty space right there. And then that whole wall over there is going to be our production wall, where we actually do tables and grinders and our whole package.”

It’ll be a busy three weeks, I observe. Yarmey grins. “Moving and shaking, man.”

It’s an apt description of Charlotte’s coffee scene in general, with both corporate and independent shops opening in neighborhoods throughout the city. But independent roasteries like Pure Intentions—which operates no shops but sells to about 150 cafés and restaurants in the region—have established their own foothold. Roughly a dozen operate in the area, including Hex Coffee Roasters, Night Swim Coffee, Summit Coffee in Davidson, and Magnolia Coffee Co. in Matthews.

They’re a crucial link between growers and consumers. As independent businesses, they also maintain a precarious balance between quality and affordability, distinctiveness and accessibility, as their solvency hinges on coffee crops of varying yields from faraway sources. A recent subpar growing season in Mexico, for instance, forced Yarmey to scramble to close the gap.

Overall, he and his counterparts make it work. But over a dozen years, he’s tried to answer a question fundamental to entrepreneurs, especially in food and beverage: Can you run a profitable business without sacrificing quality? Yarmey and his counterparts want to sell good coffee to people who want something more refined than Folger’s or Maxwell House but don’t want novelty coffees—consumers he refers to as “the meaty middle.” 

Roasters begin by loading green coffee into the roaster, which dries and heats the beans at different levels for varying times to create light, medium, and dark roasts. Then they’re released into a cooling tray, rotated to draw out hot air, and bagged.

“I just wish people knew how hard it was to get that cup of coffee to taste like it does every day. It is an immense amount of work—and not just by us,” he says. “I’m talking about, you know, the producers and all the work they have to do on the farm to create an agricultural product consistently, year over year over year, with all the shit that’s going on—pardon my French—climate-wise, globally. It’s extremely difficult.”

One of the hardest choices for an independent roaster lies in the decision not to scale. Former teachers Tony and Becky Santoro founded Enderly Coffee Co. in 2012, the same year Yarmey got started. They’ve done well enough, with a popular shop on Tuckaseegee Road and a 3,000-square-foot roastery near the intersection of Freedom Drive and Interstate 85.

The Santoros, though, envisioned their business as a community asset as much as a moneymaker. Tony, who grew up poor near Detroit, says he’s “an advocate for the underdog,” one reason why he chose to set up on the west side. He admits he undercharges for some of his specialty coffees “to have an approachable entry point for anyone who wants to visit our café.” But he’s more concerned with providing decent wages and benefits for his seven employees and compensating the Guatemalan and Honduran small farmers who supply his beans through direct-trade partnerships.

I ask Tony if he plans to expand. His response: “Gosh, I kind of hate that question.” He doesn’t rule it out but has no specific plan to. “We all build up this Charlotte coffee economy together,” he says. “So the better we all do, the better it is for each of us and for our city.”

Enderly Coffee

The turbulence of the business can lead to eccentric arrangements. One of Charlotte’s first independent coffee shops was Dilworth Coffee, which Don and Aylene Keen opened in 1989, long before coffee shop culture went widespread. Five years later, a Raleigh financial officer named Jeff Vojta decided he wanted to open a coffee shop in his city, and he learned and bought beans from Dilworth Coffee.

The Keens eventually sold to partners who didn’t run the business to their satisfaction. They bought Dilworth Coffee back and sold it in 2010 to Vojta, by then a co-founder and CEO of his own roasting operation in Raleigh, Stockton Graham & Co. The company rebranded as Dilworth Coffee in 2017 to market itself under one better-known name, Vojta says. Today, Dilworth Coffee is a Raleigh-based roastery with more than 300 clients, most on the East Coast, and two shops in Charlotte—neither in Dilworth.

Pure Intentions Coffee was born over beer. Yarmey, a Charlotte native who’d returned after some time in California and New York, was working as a consultant with Dixon Hughes Goodman, the Charlotte accounting firm.

One evening in 2010, as he downed beers with a colleague at Mac’s Speed Shop, he expressed that he was in his 20s, making a good living, doing everything he thought he was supposed to do—but something felt off. He wondered if this was his lot in life, working for The Man for the rest of his career. He and his buddy began to bat around ideas. Hey, how about a coffee shop? “Coffee is really cool, and everybody drinks coffee. How could you not be successful?” Yarmey says, recapitulating his rationale. “Little did I know.”

At the bar, from his phone, Yarmey ordered a half-pound roaster and 500 grams of beans from Sweet Maria’s Coffee Warehouse in Oakland, California. When they arrived at his apartment in Plaza Midwood, he says, “I put it on my kitchen counter and hit roast, and 10 minutes later, the fire department was there.” He took roasting classes and learned, though, ultimately naming the business after his intention to run his business his way.

Then the way changed. In the beginning, Yarmey says, he bought beans and roasted according to his and his employees’ preferences. If they thought it was good, they roasted and tried to sell it. After a few years in the garage off Old Concord Road, he began to realize he couldn’t—shouldn’t—run a business by trying to sell what he thought people should drink.

Beans in Pure Intentions Coffee Roastery’s cooling tray.

“You shouldn’t have to shame somebody into enjoying your product. You should just be able to present it to them, and they should be able to enjoy it inherently because of the characteristics it has,” he says. 

“I have to ride this middle ground. … There’s a way to present flavor profiles that makes all different types of coffee drinkers happy without just going to the bottom and saying, ‘Well, I’m going to roast everything just like Starbucks and just like Peet’s because they’re doing well and because it sells,’ or going to the other end of the spectrum and saying, ‘Well, I’m just going to do the top-1% coffees because I want to be really cool and be the Instagram-famous coffee roaster.’ There’s this massive meaty middle of people who just want a really damn good cup of coffee.”

So that’s the lane he’s picked. Pure Intentions renders unto the 1% with limited-release coffees, like a recent offering from Papua New Guinea with a flavor profile of grapefruit, white grape, and macadamia. But the flagships are more conservative, in a good way: a single-origin medium roast from Colombia and a blend of Brazilian and Colombian dark roasts. There’s no need for snobbery, as Yarmey says he’s encountered from too many in the industry and, until recently, in Charlotte.

“It never really amounted to, ‘How do we make the best cup of coffee and please the largest number of people?’ It was a comparison trap: ‘How do we make ourselves look like other really popular, Instagram-fabulous coffee cultures?’” he says. “In my opinion, we have grown up from that. I see it going in the right direction.”

RELATED: See our Guide to Charlotte Coffee Shops.

GREG LACOUR is the editor.