Roaster Spotlight: Bows & Arrows and Astro Café Roasters

It's time to highlight more of our fantastic partners: two wonderful artisan roasters on the coasts of two different oceans. We're honored to be their choice for chemical-free, delicious decaf, and excited to share them with you.

Bows & Arrows Coffee Roasters

Bows & Arrows has been bringing incredible coffees to Canada's Vancouver Island (and wholesale partners around the world) since 2011. Roasting out of a sunny space in Victoria, British Columbia, Bows and Arrows is a coffee business built on expertise, high standards, and a passion for getting it right. ⁠We've worked with Bows and Arrows for years, and co-founder Drew Johnson says he was initially surprised at how good decaf could be. 'But we've come to know that if the coffee is good going into the soup, it's gonna be good coming out.'

Bows & Arrows' current decaf offering is from the Mataquescuintla Project in Guatemala, an initiative to support indigenous producers who have banded together in resistance to international mining interests on their land.

'We wanted to maximize the volume we committed to them and sending that coffee to Swiss Water for decaffeinating was a great way to do that, especially now that we can manage the volume to fulfill a batch,' says Johnson, who adds that he partners with other roasters, like BC's Drumroaster, to make this happen.

'Cupping each microlot to build a single lot for decaffeination ensures us that the coffee going in is already solid. That satisfies the quality requisite for us and our customers, but really, if we can put another 70 bags in a container from the producers, why wouldn't we? That's our MO.'

Astro Café Roasters

Astro Café Roasters
is a roaster partner of ours based on the Galician coast in A Coruña, Spain-but we think they're out of this world!

Co-founder Willy Gómez says it was important to offer a great decaf alongside the other high quality coffees his shops carried. 'We wanted to offer decaf to our customers, because we think that everybody must have the opportunity to taste high quality coffees,' says Gómez. 'Nowadays a lot of coffee shops and coffee roasters don't offer decaf, and we found a lot of customers asking for it. At first we only had a sugar cane process, but we always liked to have a nice Swiss Water process, so we started asking for some samples and them we ordered our first bag. We sold it quickly, so we decided to incorporate it to our intergalactic coffee fleet.'

Astro's current Swiss Water decaf is from Veracruz, Mexico-a balanced, sweet coffee that's beautiful in milk, with flavor notes like nuts, milk chocolate, cacao, and caramel. Gómez says it's a hit and that Swiss Water is a permanent fixture in Astro's orbit.