Cartel Roasting Co.

House-roasted coffee at a campus counter

Cartel roasts what it pours, and has done since 2008, when the company started in Tempe as a coffee lab and stayed there. The Tempe counter sits close to Arizona State University, which shapes the room: rustic, unfussy, half of it working and the rest passing through for something cold. The house line is deliberately unintimidating, that coffee does not need to be complicated, and the staff present themselves as guides rather than examiners.

Behind that is a real production business. Cartel buys largely through the importer Mercanta and roasts single origins chosen to be both interesting and drinkable every day, at a range of prices. Subscriptions, order-ahead retail and the company's own brewing guidance for Aeropress and Chemex mean the cup you drink at the counter has a version you can repeat at home.

A roaster that outgrew its first room

Production has since moved into a 12,000 square foot facility with a cold brew canning line, keeping the San Franciscan SF25 roaster and adding a 70 kilo Loring Peregrine. That is a serious jump in capacity for a company that began with one Tempe café.

The same expansion added a commercial bakery, with scratch-made menus planned to change quarterly, so food is no longer a tray bought in from elsewhere. At the Tempe counter that adds up to a campus-adjacent stop that works for studying or for a quick espresso, with the wholesale, subscription and rewards side of the business running quietly behind it.

Start with cold brew

Cold brew is the smart first order, partly because of the Arizona heat and partly because it is where the company has put its money: the ready-to-drink line runs to Sonoran Sun Standard and Night Vision Nitro, canned on the same expansion that enlarged the roastery.

For brewed coffee or beans to take away, the single origins are the point. The Kiambu Kenya Ibonia Estate AB is a good example of what the buying looks like: blackberry, lemon and red wine in the cup, cherries handpicked and pulped on the day of harvest, fully fermented and washed, dried and held in ventilated bins. Order it as filter if it is on, then take a bag of whatever is roasting that week and follow the house's own Chemex or Aeropress guidance at home.