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Recluse Roasting Project owners Aimee Biggerstaff and Jack Fleming. (Photo by Stephanie Ganz)
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Roaster inside Recluse Roasting Project. (Photo by Stephanie Ganz)
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Recluse Roasting Project recently debuted their first cans of chilled coffee. (Photo courtesy of Recluse Roasting Project)
The Oxford Dictionary defines a recluse as “a person who lives a solitary life and tends to avoid other people.” In some ways, it’s a fitting description for Aimee Biggerstaff and Jack Fleming, the earnest and highly skilled duo behind Recluse Roasting Project in Scott’s Addition. The two prefer drinking a cup of coffee by a crackling campfire with their dogs to just about anything else.
But just under that reclusive exterior is a couple who have been roasting and brewing coffee since they worked together at Olympia Coffee Roasting Co. in Washington, one of the most well-respected roasting companies on the West Coast and arguably the coffee capital of the U.S., before returning to Fleming’s hometown.
The coffee bug bit Biggerstaff early in life, and she began working for Olympia Coffee Roasters in her late teens. After returning to Olympia post-college, Biggerstaff met Fleming, a self-taught environmental scientist turned roaster, whose keen sense of curiosity compelled him to build a coffee roaster out of spare parts — a shop vac, an old motor, a pizza tray and a butane burner — in his garage and then start roasting green coffee.
“I love sugar, and I knew that I wanted coffee to taste as sweet as possible without covering up the terroir and natural flavor of the coffee, so our roast approach is to try to situate the sweetness as much as possible,” Fleming explains.
His unflappable devotion and high-scoring cuppings prompted OCR to hire him despite his lack of professional coffee experience, and the two fell in love behind the bar. They both saw a future in the coffee business, but Fleming had his eyes set on Richmond. The couple loaded up their roaster, a La Marzocco espresso machine, and their two dogs and headed east.
After over a year of building their tucked-away roasting lab from the ground up, the team opened their doors at 1310 Altamont Ave.in Scot's Addition on July 4 for curbside coffee with online ordering, pouring out the front door.
Biggerstaff and Fleming’s lab allows them to roast direct-trade coffee beans, from farmers they’ve personally vetted and formed relationships with. For them, ethical sourcing is non-negotiable.
“We wanted to get away from the model of paying people based on the market and start paying based on an actual living,” says Fleming, who spent time working alongside coffee farmers in Burundi.
For now, RRP’s menu features hot and iced coffee and tea; cardamom buns from baker Ashley Patino, the owner of forthcoming Pizza Bones; sundries like coffee bags and cartons of Oatly oat milk; along with two specialty slushies per month — for July there are sweetened oat milk latte and cascara with lime shrub flavors available.
Recluse has also been toiling away to perfect a method for quickly chilling freshly brewed coffee for canning, which Biggerstaff believes helps to capture the aroma and preserve that fresh flavor. Their first release, Finca Gaia, is a single-producer microlot blend from farmer Bernard Ornilla.
These special lots of coffee are selected for their high quality and their unique flavor profile. Biggerstaff says Recluse pays a premium for the beans, which, when combined at the right ratio, deliver hits of grape, currant and Whoppers candy.
The home of Recluse Roasting Project is appropriately obscure, the door a few dozen feet down a gravel alley, sharing a building with Wax Moon Records. It fits the not-a-coffee-shop vibe Biggerstaff and Fleming were aiming for.
While both possess the knowledge and platform to open dialogue about the coffee world, Biggerstaff says it’s not all about the education: “If the customer is asking questions, it’s an open door, and I’m going to give them all the information they want. But if that customer just wants a really good cup of coffee, they have the same right to that exquisite cup, and they don’t have to be educated to appreciate it.”
Recluse Roasting Project is currently open for online ordering on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Online ordering opens at 7 a.m. each morning.
