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Coffee beans roasting at Recluse Roasting Project
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Roasted and unroasted coffee beans
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Recluse’s coffee vending machine at their Lakeside roastery
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Jack Fleming restocks the coffee vending machine.
The sign outside a defunct pizza shop at 5607 Lakeside Ave. reads in all caps “Not a coffee shop.” The message is partly practical, partly sarcastic.
Inside, there is no crowd of customers sipping lattes, no pastry case, no lingering over a laptop for hours. Instead, the space features pallets stacked with burlap sacks of green coffee beans, a gleaming roaster, a kegging station for cold coffee and two people — Jack Fleming and Aimee Biggerstaff, owners of Recluse Roasting Project.
Recluse beans fuel the coffee program at Julio’s Bagels, where Fleming and Biggerstaff are minority partners. They’re also served locally at Sugar & Twine, Alchemy Coffee, and Susie’s; mobile coffee truck Eddie Rose; and The Veil Brewing Co.
Since opening their business in 2018, the owners have intentionally remained behind the scenes. In an era of cold foams, seasonal syrups and drinks engineered as much for Instagram as for consumption, Recluse remains true to what was there before — the beans themselves and the people who grew them. They operate strictly as roasters, and there’s a reason.
Recluse Roasting Project owners Aimee Biggerstaff and Jack Fleming
“Part of the concept of being this small, two-person operation is because we’ve been in the industry for a long time,” Biggerstaff says. “There is a lot that you end up sacrificing when you make choices about production.”
An art school dropout with an affinity for black coffee at a young age, Biggerstaff got her start in the industry at Olympia Roasters in Washington state. Fleming, a native Richmonder and chemist by training, discovered specialty coffee after moving west for a job and attending weekly cuppings. He became enamored with the technical side, built a roaster at home, and started shipping to friends and family in Virginia. While working at Olympia Roasters, he met Biggerstaff. The two fell in love, and when Fleming shared his vision to return and launch Recluse, she joined him.
If their business has a guiding principle, it’s how they wish to treat others, from not hiring employees for fear of being unable to provide livable wages to their commitment to working directly with farmers. “The choices that we’ve made all along the way have been to make sure that the coffee we’re getting is not only amazing and delicious but is coming from producers that are getting paid,” Biggerstaff says.
One of those producers is Honduras-based Bernard Ornilla, whom Fleming first met while judging a coffee competition years ago. Recluse has been buying from him since they opened. Today, they text regularly. Ornilla has visited the United States and been instrumental in introducing them to an entire network of producers through Comsa, a cooperative of small-scale farmers.
“Every year we are buying, we’re hoping to buy from the same farmers,” Fleming adds.
The language surrounding coffee can get “really diluted, really quickly,” Biggerstaff notes. When Recluse says “direct,” it’s about as literal as it can get. There are no importers and no middlemen, and they know farmers and families by name. The business is built on conversations, whether across a kitchen table in Costa Rica or over WhatsApp, and thoughtfully forged relationships.
“That’s what helps decide the price of the green coffee. It’s really what it comes down to with us,” Fleming says. “We ask them, and if they don’t have a price in mind, we start offering them something. These farmers aren’t asking outrageous prices for their coffee, and we shouldn’t be the ones deciding — the people doing the work should.”
Without a cafe, Recluse relies on wholesale clients, beans sold by the bag at markets and coffee shops, and online sales. Additionally, they operate a satellite coffee bar inside Julio’s Bagels in North Side (the bagel shop is co-owned by Ashley Patino of Pizza Bones) — an opportunity that has allowed them to curate the menu, train the staff and remain hands off while letting their coffee shine.
But the arrangement extends further than the couple. “We’re trying to connect the producers or farmers themselves with coffee shops that go through a good amount of [our] coffee,” Biggerstaff says. “This is also kind of how we define our direct relationship.”
Over the years, the company has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, lost and regained wholesale accounts, and hosted popular alleyway pop-ups out of its original Scott’s Addition space. Today, Fleming and Biggerstaff live three blocks from the roastery, have debuted a “customer-facing” vending machine stocked with coffee outside the building, continue to enter new markets, and are forging relationships with producers in Burundi, East Africa.
In the restaurant world, chefs name the farms supplying their produce with pride; Fleming and Biggerstaff believe coffee deserves the same treatment. It shouldn’t be a faceless, ubiquitous commodity, rather understood as an agricultural product with a specific place of origin, a particular growing season and, most importantly, real people behind it.
“The way coffee is portrayed has always been free refills, diner coffee, black water; it’s mud, all of these ways that we refer to it, even if it is like, ‘Oh my God, I need my coffee every morning,’” Biggerstaff says. “This thing that we care about so deeply is still something that we consistently devalue.” Fleming notes that consumers rarely blink at a $30 bottle of wine that disappears in an evening, while a $20 bag of coffee that typically lasts a week or more raises eyebrows.
Every bag that leaves Recluse carries a chain of human decisions: planted by one person, harvested by another, processed, shipped, roasted and brewed. For these entrepreneurs, the goal is not to shorten that chain, but to make it more visible.
