Bend has a pretty good number of coffee roasters per capita, but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well; and whatever is being done well, it’s worth having a lot of it. So, the number of roasters ’round here indicates how much we, collectively, love coffee. But most of the caffeine fiends among us don’t love coffee as much as Scott Hughes, founder of Bend’s underground, professional coffee roasting company, Third Rock Roastery.
Hughes says he started roasting “back in 1999. I was making coffee one morning, a coffee from a can I’m sure, and I thought, ‘I could do better than this.’ As I was used to making my own beer and wine, I wondered if there was a way to roast my own coffee.”
Speaking of making beer, Hughes worked for just over a decade at Deschutes Brewery until last spring, just not on the brewing side of things but rather in the warehouse. He’s now the facilities manager at Empire Cold Storage, as he and his business partner — who’s also his wife, Kim — work on making Third Rock a roasting company that’s open to the public, including a potential coffee cart for those who need a tasty, authentic and truly handcrafted fix.
Early in his roasting research, he learned that 20th-century home roasters used cast iron skillets. “I did that a few times and decided that was not going to work for me,” he says.
After studying the different types of roasters on the enthusiast market — because commercial-type roasters are really expensive — he discovered Fresh Roast, which sold a small, fluid bed roaster for home roasters that handled all of six ounces at a time. He reminisces, “I got my first one for Christmas in 2000. From there it was game on.”
About four years after beginning his foray into roasting, and having worn out a few different Fresh Roasts, Hughes scaled up and ordered a high-end commercial roaster. What he has discovered along his java journey is that he loves working with beans from each equatorial origin across South America, Africa and Indonesia. “We limit our coffee to a few bags of each, so we can rotate through different single origins. It’s fun to experience all the coffee and not get stuck on one,” Hughes suggests. He is passionate about discovering which beans are best suited to various roast styles as well as brewing apparatuses.
By the time he began working at Deschutes Brewery in 2013, his nano-roastery, Third Rock, was purring along, and his coffee was finding homes beyond coffee mugs. “I worked my way through all shifts and all positions in the warehouse… In that time, Third Rock Roastery coffee was used in several coffee beers, most notably the anniversary Black Butte Porter XXXI,” Hughes notes.
Since a pot of hot coffee is, obviously, not a great partner in a batch of cold beer, Hughes explains that good cold brew is usually the key method for weaving joe into suds, recalling, “When I was at Deschutes, we did samples of cold brew using different types of water and had very interesting findings. Cold brew plays a big part in the coffee industry and should be part of the roaster’s toolbox.” He cautions, “Cold brew is great. Easy to make; harder to perfect.”
Additionally, Hughes states, “This is also where I came up with the idea to age green coffee beans in the used barrels from Deschutes’ barrel-aged beer program.” And given the collaborative nature of the brew biz, homographic pun intended, Third Rock’s coffee has also featured in beers from Cascade Lakes Brewing and Boneyard Beer.
While Hughes and his wife, Kim, hoped 2025 would be the year they made the roastery a public-facing company beyond having some local beers feature the beans, the communal shop with roll-up doors they’ve envisioned has morphed, more than once. Then the duo, according to Hughes, pivoted “to wanting a space that we can teach others about the story behind coffee, and how coffee from around the world can taste different, based on that specific growing region and the way it’s also brewed. This idea is where our name… Third Rock Roastery… came from… But it all takes capital… We are currently working through what it looks like for a mobile roasting trailer.”
The coffee roasting process is “different each day as
weather, humidity and, sometimes, I think the attitude of the person roasting
can affect the flavor. Because roasting is an art.”—
Scott Hughes
Once that vision becomes tangible, expect a Bend coffee cart where you can travel the world through bean-water — an ideal cuppa bean-water at that. “The worst thing about our era,” opines Hughes, “with all the choices [available] is that the magic is gone. The old-school, hands-on roasting process is lost. Roasting machines are now computer controlled. For me and my roast style, coffee is alive and you need to be part of the roasting process. No distractions. [You have to] understand what the coffee is doing as it goes through the roasting process. It’s different each day as weather, humidity and, sometimes, I think the attitude of the person roasting can affect the flavor. Because roasting is an art.”
Until Third Rock’s coffee trailer launches, Hughes said his beans will soon be available to purchase online in whole bean and ground formats, in both 12-ounce and five-pound bags.
When asked about his favorite way to enjoy the caffeinated arts, Hughes allows, “My favorite coffee — if I had one — would be a low-acidic, light-to-medium-roasted coffee. I do tend to like Ethiopian Harrar and Panama coffees.” And when asked how he takes it, the romantic concludes, “My best accompaniment to a cup of joe hands down: my wife. Sitting down with Kim and having an amazing cup of coffee and talking is the best!”
Third Rock Roastery
thirdrockroastery.com
This article appears in The Source Weekly January 16, 2025.
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