Fun Stuff

When you buy coffee from Mighty Valley, you can be sure that we have done our research from sourcing to roasting to packaging. We are on a continual journey to thoughtfully source and roast coffee that we ourselves want to drink and feel good about every single day.

We critically engage with the coffee bean’s journey from seed to cup with a lens of social and environmental justice to ensure the highest standards of traceability and accountability in the production of our coffees. We also love to experiment and play with each new bean we bring in to find the ideal roast profile that brings out the natural flavours, subtle qualities, and natural sweetness of the beans.

Everything we do in our businesses abides by our shared life principles and goals as feminist, anti-racist, environmentally-minded human beings and community members.
This is who we are and what our business is about!

Coffee is political. At Mighty Valley, we understand each cup of coffee to represent various intersecting historical, political, social, cultural, ecological, and economic dimensions as coffee (a crop grown by farmers in the Global South) makes its way into the mugs and everyday routines of consumers in the Global North. However, the pathways that coffee beans take from seed to cup can be extremely varied.

Since the early-2000s, the specialty coffee industry and consumers have relied on third-party voluntary certification and labeling bodies like Fair Trade to promote something called ‘ethical consumption’. While these third-party certification systems have led to some important benefits and changes in the industry, many researchers and experts argue that these systems have stagnated and critique certifiers like Fair Trade in particular, noting the many significant gaps between the concept of trading fairly and Fair Trade’s practices as a thirty-party certifying body. Check out our blog for details and resources on the benefits and drawbacks of third-party certifications and mainstream ‘ethical’ coffee.

All this is to say that we, as coffee roasters situated in Canada, are pushing forward, seeking alternatives to the ‘ethical’ norm, and going beyond the buzz.

Our partnerships with these small direct-trade importers enable us to work within only 1-2 degrees of separation between ourselves and the people who grow the coffee we roast. You can listen and learn a lot more about direct trade coffee, (more-than capitalist) community economies, and the coffee industry more broadly on our blog via an interview with Brendan Adams, founder of Semilla coffee.

Our approach to sourcing green coffee beans unfolds in practice as a conscious resistance to the ongoing impacts of colonial and capitalist exploitation of people and environments. This approach is particularly important in the context of the ongoing threats and challenges that coffee producing regions and farmers are facing due to global climate change like leaf rust, harvest losses, and income precarity. And again, these impacts and access to resources to combat them are not evenly distributed between farmers at the local scale - we are working and investing in the long-term with folks like Semilla to consciously buy coffee from producers who have less to work with and tend to be marginalized or lack access to the higher prices of the specialty coffee market.

At Mighty Valley, we roast our coffee beans using an artisanal approach that combines art, science, and practice with small batches of high quality and thoughtfully sourced beans. We are coffee lovers who aim to make the best coffee possible. We are constantly honing our craft through research, experimentation, and staying up to date on emerging ideas in the roasting world.

We use both technical tools and our own senses to monitor each roast. This process both mitigates the possibility of roast defects and enhances the flavour profiles of each bean. Our roaster has two temperature probes which monitor the bean temperature and internal environment of the roaster. This information is then fed into an open-sourced profiling software (Artisan) on our laptop which helps us to interpret the environmental conditions of the roast in real-time. While this data is coming in, we also use our senses to watch the beans change colour through a small window in the roaster, listen to the sounds of the roasting beans, and smell the aroma of the beans by pulling small samples out of the roaster using a trier. 

At Mighty Valley Coffee, we are minimizing our impact on the environment by using sustainable packaging options. We are one of the only coffee roasters in the Ottawa area that uses fully biodegradable packaging – it is expensive, but even as a small start-up business, it is a cost we prioritize and absorb in alignment with our ethical and environmental commitments.

We understand waste as a structural issue and believe that companies need to provide better options for their customers and the planet.