Eileen Rinaldi founded Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco in 2005, after a shot of espresso at Espresso Vivace in Seattle convinced her to open a shop dedicated solely to coffee. The first café opened that year in the Mission, in a former furniture store, and by its third day there was a line to the corner. In 2006 Ritual began roasting on a small 5 kilo Probat at the back of the café. Its production roastery and training centre opened in SoMa in 2009, and in 2010 it moved from a 1990s Probat L-12 to a fully retrofitted 1950s Probat UG-22. That year it also replaced the French press with individual Hario V60 pour-overs.

Ritual began its relationship-based sourcing in 2007 under coffee buyer Ryan Brown. It buys from smallholder farmers it knows and pays two to three times the commodity market value for specialty grade coffee, with sustainable base prices, bonuses for hitting quality targets and investment in infrastructure projects. Since 2019 its Ace single origins have been roasted as “omniroast”, for both espresso and drip.

The Mission café was remodelled into a bright, airy room with gardens and parklets, and is now Ritual Coffee + General Store, selling goods from local small businesses. In Hayes Valley, “the Container” is a shipping-container coffee bar opened in 2011 as part of PROXY, a block of renovated containers on land that was once a freeway off-ramp. Ritual has run a three-sided open bar at the north end of Napa’s Oxbow Public Market since 2008, with The Cup and Star, an experiential coffee bar, in the stall next door. The SFO café in the Harvey Milk Terminal opened in October 2022.

A café in the Financial District is planned for the 255Cal building, in the space where Rinaldi managed a Torrefazione Italia café in 2003 before starting Ritual. It is designed as a homage to Italian coffee bars and to the building’s midcentury modern bones, with high ceilings, a long bar and a view of the cable cars.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Ritual Coffee Roasters