Saint Frank - Specialty Coffee Shop & Roaster in San Francisco

Saint Frank takes its name from San Francisco and from Saint Francis, who “showed all things seemingly mundane and ordinary to be special” and who, Saint Frank reckons, would have preferred a simple name like Frank. Kevin Bohlin founded it in 2013 after discovering that small-scale farmers produced some of the most complex coffees in the world without ever learning what happened to their work thousands of miles away.

Saint Frank works only through long-term relationships with small-scale producers, in a seasonal programme that brings the same farms back year after year, and it commits to buying all that a producer grows, or enough from a cooperative for its customers to get to know the coffee. It looks for places “largely undesired and avoided for risk, lack of recognition, and costliness”, from Honduras to Burundi. The partnership with Eduardo “Guayo” Gomez near Antigua began in 2012, before the company launched, and the Burundi coffees come through the Long Miles Coffee Project, with which Saint Frank partnered in 2019 to establish a new washing station at Ninga.

The roasting is done in-house: the components of the Little Brother espresso blend are roasted separately to even out their extraction, and a bumper Burundi harvest was once “more than Saint Frank could roast alone”. The blends carry Franciscan names: Little Brother, Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Friar Minor, an “old school dark roast”.

There are three cafés in San Francisco, in Russian Hill, at Mira in the East Cut and in the Inner Sunset, and a fourth in Menlo Park. The Russian Hill room has a long white counter under a curved wall of pale wood. The online shop sells the single origins and blends in 10 oz and 5 lb bags, with a taster box of four filter coffees and a subscription.