Sightglass Coffee began in 2009 with a small service cart in San Francisco’s SoMa district, pouring from a few Chemex pots and a leaky vintage two-group espresso machine behind the roll-up door of a warehouse built in 1914. Two years later the whole warehouse became its production roastery, coffee bar, community space and headquarters. The company takes its name from the sightglass, the viewing window on its vintage Probat roaster. It now roasts in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Sightglass treats coffee as a seasonal fruit and buys directly from origin in freshly harvested lots, then roasts in small batches, with a roast profile set for each coffee. Every green coffee is first roasted and evaluated on the sample roaster in the SoMa training lab, where educators also run barista trainings and, each Friday, a public tasting.

The SoMa flagship has an open floor plan, so guests can watch roasting, production, training and drink preparation from the open coffee bar. The Mission bar shares its block with neighbours such as Trick Dog and Southern Exposure, and sits under a ceiling of reclaimed redwood sapwood, with coffees sourced for that location. The Divisadero bar occupies a corner Victorian from 1903, with woodwork milled mostly from a single Monterey cypress, a walk-up window worked by a pulley system, and cascara shrub, vanilla cold brew and single origin nitro on tap. Pastries there come from Neighbor Bakehouse, b. patisserie and Piccino.

In Hollywood’s Sycamore District, Sightglass opened its first roastery and café outside San Francisco, designed with Seth Boor of Boor Projects, who also worked on the San Francisco cafés. It has an outdoor patio, wine, and a seasonal, market-driven all-day menu from an in-house chef. The Berkeley café, the first in the East Bay, faces UC Berkeley from the ground floor of the Helen Diller Anchor House: 1,700 square feet of high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, with a hand-built 12-foot fixture above the bar. Every bar serves V60 pour-over, cold coffee on tap and espresso drinks.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Sightglass Coffee