Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters is a coffee roasting company in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in 2011. Its founder, Trish Rothgeb, is its CEO, director of coffee and roastmaster, with more than 30 years in coffee as a roaster, green buyer and teacher. She is credited with coining the term “third wave coffee”, teaches cupping to producers and professionals around the world, is a licensed Q grader and Q trainer with the Coffee Quality Institute, where she ran the Q and education programmes from 2013 to 2016, and was a charter member of the World Barista Championship board and a founding member of the Barista Guild of America.

The café is in Cow Hollow, a full-service room with a menu of espresso drinks, brewed coffee, matcha lattes, teas and herbal tisanes, and the whole-bean coffees to take home. It was fitted out with La Marzocco, Wilbur Curtis, Acaia and Mahlkönig equipment, and the wallpaper is a Rifle Paper Co. design from Hygge & West.

Roasting happens twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and online orders ship within 24 hours of the roast, bagged within an hour of leaving the machine in compostable heat-sealed paper bags with one-way valves. The menu is short: a signature Pillow Fight espresso of Brazil, Ethiopia and Colombia, a decaf version, the Triple Double blend, and single origins such as the Guatemala Los Dos Socios from Concepción Villatoro’s farm in Huehuetenango, which Wrecking Ball has bought for several years running, and a small Kenya lot from the Nkumari estate in Meru.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters