Dagger Mountain is an all-vegan café and coffee roaster in Valparaiso, Indiana. It is a roasting company first: it sources and roasts its own coffee, and the roastery sits in a renovated storage garage. The café opened in August 2021 in the building next door. The coffee is roasted and packaged fresh on two mornings a week, and retail orders ship on the same days.

The drinks list runs rotating seasonal single origins on drip and pour-over, and an espresso list built around lattes: a café miel with agave and cinnamon, a salted maple latte with smoked sea salt, a Dune latte with orange, maple agave and clove, and coconut, orange, vanilla and banana lattes beside a mocha. Every latte is made with oat milk, with soy and almond as the other options, and the syrups are made from scratch in-house. The autumn board adds a pumpkin Spice Grrrl, an Apple Jack with brown sugar and sea salt, a Choco-Khan with coconut and a chai cider, with tea lattes, kombucha and hot chocolate alongside. The room is a tall white space with a long slatted wooden bar, a wall of framed landscape paintings and a sofa corner under the windows.

The green coffee comes from a select group of small family farms, specialty grade and held to fair and ethical standards, some of which cannot afford or access organic or fair-trade certification. The current single origins come from Kenya, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Ethiopia, beside the Limestone blend dedicated to Hoosiers, the dark Nightshade blend and a mountain-water-process decaf. Beans sell retail and wholesale, and a monthly coffee club sends out the month’s featured coffee. The current retail range is listed below with the roaster’s own tasting notes.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Dagger Mountain