About Us
Brewed for Community, Served with Heart
We’ve been on this corner of Tower Grove South since 2004. Joe does all our roasting on-site, five pounds at a time. Small batches — that’s just how we do it. And we air-roast, which most places don’t. Basically, the beans float on hot air instead of sitting against hot metal, so nothing scorches. The coffee comes out clean and bright. That’s the whole trick, really. Every bag gets its roast date printed on it, because coffee is best when it’s fresh and we figure you should know what you’re getting. So come by. Sit a while. Or have us ship beans to your door. Either way, after twenty-some years, we’re still just making coffee for our neighbors.
Why Locals Love Us
HARTFORD COFFEE
✔ Twenty Years in Tower Grove South
We opened in 2004. Some of the people from that first year still come in every week. Their kids grew up at the train table in the back — a few of them are old enough to order their own coffee now, which still catches us off guard. New people find us all the time, a lot of them on the way back from the park. However you got here, pull up a chair.
✔ Good Food, Fair Prices
The food is made here, in our kitchen. Breakfast, sandwiches, desserts. Nothing fancy for fancy’s sake — just good, and priced like a neighborhood place should be. We’d rather see you Tuesday and Thursday than once a year on your birthday.
✔ In the Café or at Your Door
Some folks camp out for the afternoon with a cup and the WiFi. Some are in and out in two minutes with a bag of beans. Both are fine by us. And if you can’t make it in at all, we’ll roast your order fresh and ship it to you.
✔ A Place to Meet
Book clubs meet here. First dates happen here. Kids do homework, friends catch up, somebody’s always got a laptop open. Stay as long as you want. The tables aren’t going anywhere.
Air-Roasted Since 2004
We’ve been air-roasting since 2004. Same method, same attention, the whole time.
Here’s the thing about most coffee: it’s roasted in a drum. The beans tumble around against hot metal, and hot metal scorches. The chaff — the papery skin beans shed — burns right in there with them. And the oils from one batch coat the drum and sneak into the next. That’s why so much coffee has that bitter, smoky edge. It’s not the bean. It’s the roaster.
Air roasting skips all of that. The beans float on hot air and never touch metal. No scorching, no burnt chaff, no carryover from the last batch. What you taste is the coffee itself.
Joe runs every batch by hand, five pounds at a time. Big roasters do fifty, a hundred, sometimes five hundred pounds at once — and we get why, but five pounds is small enough that Joe can watch the color turn, listen for first crack, and pull the beans at just the right second. You can’t do that with five hundred pounds.
A regular told us not long ago that the Sumatra she buys now tastes exactly like the Sumatra she bought twenty years ago. Honestly, that might be the best compliment we’ve ever gotten.
Taste what air roasting does for a bean.
Why It Matters for Our Flavored Coffees
Clean roasting matters for every cup. For flavored coffee, it matters even more.
We’ve worked with Liz at CoffeeFlavorOils.com for years on our lineup — Ube, Vanilla Lavender, Rainforest Crunch, and Dubai Chocolate coming soon. She’s told us our air-roasted beans are one of the cleanest canvases she gets to work with. Because there’s no scorched or bitter edge to cover up, we can use less flavor oil and still get all the flavor. So the coffee still tastes like coffee. The flavor’s just along for the ride, the way it should be.
Nothing Goes to Waste
Air roasting separates the chaff from the beans instead of burning it into your cup. We collect it and compost it — it ends up as garden mulch in backyards around St. Louis. The burlap sacks our green coffee ships in get a second life too, as fishing nets and craft projects. None of this is glamorous. It’s just what you do with stuff that’s still useful.