commonly coffee

Albuquerque has gotta get on your radar when it comes to notable cities in the specialty coffee community. The truth is this city punches above its weight and has a considerable amount to offer. And one such roaster doing considerable amounts of good in helping to grow this city’s reputation for not only being hot–when it comes to climate–but also a coffee hot-spot is our Coffee Roaster of the Month for March. I am thrilled to share the story of Little Bear Coffee Roasters this month. A huge thanks to Jacob Fox (co-owner) of Little Bear for answering my questions.

Hey Jacob, so great to get the chance to connect with you! Help our audience get to know you a bit better…What’s your personal backstory in coffee? How did you get started? What keeps you going in coffee?

Like a lot of people, my personal background in coffee started off as a home brewer a little over 10 years ago. I think starting out as an enthusiast has kept fueling me and our teams’ journey towards learning more, ya know? Coffee, and the coffee industry as a whole, are such big rabbit holes and once you get answers to one thing it leads you to new questions that you’re trying to find answers to. It’s fun to learn and discover new things, and it’s even more fun to share those moments alongside people you care about.

Before we go much further, share with our readers what you’re drinking/enjoying these days when it comes to coffee!

We have some real soft spots in our hearts for our Indian and Colombian coffees that we serve on our menu at Little Bear. We have a lot of really great personal friendships with the producers whose coffee we feature from both of these countries! We have found over the past few years, specifically, that good friendships lead to more fun collaboration across the whole supply chain, and we personally feel like that makes the quality of the coffees even more dynamic and exciting.

So, home-base I see for you is Albuquerque, New Mexico. For those reading this who might not be familiar with the specialty coffee culture in New Mexico, can you share a bit of what it’s like, and how Little Bear is helping to shape the specialty coffee culture in the region?

It’s the wild West out here! Albuquerque is honestly on a little bit of an island, geographically and culturally, which makes it a very unique and very special place. We personally feel like our city really, “punches above its weight” in terms of the quality of our local coffee scene, but we have also historically been a little disconnected from the specialty coffee community on a larger scale. Some of our more recent goals have centered around us really championing specialty coffee in NM to help put us more on the map for the rest of the industry at large.

I see that you’ve got four shop locations in Albuquerque. Can you tell us a bit about the history of your cafes/roastery? How long have your shops been around? What can people expect when they visit? What kind of equipment do you roast on?

Our original location is really more in a neighborhood spot. The city really showed up for us and supported us in some really amazing ways when we opened at the very end of 2017, and that really amazing community response early on made it possible for us to grow long-term. Our second location is in a more historic area of the city along Route 66, which has kinda helped spur some exciting revitalization in that Nob Hill neighborhood! We opened that second location towards the end of 2019.

We have been roasting since the later half of 2018, and our buddy James Reimann has roasted almost every single batch of coffee since then! We currently roast on a San Franciscan, but we’re building out a new roasting facility that will help accommodate some future growth for us. In that new space, we are really looking forward to using Loring for the first time!

We opened our last two cafe locations pretty recently actually. One is at the bottom of the tallest building in New Mexico, and that’s right in the heart of downtown Albuquerque! The other cafe is in one of the most frequently visited tourist destinations in the state called Sawmill Market. It’s a really great place for people to visit where they can get a feel for some of the best local food and beverage that our state has to offer all under one roof.

I am always fascinated in the origin story of how a coffee roaster selects their name/brand. I’d love to hear the story of how Little Bear came to be. What inspired this name to represent your company?

Our origin story is a bit funny in the sense that we really picked our name last. We mainly talked about what we wanted our business to feel and be like for almost a whole year before we even landed on a name. Back in early 2017 when we were trying to figure out who we want it to be as a coffee business, it felt really important to us to make specialty coffee really fun and really accessible. We wanted our brand to feel like a place where a customer could be friends with all of our baristas. We also liked the concept of being able to take advantage of the beautiful landscape in Albuquerque and make coffee outside.

So after throwing hundreds of names around over a months’ worth of brainstorming sessions, Little Bear felt the most like “us” if that makes sense. Only years later, did we come to the realization that the “Little Bear” name could be inspired by our grandpa getting to meet Smokey the Bear back in the day… part of the reason our family is here in Albuquerque is because our grandpa was stationed in New Mexico at the forest service way back before we were born. Most people don’t know, but Smokey was actually rescued from a forest fire in the mountains of southern New Mexico! Maybe Little Bear in some ways is also a subconscious nod to the spirit of the outdoors and conservation in that sense.

At the end of the day, we just wanted to be a brand that felt approachable, outdoorsy, friendly, and fun.

After spending some time looking over your website, you use a phrase that totally resonated with me: LOVE PEOPLE, USE COFFEE. Can you share more about the story behind that saying, and perhaps how that impacts what you do as a company/team?

This is one of our favorite parts of the brand and it felt really important for us to express that early on. We always say that you can have one of the best cups of coffee you’ve ever had but, if the person behind the counter treats you like you’re a chore or like you’re taking up space that you shouldn’t be it’s always going to be a bad experience no matter how good the coffee objectively was. Inversely, you could get great hospitality, but not feel very taken care of if you receive a pretty subpar product while you’re visiting.

Our big goal is to communicate to all of our customers, and the people that we work with, that we value them as people more than we value the coffee that’s in the cup. Ideally if what’s in that cup is some of the best coffee you’ve ever had, it makes that sentiment quite a bit more meaningful.

It looks like I am not the only one excited to share your story. I see the team at Sprudge has featured you a few times, twice in their Build-Outs series in 2019 & 2024 and also in their Sprudge Maps Spotlight January 2024. What was that experience like working with them? How has this notoriety helped to grow your company and your presence in the specialty coffee community?

We really appreciate any of the love that we have received from local hospitality publications or more industry-wide ones like Sprudge! At the end of the day we really just want to grow Albuquerque and New Mexico’s credibility in the nationally, and internationally, recognized coffee scene. I think any outside interest is always a positive indicator that maybe we’re doing something right.

As we look ahead at 2025, what are your hopes and dreams for the specialty coffee community? What would you like to see change? What is going well? And how is Little Bear Coffee helping to lead the way in some of these areas?

I think we as a business really hope that our biggest impact in the specialty coffee industry highlights that relationships and friendships are the most important part of doing business holistically and ethically. When all of the stakeholders in the supply chain are genuinely looking out for each other‘s interests and trying to find how to best support each other, we can all ensure that these partnerships are the stability that we can lean on in an unstable global commodity coffee landscape.

We as a community at Little Bear just really don’t see a downside in wanting to be friends with all the people that we do business with. It makes things more fun and enhances the trust that’s necessary for sustainable business growth for everyone involved!

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Contact Info:

web: www.littlebearcoffee.com
instagram: @littlebearcoffeeco
facebook: /littlebearcoffeeco
email: info@littlebearcoffeeco.com

Find their beans: If you’re looking to get your hands on some beans then definitely check out their web-store for what they’re currently roasting.  

Visit their cafe: If you happen to find yourself travelling down in New Mexico and wind up in Albuquerque, be sure to visit their cafes.

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I just want to say a huge thank you to Jacob and Olivia from Little Bear for helping to share their story. Check out their site, grab yourself some beans, and enjoy! 

AND…as a way to say THANK YOU for reading this far, Little Bear is generously offeirng a 15% discount on all purchases for the month of March. Just use code COMMONLYCOFFEE at checkout.

Stay Caffeinated,

Tyler