Another Year In The Books!

Goodbye 2022.. Hello 2023! 

How is it that another year has come and gone? Another year full of learning, experimenting, successes, failures, and so much more. Although each year brings new challenges and changes, we continue in our dedication to serving you quality coffee that is sustainably sourced through our direct trade partners, cupped by our team of Q-graders, meticulously roasted by our highly trained roasters and served by our excellent/wonderful baristas. 

We look forward to what 2023 will bring, the coffee we will share, the relationships we will continue to build, serving our regular customers, and meeting new customers. 

As we close out 2022, let's take a look back on the year:

We opened three new cafes: Waterfront, Encinitas, and UCSD. We chose to sell our Pacific Beach location to make room for additional locations. 

We collaborated with 4 different breweries (Karl Strauss, Coronado Brewing, Pizza Port, Abnormal Beer Co.) on tasty local beers, teamed up with Misadventure & Company to create a sustainable coffee liqueur using our spent coffee grounds, and joined forces with our neighborhood bar, Bar Cordova, to create delicious cocktails using our house-made signature syrups. 

We had countless weekend donations to local businesses and nonprofits and continued to sponsor the local schools around each of our cafes, as well as participated in another end-of-the-year Food Drive with the San Diego Food Bank! 

We created two charity blends, one for Black History Month, with proceeds going to the Blue Heart Foundation. We had our most extensive partnership yet with Birch Aquarium, where we created the "Little Blue Penguin Blend," with proceeds going back to Birch Aquarium. We also created a Sparkling LGBTea for San Diego Pride month with proceeds donated to The Trevor Project. 

This year, we participated in Padres Pedal the Cause with both customers and cafe team members joining Team Bird Rock Coffee to help accelerate cures for cancer.

Each of our cafes continued to spread gratitude through Grateful Peoples Journals - further connecting people, reflecting on the good and the bad, and just spreading positivity. These journals have been so well received by our beloved customers, and even made an appearance on Good Morning America!

We introduced fun, new interactive projects for our customers with our Love Letters postcards and color-in Father's Day ties. Watching our customers engage with these projects was so fun, and we look forward to reintroducing them in 2023. We also created new seasonal drinks, signature syrups, sparkling teas, and of course, had our favorite holiday blends, Love Letters and Naughty + Nice. 

We had eight coffees scored by Coffee Review, with 2 making it into the top 30 and 7 getting scores of 94 pts and above! Read more on our blog here: Bird Rock Coffee Roasters- 2022 Coffee Reviews

We worked tirelessly on developing and launching a new coffee app and rewards system for our cafe customers. Simultaneously, we designed a new coffee bag with a focus on sustainability. Our bag is 100% compostable now and we couldn’t be more proud. We were one of the first in the country to offer these sustainable bags. It’s come with a few hiccups, being a leader sometimes does, but we are working to get those fixed.

We had our first, definitely not our last, Pizza Pop-up at our Morena Blvd location.  We featured Big Night Pizza and ended the year with three weekends of the finest coffee paired with delicious Neapolitan-style pizza!

For National Coffee Day, we had our biggest giveaway ever. One lucky winner, from an Instagram contest, won a year's supply of coffee! Look for more giveaways like this one on our Instagram (@birdrockcoffeeroasters) page in 2023. 

We restructured our coffee subscription program and, in doing so, introduced two new plans with more on the way.  We created "The Cupping Table," a curated coffee subscription that delivers our most exceptional single-origin offerings. 

We opened our Roasting Lab / Offices across from our Morena Blvd location, giving our team members a proper place to collaborate and work! This new space will also house our training facility and Espresso Medic! This year we expanded our espresso and coffee equipment expertise beyond our cafes and started Espresso Medic SD, where we service and fix coffee equipment at other local coffee shops. Nobody in San Diego should be without good coffee, right? 

And we converted our Baby Bird VW bus into a mobile ordering truck which will officially launch in 2023! This will allow us to participate in special events and take Bird Rock Coffee Roasters to new places. Maybe one of your events? We are really excited about this new endeavor and look forward to seeing you wherever you need us. Just give us a call.

With the pandemic winding down, or so we thought, 2022 finally allowed us to make trips back to Countries of Origin where we were able to visit five of our Direct Trade Farming Partners. These trips are so important to us. They are where we continue to build our relationship with the producers, the farmers, the land, their communities, and more; where we get to see, touch, taste, and collaborate. We have worked with some of these producers for more than 10-years and we are very proud of it. Some of their coffee have arrived, yet more is still on the way for 2023.

We wouldn't have been able to do any of these beautiful things without the support of our incredible BRCR team members, our Direct Trade partners, our customers, and our communities. Bird Rock Coffee Roasters is built on these relationships, and the idea that producing and serving coffee is a collaborative effort, one that we are so grateful for! 

So cheers to 2022, and here's to a wonderful 2023.

We hope you will join us in being Empowered By Great Coffee! 

XOXO,

Bird Rock Coffee Roasters