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Sextant Coffee Roasters
1415 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Sextant is an independent cafe and roastery in San Francisco. Founded by Kinani Ahmed, a first-generation Ethiopian, they work directly with farmers across Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, and elsewhere in order to showcase the most flavorful coffees throughout the world. They believe that the best cups are the result of careful expedition — from the farm to roasting to the brewing process itself — and strive for excellence at every step.
A sextant is a tool sailors have used for centuries to navigate and explore. It is also a symbol of how coffee was originally transported out of Africa, as well as of the company ongoing efforts to find the highest quality beans and bring them to you. As such, they only buy from sources they have cultivated direct, sustainable relationships with. They personally roast all of their beans in San Francisco using state-of-the-art equipment designed to highlight the inherent sweetness of the coffee. They want to bring out the natural sugars that develop during the roasting process, then caramelize them at a specific rate in order to create a roast that’s neither too light nor too dark. Using this approach, they are able to emphasize the individual attributes and complexities of each coffee. Kinani was born in Ethiopia, where he grew up surrounded by his country’s rich coffee culture. After moving to San Francisco and seeing the attention to quality and craft of the third-wave coffee movement, he wanted to combine the best coffees of his home country in Ethiopia with the highest quality equipment and roasting processes he could find. In doing so, he also wanted to help farmers back in Ethiopia, as well as in wider parts of the world. In 2014, he founded Sextant, and is the only Ethiopian independently roasting and selling coffee in the U.S.