Connie Blumhardt

Expertise: coffee media, coffee entrepreneurship, education, coffee industry 

Coffee insight: Before being roasted to the beautiful brown we all recognize, whole bean coffee is actually green!

Coffee fun fact: Roast Magazine has celebrated excellence in coffee roasting through their Roaster of the Year award since 2005.

Connie first fell in love with the coffee industry when she was working in ad sales at Fresh Cup Magazine, a trade journal for the coffee industry, in the late 1990s. By the early 2000s, Connie recognized that the burgeoning third-wave roasting community was looking for ways to connect and share information. “I saw this little niche segment that could probably use its own voice and its own educational outlet,” she explains.

So in 2004, six months after leaving Fresh Cup, she founded Roast Magazine with the goal of creating that platform.

Connie has served as the publisher for Roast Magazine for 20 years. While the publication has kept its focus on producing a beautifully designed, engaging hard-copy magazine—one that’s the gold standard for many specialty coffee roasters—they’ve also expanded their offerings to serve the roasting community in new ways. In 2011, they formed a partnership with Daily Coffee News, an online publication platform aimed at the specialty coffee industry. They’ve published six books for coffee professionals, branched out into podcasting, founded the Roaster of the Year award in 2005, and kicked off the first Roast Summit in 2020.

Connie says that the same thing that drove her to found Roast still fuels her passion—her love and respect for the roasting community. “People always ask, ‘Well, what do you love about what you do?’” she says. “One-hundred percent, it’s the people in the industry.” 

Serving the community has inspired Connie and her team at Roast to set high standards and work hard to keep raising the bar. “We want to it look amazing. We want it to read amazing. We want it to feel amazing,” she explains. “We really love serving the coffee industry, and I think that helps keep us where we’re at.”

While Connie’s frequently asked about her favorite coffees and brands, she says that coffee lovers really need to explore to choose the right coffee beans for their individual tastes. Connie explains, “It doesn’t matter what my favorite coffee brand is; it needs to be what your taste palette likes, what you like, because I feel like there’s so much variation in coffee roasting, and some people like it one way, some people like it another way. … So trust your own instinct and go with what you like.”

In 2020, Connie and Roast Magazine added Roast Summit—an educational conference for coffee roasters—to their already impressive variety of offerings. For Connie, it’s a chance to for roasters from across the country to learn from one another and to find community. “We really wanted to be able to provide an event that’s low cost for people, to be able to bring people together, provide this platform at a reasonable entry point,” she says. “We’re just trying to bring the community together.”

According to Connie, they have plans to push the scope of the event even further in 2025. The 2025 Roast Summit, which will be held in October 2025 in Portland, OR, will include both Roast Summit and the first Portland Coffee Festival—plus a major surprise that will be announced in January!

Roast Magazine website: https://www.roastmagazine.com/

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