Keri Elliott

Expertise: coffee roasting, entrepreneurship, café ownership

Coffee insight: There is only one facility, located in Canada, that processes all Swiss Water decaffeinated coffee in the world.

Coffee fun fact: The original name for Keri’s business, Elliott & Murrey, was an ode to her family’s entrepreneurial history; Keri’s great-grandfather founded Murrey & Sons, a long-standing bowling and billiard manufacturing company.

Keri was in high school when coffee first caught her attention. “Kids at my school would be walking in the first period with a caramel Frappuccino,” she recalls. “There was something about Starbucks that was like, man, if I could work there, I’d be really super cool.” After she graduated, she got a job as a barista at a drive-thru Starbucks, where she first started to explore different coffee regions and flavor profiles.

Years later, after she’d become a mom, someone encouraged her to reinvest in a hobby she loved, something she was really passionate about, and she landed on coffee. “So I started my journey, and I listed to one podcast called The Coffee Podcast. They did an episode on home-roasting coffee. I was like, ‘What is this? Home roasting? Now my curiosity is piqued.’” She bought a bag of green coffee from a local store and started experimenting with roasting coffee on her kitchen stovetop.

Keri says tasting that first cup of her home-roasted coffee was a pretty incredible moment (in spite of the fact that the amount of smoke it produced came as a pretty big shock), something that she wanted to keep chasing. She founded her coffee company, Elliott & Murrey, in 2019. Today, five years and a rebrand later, Keri is the owner and head roaster of Roasted by Mom, her specialty coffee roastery and café in Hillsboro, Oregon. The Roasted by Mom brand is a reflection of her unique connection to her business—a woman-owned coffee roasting business that celebrates and empowers women and mothers.

Find Roasted by Mom’s Bad A** Mama roast in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Keri says she’s inspired by the craft of coffee roasting and the creativity that’s inherent in being a roaster. “You can give the same coffee to five different coffee roasters, but they have different interpretations of that roast, right?” she explains. “And there’s a sort of artistry with that.” She says that as she learns more and continues to grow as a roaster, that passion fuels her resilience and persistence as an entrepreneur.

That had to start, though, with learning to accept and embrace the positive feedback she received: “The more that I really started to really take in and soak in how much appreciation people have of the coffee that I roast, because of the artistry, the craftsmanship that I put behind that, …that’s where that drive [comes from] to keep going.”

While decaffeinated coffee often gets a bad rap for being laden with chemicals, Keri wants coffee drinkers to know that there are healthier, more sustainable options in decaf. Keri’s Cool Mom Decaf uses the sugarcane decaffeination process, which reduces its carbon footprint.

Sugarcane decaffeination happens on the farm, rather than requiring the coffee to be shipped to a processing plant, and uses water and ethyl acetate, a natural compound derived from sugarcane, to strip out the caffeine from the coffee beans. According to Keri, the ethyl acetate also adds “a sweetness to the body,” which makes it even more special.

Keri engages coffee lovers through her playful and educational TikTok account, where she shares a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run her business but also the magic of coffee. She strives to show people what it looks like to be “a woman-owned solopreneur, but also trying to have that balance of highlighting the coffee and doing more coffee-making videos … to show people different brew recipes and how to make different drinks.”

For Keri, it’s all about bringing fun and joy to the learning process. “I’m a Gemini,” she says. “I always have to have a party. I like to have fun. … That’s the people pleaser inside me. I want to have people be smiling, be happy, be genuine, be awesome.”

TikTok: @roastedbymom

Instagram: @roastedbymomcoffee

Website: roastedbymom.com