Nathan Hamood

Expertise: roasting, entrepreneurship, café owner

Coffee insight: Nathan has found that their micro-lot coffees are generally at their best for about six to eight months, which he uses as a rhythm for creating new roasts.

Fun fact: Nathan started his roasting experiments with a rotisserie oven that had been converted into a drum roaster!

In 2009, Nathan’s sister, who was 16, was looking for more venues where she could perform as a musician, but her age was a limiting factor. Nathan’s family realized that not only were there limited venues for young musicians, but there also were few places in their community where people could gather in a focused environment to listen to live music. From that, the first incarnation of Dessert Oasis was born.

Originally, the business focused on serving desserts and creating a venue for their community to connect, and serving coffee was just one small aspect of their model. “That was really enough exposure to kind of get my interest piqued in the world of coffee,” Nathan explains. “I literally used to go to my parents with these profit-analysis charts as a 13-year-old, trying to explain why it would be financially feasible for us to being roasting our own coffee and actually improving what we were doing on the coffee end.”

Click here to find Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters’ Peru Germán Cerranza roast in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Nathan says wears many hats in his family’s business, Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, which has grown to a team of 65 people at four different locations, including an eight-person baking team specializing in their signature cheesecakes. He sources all of the company’s green coffee, heads the roasting department, and develops the company’s vision and financial strategy.

He’s also co-founder of Ace High Company, an all-natural-ingredient haircare company, which he founded with Dessert Oasis’s current director of finance in 2016. After friends in the haircare industry helped them discover their interest in experimenting with different hair products, Nathan and his co-founder started to play with creating their own. “We started brewing these little batches of pomade in our kitchen of the Rochester shop after hours, actually,” he recalls. Today they sell small-batch hair products worldwide, to haircare professionals and on their online platform.

Nathan is doing his part to create more opportunities for people who are passionate about making their careers in the coffee industry. “That’s one of the things that really drives me to want to continue the growth of this company…to create more of those career-type roles in our organization,” he explains.

Nathan wants to change how people think about working in coffee. “Over the years, we’ve met and worked with so many passionate, talented people who always have that compromise of that societal pressure to ‘get a real job’ or ‘get into your actual career.’” At Dessert Oasis, Nathan is proud that they’ve grown by finding driven people, like their baristas, who wanted to transition into full-time careers within the business.

Nathan says he hopes more consumers will come to understand the amount of work required to make a phenomenal cup of coffee. He shares with his regular customers all of the labor that goes into creating Dessert Oasis’s micro-lot coffees, but he says even they’re sometimes surprised by the amount of labor involved—from farming to sourcing to roasting to the art of brewing. “

“I think really the real craft of it is one of the biggest surprises to so many people still,” he says.

By forging long-term relationships with their importers and farmers, Nathan says that he’s able to better serve his customers, by providing high-quality, consistent, single-source micro-lot roasts.

After experimenting with blends, Nathan realized that his customers were truly drawn to their single-origin roasts, so that’s where he chose to put his energy: “Let’s just focus on really highlighting each origin, each lot.”

This model allows Dessert Oasis to provide coffee lovers with a seasonal rotation of unique coffees and serve as a market for small farmers, while also educating consumers about what makes each lot unique.

Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters: www.docr.coffee

Instagram: @desert_oasis_coffee_roasters