Our story
Bear & Bean started in 2024 when two friends — both former chain-cafe baristas — decided they were done watching $7 cups get pulled from beans nobody knew the origin of. We rented a 600 sq ft shop on Ossington in late 2023, installed a Probat 5kg roaster in the back, and started importing green beans directly from co-ops we'd visited.
Today we roast every Tuesday and Friday. Twelve rotating beans on the shelf at any time, sourced from six countries. Our espresso bar serves around 80 cups a day; the rest of our roast goes out via online orders to home brewers across Canada.
We don't have venture money. We don't have a big marketing team. What we have is a roaster, a list of farms we trust, and a customer base that grows by word of mouth.
Our standing relationships are with co-ops in Yirgacheffe (Ethiopia), Huila (Colombia), Nyeri (Kenya), and Aceh (Indonesia). We rotate the rest seasonally — guests from Brazil, Rwanda, Costa Rica, and occasional micro-lots from Panama or Bolivia depending on what our importer surfaces.
Every bag tells you the farm, the altitude, the variety, the process, and the roast date. If a bag ships without that info, we screwed up — please email us.