Specialty Coffee Wiki

Lance Schnorenberg

Properties3
descriptionThe American roaster who started as a barback at Espresso Vivace in Seattle, spent three years teaching himself on a 1 lb sample roaster in a Bushwick loft, and co-founded the Brooklyn micro-roastery that became Sey — where he buys the green coffee and argues that the roaster's job is to stay out of the way.
tagsperson, united-states, new-york, brooklyn, roaster, green-coffee-buyer, light-roast
aliasesSchnorenberg, Lance Schnorenburg, Sey Coffee founder, Lofted Coffee founder

9 min read

Lance Schnorenberg

Lance Schnorenberg is an American coffee roaster and green-coffee buyer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a co-founder of Sey Coffee — the Bushwick roastery and café at 18 Grattan Street — where he works as Director of Coffee and green buyer, the person who chooses which coffees the company buys and how far they are roasted.123

He is from the Pacific Northwest and began in coffee as a barback at Espresso Vivace in Seattle, the small Seattle company where David Schomer popularised latte art in the United States.14 He describes the job as where he fell for café culture and the craft of espresso.1

Why he belongs here: most of the people in this wiki have a scoreboard behind them — a championship title, an auction lot, a record price. Schnorenberg has none of that. His reputation rests entirely on what he buys and how lightly he roasts it, and on a company that publishes what it paid. That is a much harder claim to check than a scoresheet, and this note says plainly where the checkable evidence stops.

Key facts

AttributeDetail
NationalityAmerican; from the Pacific Northwest, based in Brooklyn, NY1
RoleCo-founder, Director of Coffee and green buyer, Sey Coffee2
Business partnerTobin Polk — also spelled Tobias Polk in sources34
First coffee jobBarback at Espresso Vivace, Seattle14
ThenStumptown Coffee Roasters, after moving to New York1
Earlier companyLofted Coffee, roasted from a fourth-floor Bushwick loft, renamed Sey in 201734
Café openedEarly August 2017, 18 Grattan Street, Brooklyn3
Buying focusClean, expressive coffees; a stated preference for the Washed process5
Stated current focus”Equity and reciprocity within the global coffee supply chain”2
Outside coffeeLuthier apprenticeship — building acoustic guitars and ukuleles1

How he got here

The path runs Seattle → New York → his own roaster, and each step changed what he was looking for in a cup.

Espresso Vivace, Seattle. He started as a barback — the person who restocks, cleans and runs the bar so the barista can stay on the machine — at Espresso Vivace, and stayed for the café culture and the espresso craft.1 Vivace roasts dark and sweet in what it calls a Northern Italian style, which is close to the opposite of what he would later become known for. He and Tobin Polk worked there together before either of them roasted anything.4

Stumptown, New York. After moving east he “found a home at” Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and credits that job with introducing him to single-origin coffees — coffee sold as one farm or one lot rather than blended — and to the range of flavours different origins can produce.1

A coffee trip to Europe. He has described a trip through Montreal, England and Copenhagen as the thing that fundamentally reset his approach, by showing him the much lighter roasting style then standard in Northern Europe.1 That trip is the direct ancestor of the way Sey Coffee roasts today.

Three years on a sample roaster. He bought a San Franciscan 1 lb sample roaster — a very small machine of the kind used to test-roast green coffee before buying it, not to produce it commercially — and spent roughly three years experimenting before Lofted Coffee became a real business.1 By his own account there is no clean founding date: “There isn’t really a date of when Lofted Coffee was created… We hit a stride about 2 years ago, 2014.”1

Lofted Coffee, and the name that had to change

Schnorenberg and Polk lived and roasted in a fourth-floor industrial loft in Bushwick for several years under the name Lofted Coffee, selling to New York cafés — Búdin in Greenpoint, Joe Pro Shop, and the Peddler cart service among them — before they had a shop of their own.3

Then they lost the name. Lofty Coffee of San Diego brought a trademark dispute that ran for about two years; Schnorenberg’s summary to Sprudge was “We’d been dealing with the whole court thing for almost two years.”3 The pair rebranded to Sey in 2017 — “yes” spelled backwards — and opened the Grattan Street café in early August 2017, turning a roasting operation into a café.34

To verify — when the company actually started

Sources give four different start dates for the Lofted/Sey business, and the Sey Coffee note already flags the same conflict. Sprudge, interviewing Schnorenberg directly, says only “the early 2010s”.3 A third-party roaster guide says 2013.4 A social post says 2010;6 Sey’s LinkedIn shows 2014. Schnorenberg himself says there is no precise founding date and that things “hit a stride” around 2014.1 Treat any single year attributed to him as unestablished. The 2017 rebrand and café opening are firm — those are dated in contemporaneous reporting.3 Note also that his co-founder’s first name appears as both Tobin and Tobias Polk, sometimes in the same source family.34

What he buys, and how he roasts it

Schnorenberg is the green buyer — the person who tastes and purchases the unroasted coffee. His stated aim is to buy and roast clean and expressive coffees, with an emphasis on the Washed process, the method that ferments and rinses the fruit off the seed before drying and tends to produce the clearest, most transparent cup.5 He travels annually with his team to the countries Sey Coffee buys from.5

That buying decision and the roasting decision are the same decision, which is the part worth understanding. Sey Coffee roasts very light — stopping well before the sugars caramelise far — so almost nothing in the cup comes from the roast. A light roast has nowhere to hide: a coffee that was only average as green tastes thin and sour. Choosing to roast that way is therefore a public bet on the quality of the buying, which is his job. See Green coffee buying and Coffee roasting for the mechanics on each side.

His own framing of the work has moved past flavour. The bio circulated when he judged in 2025 says he “now spends most of his time thinking about and working on finding equity and reciprocity within the global coffee supply chain” — meaning who in the chain gets paid what, not what the coffee tastes like.2

To verify — Sey's pay and transparency figures

A single roaster-directory page reports that Sey runs a gratuity-free model with baristas paid $22/hour and publishes per-coffee supply-chain transparency including farm-gate value.4 No second independent source, and no page on Sey’s own site, was confirmed for either figure in the research behind this note — an attempt to read Sey’s transparency page returned an HTTP error. The claim is plausible and consistent with his stated focus on equity,2 but the numbers are one aggregator’s, not the company’s own published document. Compare the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide for what verifiable price reporting looks like.

Judging

In October 2025 Schnorenberg was one of five judges at the NYC AeroPress Championship, the New York qualifier feeding the World AeroPress Championship, alongside head judge Brandon Lee and judges Danny Toro and Kendra Sledzinski. The event was held on 12 October 2025.2

This is the only competitive-circuit involvement documented for him, and it is a judging role, not a competitor’s. The World AeroPress Championship is a fan-led knockout event, not a Specialty Coffee Association championship.

What is not documented

Research for this note looked specifically for cupping scores, auction results, prices paid, and lot-level records naming Lance Schnorenberg — in Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, Specialty Coffee Association and Coffee Quality Institute material — and found none. He does not appear as a competitor, a winning roaster, or a named buyer of a competition lot in anything consulted.12354

That absence tracks the same finding on the Sey Coffee note and looks like a real feature of his record rather than a gap in the search: his public standing was built on buying and roasting, not on winning.

One near-miss is worth stating carefully. He has named a “Panama Esmeralda Geisha” as a formative coffee he tasted — the Geisha variety from Hacienda La Esmeralda that started the modern Panamanian auction market.1 The interview does not say he bought it, at Best of Panama or anywhere else, and gives no lot, price or score. It is a coffee he drank, not a coffee he purchased.

Footnotes

  1. OKCoffee — Lance Schnorenberg — confirmed via WebFetch; his own account of Espresso Vivace, Stumptown, the Europe trip, the San Franciscan sample roaster, the absence of a Lofted founding date, the luthier apprenticeship and the Esmeralda Geisha ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15

  2. World AeroPress Championship — NYC AeroPress Championship judges announcement — confirmed via WebFetch; source of his Sey title, the equity-and-reciprocity line, and the 12 October 2025 NYC judging panel ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Sprudge — Say Yes To Bushwick’s New Sey Coffee — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Lofty Coffee trademark dispute, the two-year court quote, the loft years, the wholesale accounts, and the August 2017 café opening ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  4. day9.coffee — Sey Coffee, Brooklyn, New York — confirmed via WebFetch; third-party roaster directory; source of the Espresso Vivace connection with Polk, the 2013 date, and the wage and transparency claims flagged above ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  5. Interview with Sey — buying and roasting philosophy (YouTube) — cited via the research report; not read directly ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Instagram — post introducing Sey Coffee — cited via the research report; the outlying 2010 founding date ↩

Graph View

Backlinks