Specialty Coffee Wiki

Dragonfly Coffee Roasters

Properties3
descriptionThe small Boulder, Colorado roastery that was Roast magazine's 2019 Micro Roaster of the Year and the quietest of the four names on the first coffee ever to sell above $1,000 a pound.
tagsorganization, roaster, buyer, usa, colorado, geisha, prices
aliasesDragonfly Coffee, Dragonfly Coffee Roasters, LLC, Dragonfly, organizations/dragonfly-coffee-roasters

8 min read

Dragonfly Coffee Roasters

Dragonfly Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roastery in Boulder, Colorado, selling both wholesale and retail. It is small — around ten staff when it last described itself publicly — and it appears in this wiki for two reasons that sit oddly together: it won the American roasting trade’s top small-company award, and it was one of four businesses that jointly bought the most expensive coffee ever sold at the time.

It is the least famous name on that purchase, which makes it a useful example of what a Buying consortium actually looks like from the inside.

The company

AttributeDetail
LocationBoulder, Colorado, USA
Legal nameDragonfly Coffee Roasters, LLC1
BusinessWholesale and retail specialty roasting — tasting room, production facility and retail space
Led byTamas (surname not confirmed — see below)
Staff~10, as of 2018
Major awardRoast magazine 2019 Roaster of the Year, micro category
MembershipsAlliance for Coffee Excellence — member since roughly 2015

The location, business model, staff count and facilities all come from the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own member spotlight on the company, checked directly.2 Boulder is corroborated independently by Coffee Review (, confirmed via WebFetch)3 and by the trade coverage of the 2019 auction below.

Dragonfly states its emphasis as “quality, sustainability, ecological improvement and humanitarian support through ground level projects, sourcing and education” (ACE spotlight, confirmed via WebFetch). That is the company describing itself, not an audited claim — there is no certification behind those words in the way there is behind B Corporation certification or Rainforest Alliance approval.

Roaster of the Year, 2019

Dragonfly won Roast magazine’s Roaster of the Year in the micro category for 2019, sharing the year with Peerless Coffee & Tea in the macro category. This is confirmed against the awarding magazine’s own archive.4

Roast is the US roasting trade magazine, and the award judges the whole business — sourcing, quality control, staff development, community work — rather than a single coffee. “Micro” is the small-volume category; “macro” is the larger one.

The award is announced ahead of the year it names: ACE’s spotlight, published 28 November 2018, congratulates Dragonfly on being named Micro Roaster of the Year in Roast’s November/December 2018 issue, while the magazine’s own archive files the title under 2019. Both are describing the same win. If you see the year given as 2018 elsewhere, that is the announcement date rather than the title.

This wiki’s other Roast winners are Klatch Coffee (2009 micro, under its earlier name “Coffee Klatch”), Equator Coffees (2010 macro, as Equator Estates Coffee) and Cafe Kreyol (2023 macro).

The 2019 record lot

At the 2019 Best of Panama auction, an Elida Geisha Green Tip Natural ASD lot from Elida Estate scored 95.25 and sold at **1,029 per pound** — the first coffee ever to pass 1,000 a pound at public auction. Panama’s producers credited Saza Coffee of Japan with leading the buying consortium, and named three co-buyers: Klatch Coffee of California, Willoughbys Coffee & Tea of Connecticut, and Dragonfly Coffee Roasters of Boulder, Colorado.56

Two things are worth being careful about here.

Being named is not the same as paying. Nobody publishes how a consortium splits the bill or the beans. Dragonfly was in the group; nothing consulted here says what fraction of $1,029/lb it paid or how many kilos it took home. Klatch Coffee publicly described itself as the buyer of the same lot, which is exactly the ambiguity the Buying consortium note exists to explain.

It is a different size of business from its co-buyers. Saza Coffee fronts record bids habitually and Klatch Coffee turned its share into a widely reported ~$100 cup. A ten-person Boulder roastery buying into the same lot is the clearest illustration in this wiki of why consortia form at all: a share of the world’s most talked-about coffee is reachable for a small roaster in a way the whole bag never could be.

Coffees

The only independent sensory evaluation of a Dragonfly coffee found here is from Coffee Review, which cups and scores coffees on the 100-point scale described in Coffee scoring.

CoffeeScoreReviewedRoastOriginPrice
Espresso Crema Dolce93February 2015Medium-dark, Agtron 50/60Not disclosed$12.00 / 12 oz

Coffee Review describes the company as “a Boulder, Colorado based micro-roaster that produces high-quality coffees and supports worthy causes”. “Agtron 50/60” is a colour measurement of how dark the roast is, given for whole bean and ground separately — higher numbers mean lighter. “Origin not disclosed” is normal for an espresso blend, where roasters often keep the component coffees private.

On its Cup of Excellence buying, Dragonfly’s stated reasoning is educational rather than commercial: COE coffees “play a key role in our education and sustainability programs… these coffees and their connection to farm level support and empowerment are ambassadors of the direction prices and value structures in specialty coffee should be steered” (ACE spotlight, confirmed via WebFetch). No specific Cup of Excellence lot bought by Dragonfly is documented in anything consulted here.

To verify

Who Tamas is. ACE’s spotlight names only “Tamas”, with no surname, and describes him as speaking for the company — it never uses the word “founder”. A sales-data aggregator gives the full name as Tamas Christman and the title as CEO.7 Aggregator profiles are scraped and frequently stale, so the surname, the exact title and whether he founded or merely runs the company are all unconfirmed. No primary source consulted here documents Dragonfly’s ownership.

To verify

The 2011 founding year. A company-data profile lists Dragonfly as founded in 2011.8 Nothing from the company itself, and no state corporate filing, was consulted to confirm it. Treat 2011 as a third-party estimate rather than a documented date.

To verify

The current address, the Nevada listing, and whether the roastery still trades. Business directories place Dragonfly at 1501 Lee Hill Drive #22, Boulder, CO 80304, phone +1 303-579-2154 — the phone number is corroborated by Coffee Review, but the street address comes only from aggregator listings. Separately, a roaster-mapping site files Dragonfly under Henderson, Nevada with its own opening hours9 while titling the same page “Colorado” — an unexplained conflict with every Boulder-based source. Compounding this, the company’s own website could not be retrieved: www.dragonflycoffeeroasters.com returned an expired security certificate and the bare domain rate-limited repeated attempts. That is not evidence the business has closed, but its current trading status, locations and whether it operates a public café are all unconfirmed here.

To verify

Size and revenue figures. Two aggregators give mutually contradictory numbers — one lists employees as both “1–10” and “25–100” within a single profile, the other “11–50”; revenue estimates range across “100K–5.0M" and "1M–$5M” (SignalHire and Seamless.ai via the research report behind this note). None are company statements. The only figure with a named source behind it is the ~10 staff Dragonfly gave ACE in 2018, and that is eight years old.

Why it belongs in this wiki

Most roasters in these notes are here because they are large, famous, or repeatedly at the top of a bid sheet. Dragonfly is here because it is none of those and was on the record lot anyway. When a headline says a coffee “sold for $1,029 a pound”, part of that number is a ten-person roastery in Boulder buying a few kilos of it — which is the practical answer to how record prices get paid at all. See Premiumisation for why the willingness exists, and Angelino’s Coffee, Sey Coffee and Proud Mary Coffee for other US roaster-buyers documented here.

Footnotes

  1. LinkedIn — Dragonfly Coffee Roasters company page ↩

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Member Spotlight: Dragonfly Coffee Roasters (28 November 2018) ↩

  3. Coffee Review — Espresso Crema Dolce by Dragonfly Coffee Roasters ↩

  4. Roast magazine — Roaster of the Year award archive ↩

  5. AgroNosotros — Elida Estate Gesha earns $1,029 per pound in record-breaking Best of Panama auction ↩

  6. Global Coffee Report — Elida Estate Natural ASD Geisha makes Best of Panama auction history ↩

  7. Seamless.ai — Dragonfly Coffee Roasters ↩

  8. SignalHire — Dragonfly Coffee Roasters company profile ↩

  9. RoastersMap — Dragonfly Coffee Roasters ↩

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