Specialty Coffee Wiki

Willoughby's Coffee & Tea

Properties3
descriptionThe Connecticut roaster and café group, roasting in Branford since the 1980s, that keeps turning up on the buyer line of competition lots — including the first coffee ever to sell for more than $1,000 a pound.
tagsorganization, roaster, cafe, buyer, usa, connecticut, geisha
aliasesWilloughbys Coffee & Tea, Willoughby's Coffee & Tea, Willoughby's Coffee, Willoughbys, roasters-and-companies/willoughbys-coffee-tea

9 min read

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea

Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea is an American specialty coffee roaster, café operator and retailer based in Branford, Connecticut, with cafés along the Connecticut shoreline and in New Haven.12

It earns a note here for one reason: its name keeps appearing on the buyer line of competition results. Willoughby’s is not a household name and it does not publish scores or a sourcing report, but when you read the official paperwork of two very different auctions — a record-breaking Panamanian sale and an African Cup of Excellence — Willoughby’s is in the buying group both times. That is the whole case for this note, and both instances are documented below from primary sources rather than from the company’s own marketing.

The company

AttributeDetail
Trading nameWilloughby’s Coffee & Tea13
BaseBranford, Connecticut — the roasting plant, with a café attached12
BusinessRoasting, own cafés, whole-bean and tea retail
CafésFour: two in New Haven, one in Branford, one in Madison2
Websitewilloughbyscoffee.com3

The Branford base is the one company detail confirmed from outside the company itself: reporting on the 2019 Best of Panama auction identifies the buyer as “Willoughbys Coffee & Tea (Branford, Connecticut),” which matches the roasting-plant address on the company’s own location page.12

To verify — the founding year, the founders, and the company's own account of itself

Willoughby’s About Us page states that the company was founded in 1985 by Bob Williams and Barry Levine, and that its “core mission” from inception was to be a “state-of-the-art coffee roasting company” producing the finest and freshest beans.4 That is a single source, it is the company describing itself, and it could not be read directly while this note was written — willoughbyscoffee.com returns HTTP 403 (Forbidden) to automated requests, on every page tried. So the 1985 date, both founders’ names and the mission wording all reach this note second-hand, through the research report behind it, and none is corroborated by an independent source. Treat them as claimed. Current ownership is not documented anywhere consulted — do not assume the named founders still own the business.

Locations

All four sites are in Connecticut, and the company runs its roastery and one of its cafés in the same Branford building.2

CaféAddressPhoneNotes
Branford550 E. Main Street, Branford(203) 481-1700The roasting plant, with a café attached; closed Sundays
New Haven — Church Street258 Church Street (corner of Grove)(203) 777-7400Open seven days
New Haven — York Street194 York Street(203) 789-8400Open seven days; in the Yale campus blocks
Madison752 Boston Post Road, Madison(203) 245-1600Open seven days

The York Street address and phone number are separately listed by Tripadvisor, which is the only one of the four with a second source behind it.5 Opening hours are posted on the company’s location page and are not repeated here — small café hours change, and the page could not be checked directly.2 No location outside Connecticut appears in any source consulted; four cafés is the whole footprint as documented.

What it buys

This is the part of Willoughby’s that is documented by other people’s records rather than its own.

YearAuction / lotScorePriceWilloughby’s role
12018Cup of Excellence Rwanda, lot 3A — Murundo washing station, Nyamasheke, Gihombo90.03$8.00/lbOne of five named buyers on the lot6
22019Best of Panama — Elida Geisha Green Tip Natural ASD, Elida Estate95.25$1,029/lbMember of the winning buying consortium1

The 2019 lot is the one that matters historically. It was the first coffee ever to sell for more than $1,000 a pound at public auction, and Panama’s producers credited Saza Coffee of Japan with leading the group that bought it. The three American members named alongside Saza were Klatch Coffee of California, Willoughbys Coffee & Tea of Branford, and Dragonfly Coffee Roasters of Boulder, Colorado.1

Read that carefully, though, and read Buying consortium alongside it. Being named on a record lot means a roaster was in the group. It does not mean it paid $1,029 a pound, or bought any particular share — nobody publishes the splits. Klatch Coffee’s own note carries the same caveat from the other direction: Klatch announced the win as its own, and so, in effect, could any member.

The 2018 Rwandan purchase is the more revealing one, because it is smaller and it is on an official results sheet. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence records lot 3A of Rwanda’s 2018 Cup of Excellence — Murundo washing station, 90.03 points, $8.00 a pound — as sold to a group listed as “Intelligenstia, Puff Coffee, Carrboro Coffee, Willoughby’s Coffee, Single Origin.”6 (The misspelling of Intelligentsia is ACE’s own.) That is Willoughby’s buying alongside one of the best-known roasters in the United States, at eight dollars a pound rather than a thousand — see Rwanda for why an African competition’s winning lots sell for a fraction of a Panamanian one’s.

Beyond auctions, Willoughby’s publishes single-farm lots on its own site. Two turn up elsewhere in this wiki: a washed Geisha from the “Velo” plot at Mama Cata in Boquete, picked in February 2018 at 1,750 m and dried in parchment on tables,7 and a ‘Cerro Azul’ AA Geisha from Café Granja La Esperanza in Colombia.8 Both of those lot pages are also behind the site’s 403 block, and the claims on them are flagged in the notes that use them.

To verify — what Willoughby's actually pays, and what it charges

The research behind this note searched Best of Panama, ACE, SCA and CQI material for Willoughby’s and reported finding nothing — no scores, no auction prices, no certifications. The two auction results above were then confirmed directly against the official ACE archive and against reporting on the 2019 Panamanian sale, so the report’s “nothing found” reflects the limits of that search, not the record. What remains genuinely undocumented is everything in between: retail prices per pound, the share Willoughby’s took in either consortium, any cupping score the company assigns its own coffees, and any Direct trade or certification claim. No number of that kind should be inferred for this roaster.

Where it sits

Willoughby’s is a useful example of a type this wiki keeps running into: the regional roaster with national buying reach. It has four cafés in one small state and no international profile, yet it sits on the bid sheet of the most expensive coffee ever sold at the time. That combination is normal in specialty coffee precisely because of the consortium mechanism — a shoreline Connecticut business cannot outbid Japanese and Chinese buyers alone, but it can take a few pounds of the lot by joining a group that can. Compare Dragonfly Coffee Roasters, a Colorado roaster in the same 2019 group and in the same position, and Klatch Coffee, which is the outlier: it took the lot all the way to a menu board at $100 a cup.

The 1985 founding date, if it holds, would also make Willoughby’s roughly contemporary with Peet’s Coffee’s expansion and older than most of the American roasters in this folder — a business that was fresh-roasting whole beans in Connecticut well before Third wave coffee had a name for it.

  • Official site — Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea — the company’s own site, and the source of the founding, mission and location claims above. It blocks automated requests (HTTP 403), so nothing on it could be confirmed directly for this note; a reader opening it in a browser can check the details themselves.

Footnotes

  1. [AgroNosotros — Elida Estate Gesha earns 1,029 per pound in record-breaking Best of Panama auction](https://agronosotros.com/elida-estate-gesha-earns-1029-per-pound-in-record-breaking-best-of-panama-auction/) — confirmed via WebFetch. Source of the 95.25 score, the 1,029/lb price, the Saza-led consortium and the phrase “Willoughbys Coffee & Tea (Branford, Connecticut)” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea — Location & Hours — the company’s own page (HTTP 403 on fetch); source of all four addresses and phone numbers and of the statement that the Branford café is “located at our coffee roasting plant” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea — official site — the company homepage (HTTP 403 on fetch) ↩ ↩2

  4. Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea — About Us — the company’s own page (HTTP 403 on fetch); sole source of the 1985 founding year, the founders Bob Williams and Barry Levine, and the “state-of-the-art coffee roasting company” mission wording ↩

  5. Tripadvisor — Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea, 194 York St, New Haven — a listing directory (HTTP 403 on fetch); the only second source for the York Street address and phone number ↩

  6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Rwanda 2018 results and auction — the official competition and auction archive; confirmed via WebFetch. Source of lot 3A, Murundo washing station, the 90.03 score, the $8.00/lb price and the five-buyer list naming “Willoughby’s Coffee” ↩ ↩2

  7. Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea — Panama Mama Cata Geisha Washed — roaster lot page; the source used on Mama Cata for the “Velo” plot, the 1,750 m altitude and the February 2018 harvest dates ↩

  8. Willoughby’s Coffee — Colombia Granja La Esperanza ‘Cerro Azul’ AA Geisha — roaster lot page (HTTP 403 on fetch); the source used on Café Granja La Esperanza ↩

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