Serra do Cigano / Brazil / Go-To Espresso

Paola, originally from Trieste, and Andrew Willis founded Carrow Coffee Roasters in late 2017 on a family farm in Carrowgarry, County Sligo, on the shores of the Atlantic, after years spent in Colombia where Andrew covered the coffee industry for Bloomberg News and the couple began roasting on a Huky 500 in the attic of their Bogota apartment. Andrew is a certified Q Grader with SCA courses in Roasting and Barista Skills, and the contacts he built with Colombian growers, exporters, and industry experts during his journalism career now inform a sourcing network that reaches small scale producers across Africa and Latin America, many of whom they know personally. The roastery operates as a certified organic facility where the building sits within the natural landscape, with plywood workbenches rubbed in natural beeswax and all sink water returning to the fields on the farm. Carrow favors light to medium roasts that allow each bean's intrinsic flavor to come through, and uses 100 percent compostable retail packaging alongside reusable buckets for wholesale deliveries in the Sligo area. Listed as a women owned business in the SCA Coffee Directory, Carrow brings a rare combination of investigative journalism roots, direct origin relationships, and deep environmental consciousness to the Irish specialty coffee landscape.