What's on Our Team — Everyone Else Drinks Too (a Quiet Tour of the Drinks and Rituals of the People Who Pack Your Coffee)
I write most of the content you'll find on this site. The product photos, the brewing guides, the founder notes — that's me. But Cozy Sips isn't just me. There's a small team of people who pack orders, label bags, run the roaster on Wednesday, handle the emails, and keep the whole operation going. We don't shout about it, but the people behind the brand are real, and they each have their own coffee and tea rituals.
This post is a quiet tour of what each of us drinks at home. It's meant to be the human version of a behind-the-scenes post — not a "meet the team" with names and titles, just a few words about how each of us brews.
What I drink (the founder)
I'm a pour-over drinker, mostly, in the morning. The V60 with a 22 g dose and a 350 g water target. I drink it black, no sugar. I switch to single origins every six weeks or so because I get bored of the same cup.
After 1 pm I'm a tea drinker. Sencha in the summer (cold-brewed overnight, then strained), genmaicha in the winter (steeped hot with a 75 °C pour). I keep both at my desk during the week.
On Sundays the cup is a pour-over again, but at a heavier 1:15 ratio. The Sunday cup is what I look forward to the most. The link to that recipe is at the bottom of this post.
I don't drink decaf. I drink the same coffees we sell. I don't drink flavored coffee. The cup you brew from our coffee is the cup I brew for myself.
What our roast lead drinks
Our roast lead runs the Wednesday roast and pulls the green coffee samples to cup. He's been roasting professionally for 9 years and at Cozy Sips for 2.
He drinks a French press every morning, 1:14 ratio, 4-minute steep. Coarse grind, full-immersion, plunger at exactly 4 minutes. He has a separate grinder for espresso and one for filter, and he doesn't share burrs between them. He says the cup off a French press is "the closest you can get to a cupping without actually cupping."
He doesn't drink the roastery's coffee at home. He has a private stash of a single Kenyan that he buys from another roaster — partly because he likes the Kenyan, partly because he wants to keep drinking specialty coffee outside his own. "I want to know what the rest of the world tastes like," he said once.
In the afternoon he drinks mugicha — Japanese roasted barley tea, cold-brewed. He keeps a pitcher of it in the fridge during summer and drinks it unsweetened. He makes a fresh batch weekly.
What our packing lead drinks
Our packing lead handles the Thursday ship day. She labels the bags, pulls the orders, packs them, and gets them to the carrier. She has the most physical work on the roastery side.
She drinks a matcha latte in the morning, made with a bamboo chasen and oat milk. She whisks it in a wide ceramic bowl, pours it into her travel cup, and walks to the roastery. Her ratio is approximately 4 g of ceremonial matcha to 60 g of water and 200 g of steamed oat milk.
She drinks it hot year-round. She is unmoved by iced matcha despite our best efforts.
In the afternoon she drinks hibiscus iced tea, brewed overnight cold with a handful of dried hibiscus and a few mint leaves. She drinks it unsweetened and keeps refilling the pitcher.
She reads everything I write before it goes live. She has saved many a brewing guide with post-it notes on the printouts.
What our customer email lead drinks
The person who answers the customer emails drinks an Aeropress. Specifically, the inverted Aeropress method with a 17 g dose, 240 g of water at 88 °C, and a 2:30 steep before pressing. He prides himself on a 30-second press — slow, controlled, no hissing at the end.
He drinks it black, sometimes with a half-teaspoon of brown sugar. He has the strongest opinions in the roastery about water temperature. "If you're at 100 °C you're burning the cup," he told me once. "There's no coffee that benefits from boiling water on contact."
In the afternoon he drinks a first-flush Darjeeling brewed at 85 °C for 3 minutes. He buys it from us when we have it, and from someone else when we don't. He is the only person on the team who actively maintains two different cupboards.
What our part-time help drinks
We have one part-time helper who comes in on Thursdays during the ship-day. She's a college student studying food science.
She drinks instant coffee. Not in the roastery — she makes it at home before she comes in, and she keeps a thermos of it on the counter. She has explained to me, more than once, that instant coffee gets a bad rap and is actually fine. "It's coffee that someone already extracted for you. It's not a different category. It's just convenient."
The team has collectively decided not to argue with her. Some weeks she brings a thermos of her homemade cold brew to the roastery and shares it with the packing lead. The cold brew is excellent.
What we don't drink
A few things you won't find in our roastery.
Keurig machines. The team has a strong and occasionally loud opinion about K-cups.
Flavored coffee. No one on the team drinks it. We've all tasted it. It's fine. It's not for us.
Decaf. Most of us don't drink it regularly. We carry decaf for customers who do, and we try to source it well, but it's not a personal preference for anyone on the team.
Energy drinks. Not relevant to the coffee brand, but worth mentioning: the team doesn't drink energy drinks. The afternoon pick-me-up at our roastery is tea, generally.
The point of this post
This isn't meant to be a "meet the team" with corporate bios. It's meant to show that the people who pack your coffee drink coffee — and tea — in the same ways you probably do. There's no big secret behind the brand. We're a small group of people who like coffee, like tea, and like packing and shipping orders.
If you order from us and the bag feels quietly packed in a poly mailer with a roast-date card, that's not a branding choice — it's just how our packing lead works. She's been doing it for two years and hasn't changed anything.
We don't try to be anything other than a small specialty coffee and tea shop that's run by people who actually drink what they sell. The team isn't large enough to need a leadership chart. The team isn't composed enough to need a mission statement.
We drink coffee and tea. We pack orders. We ship Thursday.
See what the roast date means.
P.S. The customer email lead wants me to note for the record that he does not drink instant coffee. He's the only one of us who has an active policy on this. I'm including it because he asked nicely twice.
— Seraphina
A short note on what's in the roastery on a normal day
Since this post is meant to be a tour of the people behind the brand, a quick note on what each of us does in the roastery during the week.
Monday and Tuesday. I work on the website, write the blog posts and product copy, answer customer emails, and plan the week's roast. The customer email lead works on the same days, handling the bulk of the inbox.
Wednesday. The roast lead and one helper roast the week's coffee. The roast typically runs 3 to 5 hours depending on the lot. I cup the post-roast sample Wednesday afternoon to verify the cup came out the way we wanted. The packing lead comes in for two hours at the end of the day to label and prep the bags.
Thursday. The packing lead (with the part-time helper) packs and ships the week's orders. We typically ship 60 to 100 orders each Thursday. The other team members are usually doing other work — design, customer email, supplier communication — on Thursdays.
Friday. Lighter day. We catch up on orders that came in late in the week, handle any shipping issues, and restock the few supplies we keep on hand.
Weekend. The roastery is closed. The website stays open for orders that will go into the next week's roast.
That's the rhythm. There's no big secret behind the brand — we roast once a week, we ship once a week, and the people who do it are a small group who happen to drink a lot of coffee and tea.
If you've ordered from us before, the bag in your kitchen came from someone on this team. The brew guide was written by someone on this team. The customer email reply (if you've written in) was written by someone on this team.
We don't shout about it. We're just a small group of people who like what we do.