Fresh Cup partnered with coffee roaster and communicator Kat Melheim to produce a series of interviews with coffee leaders and innovators. We gave Kat full creative control to interview the people she finds fascinating, and dig into the topics she’s most curious about.
For this conversation, Kat sat down with Brett Donahue, Eastern roasting supervisor at Counter Culture Coffee in Durham, North Carolina. Counter Culture recently turned 30 years old and has built sophisticated systems for sourcing, roasting, and quality control, all at an impressive scale. Brett has been with the company for 15 years, managing roasting operations that produce coffee for Counter Culture’s extensive wholesale and retail network up and down the East Coast.
In this conversation, Donahue explores how one of the largest specialty coffee roasters in the United States maintains quality and consistency—not just for Counter Culture, but for its sourcing and producing partners as well.
To catch up on the conversation, watch the full video below, or read through the following transcript.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
Kat Melheim: Could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Counter Culture?
Brett Donahue: My name is Brett Donahue. I’m the Eastern roasting supervisor at our Durham headquarters. I’m managing a team of roasters, roasting machines, and ordering a lot of coffee. Counter Culture turned 30 in 2025, and I’m lucky enough to have been here for 15 of those years. I’ve seen a lot of change, a lot of growth, a lot of projects coming to fruition over that time.
How have things changed over those 15 years? How has your role evolved?
When I first started, I just wanted a job in the coffee industry. I was sick of being a barista and knew that Counter Culture was a few hours away from where I was living, so I applied for a production job, took the plunge, and moved out here. In the first two years, I worked as a shipper and a bagger, learning all the customers we were servicing up and down the Eastern Seaboard and also learning about the guiding principles of the company, at least on the production side: freshness, consistency, quality, all that.
After that, I was lucky enough to be around when there was an opening for a roaster apprentice. I applied, was lucky enough to get it, and I’ve been in the roasting department ever since.
How does Counter Culture approach coffee now—from green to roasted, theoretical to practical?
I’ll have to speak for our coffee buying team here, but we have a lot of emphasis on maintaining a diverse supply of coffee from long-term partnerships where possible. We’re focusing on bringing coffees in that are clean, have inherent sweetness, have nuance, and generally have some sort of long-term partnership potential. We’re also looking to maintain sustainability and push certain projects to improve cup scores, improve consistency, and improve the whole supply chain in that mix.
Walk me through the practical side. From the moment a coffee enters Counter Culture’s consciousness until it’s in a bag, what’s that process?
Our buying and sourcing team generally gets an arrival sample. They’ll check it for quality, and make a last-minute determination in terms of what product it’ll go into, or what rate it’ll be blended. I get that information and then make sure that I bring those coffees in at the right time for the right products.
When coffees arrive stateside, I pull them in from our external warehouse. It involves a level of intuiting what we’re going to need with fluctuations in volume. Any food industry understands there are seasonal fluctuations, daily fluctuations. We’re trying to bring in just enough coffee to get us through the week without a ton of excess. I generally order about two to three trucks a week, constantly restocking the supply we’ve got in the green warehouse.
There’s a lot of communication that goes to the roasting department about which bags to grab, which lots to look out for, how to construct blends, how to program silos to spit out blends in the right ratio. The roasters are also doing the work of looking closely at the actual product, making sure things are smelling right, tasting good. Essentially, it’s the QC loop that’s at the end of every single roast cycle.
What does the QC loop look like? Do you cup every batch?
At the volume we’re running, we don’t cup every single batch. But we are sending samples of the full product mix to our QC and buying team, so there is a feedback loop there. That helps them make determinations—if a coffee is too acidic for one product, they might shift it towards another. If a coffee’s tasting light and underdeveloped, we get that information back pretty quickly.
We also maintain some layer of QC within the roasting department. The Agtron [coffee roast analyzer machine] is very helpful and essential. What it does is it takes out a sense of bias in the process. I can think that I’ve got the perfect recipe or profile for any one of our coffees, but the coffee is going to change over time. The machines have different behavior patterns over time.
The Agtron gives us immediate feedback. I gave this coffee certain inputs and this is what I actually get out, and this is causally connected to what the customer tastes. Shades of brown seem arbitrary, but there are all sorts of connections to the lightness or darkness of that coffee having an impact on body, sweetness, acidity. It’s a great way for us to catch a batch that maybe has slipped out of profile.
With 30 years of data, I’m sure you’ve got all of that fleshed out.
Yeah, there are plenty of reference points. Every coffee has its own Agtron target. We also try to work QC in reverse: If we’re hitting the right Agtron and we’re tasting that coffee and it’s not tasting right, then we need to make determinations. Do we extend certain phases of the roast? Do we slow it down? Do we reduce the batch size so we can detail the curve a little bit better?
The Agtron is really instrumental for us. It also has this moment of bliss for roasters—that sense of “I did it right.” You add knowledge to the process, do things in a consistent manner, or try something new and get a good result. There’s a sensory hit from it, too—you get that first puff of aromatics.
It helps the roasters see that they’re a really unique hinge point in the company. The whole supply chain is really important, but we have this tiny moment where we can affect change for the better. That honors the labor of the many people who’ve come before and the customer base beyond.
You as the roaster are this critical hinge point—maybe 10, 12, 15 minutes. You can either ruin it for everyone or make it great for everyone.
Yeah, you really have this point of leverage where you can make an impact. That’s a heavy weight, but also a lot of agency. It’s something I’ve always appreciated about working in roasting.
How do you think about roast levels across Counter Culture’s product line?
Generally, our coffees are landing at specific, standardized roast levels. Big Trouble is very much a medium roast. Fast Forward we would call medium-light. Forty-Six is our darkest roast. It’s actually not a French roast—technically it’s a Vienna roast, because it just gets to the very first couple of pops in second crack. But that’s enough to get it to that rich, chocolatey, smoky range.
We’re working with those basic industry categories—dark, medium, medium-light—but the Agtron is so much more specific than that. That’s what we use to granularly define it.
Has Counter Culture’s roast approach changed over the years you’ve been here?
Yeah, quite a bit. I mentioned that we used to just roast components for blending, but our roasting approach has really changed as new folks have come through the department, bringing new ideas in, bringing experience from other roasteries, or just not knowing how to roast. As we internally teach folks, they start to learn and revise things, or they learn different lessons than we might have.
The folks in the roasting team have done a lot to codify where we’re at in terms of philosophy. The machines also drive a lot of what we do. Learning to roast single origins on the Loring personally helped me rethink a lot of my roasting methodologies. I would stall batches out or have batches that were completely uncontrollable. Honestly, it took some newer folks in the department who had less bias, who had roasted on Probats for a shorter amount of time. Having new voices, new eyes in the department has been really helpful, and it’s made it more of a collaborative environment.
I would also say some of our current coffee buyers were roasters years ago, and they did a heck of a lot to really build the foundation that we’re on now. It feels like there are a lot of folks in Counter Culture who have had really positive impacts on this department.
How does the roasting team grow? Do you bring people in from packaging, or do you hire roasters directly?
We’ve done it both ways. We’ve hired internally, and generally there are a couple of folks in production who look across the floor and think, “What are they doing down there? That looks difficult or cool or something.” In the department right now, we have two folks who started in production and were promoted into roasting, and that works really, really well. We’ve also hired a few folks who have roasted at other companies in this area.
You have four or five roasting machines and seven people in the roasting department. How is the schedule configured week by week?
It’s predicated on our start time. We have a couple of folks who are here very early in the morning getting things going, and from that point we can pretty well define how many pounds we can produce. We try not to roast a ton of excess coffee, but generally every day is hitting a level of capacity now. If we start at 6 a.m. and run till 6 p.m., that’s sufficient to produce the needed pounds.
Some of it’s known, some can be calculated out, but a lot of it is just us knowing what the hourly time on the floor needs to be to get things out. We can also get creative with the shifts. If we don’t have folks to stay here late, we can have one person roasting on the largest machine rather than spending a lot of time roasting on the smallest machine. We look at it flexibly in terms of which machines are creating the most impact.
What does a typical day in the roastery look like, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.?
The morning crew comes in and assesses the numbers of the day while the machines are warming up. After the machines have gotten that nice saturation time, they’ll start the roast list generally with darkest roasts first and then moving progressively lighter. That works pretty well for us.
Currently we’re slotting a lot of our single origins onto the Loring, just because that machine has some unique qualities that can really bring out the high notes in coffees. But certainly we’ll put single origins on the other machines at times, too.
Once the machines are going and dark roasts are in, a couple of other folks will come in and start to backfill. That’s when silo loading starts to happen, green movement starts, blend changeups start. As we get closer to lunchtime, the first shift starts to take off or step onto auxiliary tasks—warehouse upkeep, that sort of thing. The later folks step onto the roasters.
How do breaks work? Do people stagger their lunches?
We found that if we all shut down for a break at the same time, we lose a sizable chunk of the day. Generally, we have one person daisy-chaining around to each roaster and giving folks breaks, so one person’s out on break at a time.
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Fifteen years in, Donahue has watched Counter Culture grow without losing what made it an innovator in the first place. Tools like the Agtron remove the risk of roaster bias. Long-term sourcing relationships keep quality consistent and preserve the vision for ethical sourcing. New voices in the department challenge old assumptions. According to Donahue, it’s the combination that keeps a 30-year-old roaster from calcifying into “the way we’ve always done it.”
