Gigawatt Coffee Roasters on The Locals: Air Roasted Coffee & Startup Lessons

Behind the Beans: Gigawatt Coffee Roasters Interview with The Locals

What does it take to build a small-batch coffee company from the ground up—without bitterness (in your beans or your journey)? In this interview with The Locals, Emmy-nominated host Ryan Glatzhofer sits down with Eli, co-founder (with his wife Jen) of Gigawatt Coffee Roasters, to talk about air roasted coffee , launching a business during the pandemic, and building a loyal customer base through farmers markets across Chicagoland .

Whether you’re a coffee lover tired of stale, over-roasted brews or an entrepreneur looking for real talk about starting and scaling a small business , this interview is packed with flavor , insight , and the grind behind building a smooth, air roasted coffee brand —one cup at a time.

🎥 Catch the full video below , then scroll for key takeaways and a full text transcript .

Quick Summary

In this interview with The Locals, Gigawatt Coffee Roasters co-founder Eli shares how he and his wife Jen built a small-batch air roasted coffee business from the ground up.

You’ll learn:

Whether you’re curious about starting your own roastery , shopping for better beans, or just love a good small business story—this transcript and video have something for you.

Watch the full interview on The Locals with host Ryan Glatzhofer.

From smooth morning blends to bold espresso roasts, these are the coffees Eli mentioned in the interview—each one air roasted for a cleaner, more flavorful cup. Browse the lineup and find your new favorite below.

• Corporate vs. Local Coffee: Why most big-brand beans taste bitter—and how small-batch roasters like Gigawatt are doing it better

• What Is Air Roasted Coffee? How this method creates a smoother, less acidic, and more flavorful cup

• From Private Investigator to Coffee Roaster: Eli’s surprising career shift and what sparked the business

• Bootstrapping a Coffee Business: Starting with a 3-lb roaster and scaling through farmers markets

• Launching During the Pandemic: How COVID forced a pivot—and unlocked unexpected growth

• Coffee Design, Taste Notes & Packaging: How Jen’s branding work helps customers choose the right roast

• The Real Talk of Entrepreneurship: Burnout, balance, and building something that matters—with your partner and your community

From smooth morning blends to bold espresso roasts, these are the coffees Eli mentioned in the interview—each one air roasted for a cleaner, more flavorful cup. Browse the lineup and find your new favorite below.

Kite & Key Blend

Our flagship roast. A chocolatey, nutty medium roast that’s smooth enough to drink black but holds up beautifully with cream and sugar.
→ Shop Kite & Key Blend

Live Wire Espresso

A bold espresso roast with a smooth finish. Crafted from a mix of South and Central American beans, it's powerful but never burnt.
→ Explore Live Wire Espresso

Honduran Organic (Light Roast)

Light roast lovers, meet your match. This naturally processed bean brings subtle blueberry sweetness—especially great as espresso.
→ Shop Honduran Organic

Luminosity Breakfast Blend

A bright, balanced start to your day. This blend of Mexican Chiapas and Costa Rican beans brings milk chocolate notes with a pop of citrus.
→ Try Luminosity Blend

Water-Processed Decaf

Smooth, chemical-free decaf that actually tastes like coffee. This one’s processed with just water—no harsh additives, no compromises.
→ Browse Decaf Options

Barrel-Aged Nicaraguan 

Aged for four weeks in a Midwest Distilleries Rum Barrel, this smooth Nicaraguan coffee brings out mellow sweetness, soft citrus, and a gentle rum finish. Available now—while it lasts.
→ Try the Barrel-Aged Coffee

[00:00] Eli: Corporate coffee really doesn't have a soul. Major farms don’t really put love in the actual bean that you're getting in the first place. It's mass-produced.

Exactly. I couldn't get a great cup of coffee. Burnt, harsh. We really pride ourselves in using high-grade, high-quality beans. One of the things that really sets us apart—we air roast our coffee.

[00:22] Ryan: For brand new entrepreneurs, what would be your advice?

Eli: Do it. You can't win the lotto if you don't buy a ticket. Even if you fail, you will learn so much. One year of running a business is like a master's degree from a business school. You have to be an accountant, a brand manager—do so many things. It is not for the faint of heart. You're going to work 100 hours a week. You're going to hate everything about it at times.

Ryan: If it's 100 hours a week and sometimes you absolutely hate it, why keep going?

Eli: Cuz I love it—even when I hate it. Create something beautiful for myself, my family, the community around me. Something that is more than myself.

[02:00] Ryan: Eli, how'd you think of the name? One of the hardest things about starting our business was a good name that wasn't taken.

Eli: We spent about two months just batting names back and forth—I mean, a dozen names a day.

[02:13] Ryan: What were some of the rejects?

Eli: Workbench Coffee Roasters. Ridgewood Coffee Roasters. Some really great ones. And then you hop online and go, "Oh, it's taken."  Sometimes if you checked a name that you liked, the algorithms in Google would then purchase that website.

Ryan: Seriously?

Eli: Seriously.  The name Gigawatt—it was kind of a fluke. We were talking about what our power bill would be if we fired up these electric roasters, and I said, "You know, if this thing hits, we’re gonna chew through some gigawatts."  We kind of laughed. A light bulb went on.

[02:50] Ryan: How did this come to be?

Eli: I was a private investigator for 20 years. I traveled all over the country and I'd find coffee that was burnt, harsh—geared toward people who throw cream and sugar on it to make it tolerable.  So I started roasting my own and bringing a little French press with me, 'cause hotel coffee is horrible.  I was thinking about starting my own private investigation agency.

Actually, my wife asked me, “Two years from now will you be happy?”

I told her, “No, I’ll be miserable—but we’ll have more money.”

She asked me, “What do you want to do?”

“Roast coffee?”

She looked at me like I was crazy.  Six months later—we launched.

Eli: We've taken several trips to Puerto Rico. We had the opportunity to visit a lovely coffee farm up in the hills of Adjuntas. I met a gentleman who grew these amazing, beautiful naturally processed beans—with the cherry dried on the outside.  It had flavors I’d never really gotten from coffee before.  Next to him, he showed me these kind of sad-looking, gnarled beans. And he goes, “That’s what we sell to corporate coffee.”

[04:00] Ryan: From a corporate coffee standpoint to what you're doing now—what were the differences, and what were things you wanted to do differently or better?

Eli: Corporate coffee really doesn't have a soul. I realized that there is a difference—not every bean is created equal.
Major farms don't really put love into the actual bean that you're getting in the first place. It's mass-produced.

Ryan: Exactly.

Eli: They've got a great business plan.  What differentiates specialty coffee and makes it unique is using high-grade, high-quality beans.  In my mind, good input makes for good output—and you taste the difference when you drink our coffee.  I never thought that, 20 years on, I’d actually start a roastery myself. But life is full of surprises.

[04:45] Ryan: You taste the difference in your coffee through the process, right?

Eli: One of the things that really sets us apart—we air roast our coffee.

Most coffee is roasted in a drum. It’s flames under a spinning metal tube, which is contact heat. So the outside of the bean chars a little bit on contact, and that’s what gives you that really strong roast profile.

Ryan: Like that bitter, burnt tone?

Eli: Exactly.  Ours is forced hot air through a chamber—much like a big popcorn machine.  As the bean roasts, it has something called chaff—that’s the skin of the bean—and it separates. The bean barely touches any metal surface. It’s just the air that’s lofting it up.  In turn, it makes for a much smoother flavor and also less acidity.  You really get more nuance from the bean itself.

[05:30] Ryan: Where do you source your beans from?

Eli: I have some great relationships—both with direct importers, like family farm connections who bring coffee stateside—and also with larger importers who have a wide selection of high-quality coffees.

Ryan: When you were just starting out and trying to find sources for beans, did you talk to others in the industry? Like, “Hey, where do you get yours?”—how did you get off the ground?

Eli: There was another local roaster that took me under their wing a little bit.
I knew next to nothing about purchasing green coffee or the industry as a whole, and I had a few people give me some great pointers along the way.

Ryan: And launching during COVID—how did you solve for that?

Eli: We were looking for a café, a storefront. Then all of a sudden, all of our appointments got canceled. We thought, “What do we do? We just bought this roaster.”  So we put it in a spare bedroom.

Ryan: Wow.

Eli: We were planning to sell through a café, maybe to small offices that wanted quality coffee for their employees.  But offices were closed. Nobody was going to cafés.  So—what do you do? Farmers markets were open.  We thought we’d do one or two. It’s quaint, it’s cute.

Ryan: Sure.

Eli: By the end of the first year, we were doing seven farmers markets a week.
We really found that doing mobile coffee—and not having a traditional bricks-and-mortar setup—has been a blessing.
It allows us to focus on the beans, instead of trying to create a café or a vibe.

[07:06] Eli:  For the first year at farmers markets, we couldn’t actually serve our coffee to anybody. Apparently, it was going to kill you if you took a sip of it!  So that forced us to build processes—how to talk about our coffee, how to explain our roasting process, how to describe the taste notes—without anyone actually being able to taste it.

I had to ask myself: How can I illustrate this in the best, most visually descriptive way possible so people understand it?

I have to thank my business partner—my wife. She does our graphic design, our website, our social media… and has a full-time job and raises a one-and-a-half-year-old.

Ryan: Not too shabby.

Eli: No, no—she’s a beast.  When she was designing the bags, she said, “We’ve got to put the taste notes prominent."  It made our coffee very identifiable. It gave us a different way to approach customers and interact through the product itself.

[08:07] Eli: It opened up a conversation—  “Oh, this one says dark chocolate!”  “Well, yes, it does taste like that. But it isn’t flavored.”

Ryan: Ooh la la.

Eli: Yeah—but it has flavored taste notes on the bag.  Subtle hints—like a bottle of wine.  So it ain’t flavored, but it’s coffee with some flavor.  Do you like light, medium, dark? Where’s your palate sit?

Ryan: In order to sell and make a strong presence, you have to have an outstanding website—especially if you're mobile.  When you look at typical online sites, say you’re shopping on Amazon, everything has clean white backgrounds—very visually cohesive.

But with you guys, you have bright colors , you have clouds in the background of a lot of your product photos—probably because your customers are on cloud 9 from the taste!

What was the decision-making process behind that visual design?

Eli: We realized part of what we do is vibrancy . It’s energy. Hence the name Gigawatt.  We wanted a website that represented that—and also kind of paid homage to the air roasting .  That’s where the clouds came from.  There’s a lot of psychology behind it—what makes people want to pick something up, look at it, and connect with it.

[09:14] Ryan:  One of your main missions is to have freshly ground coffee available.
Was it not before?

Eli: To anybody listening—next time you’re at the grocery store, pick up a bag of coffee.  Most coffees don’t even have a roast by date. They just have a best by date.  That coffee? It sat in a warehouse for months before it ever made it to a shelf.  Then it sat on that shelf for a couple more months before you took it home.  By that point, it’s lost all its pizzazz. It’s stale.  People don’t even know they’re drinking basically stale coffee.  And then they wonder why they have to douse it with cream and sugar.  We don’t sell coffee that’s more than a week old.

[09:56] Ryan: You have a very strong local presence. Talk to me about how people can get your coffee.

Eli: We’ve developed roots in the different communities where we sell. That’s been a huge part of how we’ve grown.

Ryan: You’ve got all these products on the table. I’d love for you to show me a few.

Eli: At any given time, we have about a dozen coffees in our lineup.

We’ve got everything from a water-processed decaf , which tastes smoother and fresher—like a real bean, because it’s not treated with methyl chloride (which is just a horrible chemical)—to great single origin coffees from all over the world. A lot of coffees are actually blends.

Like my Live Wire Espresso —it’s a blend from a little bit of everywhere, mostly South and Central America.

Our flagship is Kite & Key . That one’s a combo of Brazil, Colombian, and Guatemalan beans. I kind of describe it as our take on a quality cup of diner coffee—it’s approachable for almost any coffee drinker. It’s got that classic chocolatey, nutty taste. Shines through cream and sugar—but it’s smooth enough to drink black.

Then we’ve got our breakfast blend, Luminosity . That’s a mix of Mexican Chiapas and Costa Rican. The Chiapas gives it a nice milk chocolatey smooth tone, and the Costa Rican gives it a little pizzazz on the back end.  Because—who doesn’t want pizzazz in their coffee?

One of our limited release coffees is a barrel-aged Nicaraguan.  We’ve been aging it in a rum barrel from Midwest Distilleries.

Then there’s my personal favorite: our Honduran Organic.  I love light roast shots of espresso.  This one’s a natural processed coffee, meaning the coffee cherry is dried right on the bean.  Those naturally occurring sugars infuse the seed, and it creates this gorgeous blueberry undertone that really comes through when you pull a shot of espresso.

[12:06] Ryan:  Are there tariffs or taxes on coffee beans that affect your pricing?

Eli: I haven’t seen a ton of pain from tariffs, per se.  But speculation in the coffee market as a commodity —that’s what’s really impacted pricing.  The price of green coffee has doubled over the past year.  We saw an uptick even before the election, and then after, with all the economic uncertainty and a poor harvest in Brazil… it got worse.  Roasters that didn’t hedge or who put off purchasing were hit hard.  And obviously—if there’s a tariff or tax on anything, you’ve got to offset that to stay afloat.

But for us, our ethos as a company is all about approachable, affordable, quality coffee.  A lot of other companies have great causes they donate to—and that’s awesome.  But for us? Our cause is our customer.

We’ve worked really hard to maintain low pricing structures and still deliver a quality cup.

The whole reason I started this company?  I was sick of paying too much for good coffee.  So I asked myself, “How can I do this better, cheaper?”  And we’ve kept our overhead low from day one.

[13:20]   Ryan: Problems arise - and you have to pivot and navigate.  How have you navigated challenges with your support system and business acumen?

Eli: I’m really fortunate to have the world’s best business partner.

A friend once said to me, “Your wife is great.”

I said, “Yeah—marrying her was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

And he goes, “Should be the best decision you ever made.”

And I told him, “No— making her my business partner was.”

We know each other well. We make decisions quickly.  We pivot fast.  So many different challenges get thrown at you as a business owner.  It’s like spinning teacups—some are going to fall. You just have to keep spinning the rest with a smile.  If you keep trucking ahead, you will succeed.

[14:05] Ryan: Did you ever envision—or even want—to start your own business?

Eli: I did a lot of music back in the day.  One of my guys and I used to make beats together—I’d be rapping—and we’d joke,  “Wouldn’t it be cool if we roasted coffee? I bet people would smell it and really like it.”  I never knew, 20 years later, that’s what I’d be doing.  But we’ve always had that get-it-done spirit .

Being a business owner is a privilege—not just because you create something beautiful for yourself, your family, your community ... But because you also create jobs.  You build something that’s more than yourself, and that’s a really beautiful thing.

[14:55]   Ryan: For brand new entrepreneurs—what’s your advice?

Eli: Do it.  You can’t win the lotto if you don’t buy a ticket.  Even if you fail, you’ll learn so much.  Just one year of running a business is like getting a master’s degree in business school.

You’ve got to be an accountant, a brand manager , a logistics person —you wear all the hats.  It’s not for the faint of heart.  You’ll work 100-hour weeks.  You’ll hate everything about it at times…but you’ll also love everything about it at others.  That’s part of the journey.

Unless you take that leap of faith in yourself…  you’ll never know whether you could have done it.

[15:40] Ryan: If it’s 100 hours a week and sometimes you absolutely hate it—why keep going?

Eli: Because I love it. Even when I hate it.  I’ve spent a lot of time doing things I didn’t want to do. This? I want to do.

Ryan: Being a business owner isn’t easy—how did you fund all this?

Eli: You’ve got to figure out how to make the product—and then how to fund it so people can actually get it. We started with just enough money to buy a roaster.

Everything you see in our warehouse? We bought it with money the business made. I basically worked for free that first year. We bootstrapped it all. Our whole first year—I roasted on a 3-pound machine.

A guy at Sputnik once gave me some advice I wish I’d listened to:

“Buy a bigger roaster than you think you need—or you’ll hate your life.”

I bought a three-pound roaster instead.

The first—the first nine months—were very hard to make coffee.

[16:52] Ryan: So far in this journey, what’s been your proudest moment?

Eli: That’s a good question.  It’s not any one moment, because we haven’t reached the mountaintop.  But it’s all those little victories that really make it worth it as a small business owner.  Getting this warehouse was a huge step for us.
We’re doubling the size of our business, and that made me say, “I think we’re on the right track.”  It’s a lot of little moments, you know?  And I get to do it with the person I love.  That’s part of the fun.

Ryan: That’s so wholesome—and I love that.  I’ve learned a ton today. How attentive to detail you are, the kind of craftsmanship you approach your products with—that’s really commendable.  So congratulations on your success, and thank you so much for your time today.

Eli: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Ryan: Thank you.  And folks, that does it for another episode of The Locals.  If you’re interested in more content about entrepreneurs—you know what to do:  Hit the subscribe button.  We’ll see you next time.