About Us
For Queen Bean, coffee is the call of home.
In our differing journeys to Canada from Mexico, and the specialty roasting business that has become our second home, coffee returns us each and every day to the embrace of family.
We first came to know the drink that would bring our lives full circle on our grandmother's lap, in the company of aunts, their laughter carried in the gaze of the boss of us all – la mamá. Warmth, belonging, love; for us, this is the smell, and taste and espírito of coffee.
From splashing and thrashing in the pool-like tanks where coffee cherries go to ferment - and children to cool off - to the shrieks and squeals hide-and-seek unleashed among the burlap sacks stored in the barn on our grandparent's farm in Mexico's Pluma Hidalgo; coffee is the lap of childhood we never expected to find in Canada. We came here to study: subjects nothing to do with coffee, although we drank it as students do.
A chance meeting, and a position as inventory manager at a Toronto coffee enterprise for one of us, led us both to where we are now when that business, Green Beanery, closed and we took over the Beanery's beans and roasting operation.
It was here that we discovered that Mexico isn't the sole source of all things coffee (which we really thought it was). It turns out that coffee beans are grown all over the world and are as diverse in taste and personality as the world itself. That revelation continues to inspire our journey as Queen Bean.
We marvel at coffee's variations and innovations, its strength and vitality, and the fuerza vital that flows through all of the green beans in our care, each of them a story of the people who picked and prepared them. These stories we cherish and honour; forever and always, nuestra gente: our people, our family. Us.
Welcome to Queen Bean. Welcome to our home.
M&R