Copper Door Coffee Roasters: Building a Better Coffee Business in Denver, Colorado
Not every great coffee business starts with a formal plan. Sometimes it starts with a neighbor and a garage. Hannah Ulbrich purchased Copper Door Coffee Roasters in Denver, Colorado in 2012 from a neighbor who had been roasting coffee by hand in his garage. Over the following years, she grew it into a nationally distributed wholesale brand with six cafe locations. Along the way, she developed sourcing relationships with women farmers in Brazil, built a sustainability model powered by renewable energy, and redesigned her packaging with a retail strategy that most roasters never think about. This is her story, told in her own words through our Hana Hou video series.
A Business Built One Relationship at a Time
Hannah's path to owning a coffee business was not a straight line. She spent time as a barista, worked in academia as a literature professor, and eventually found herself drawn back to coffee as something more than a job. When the opportunity to buy Copper Door from her neighbor came along, she took it and began the work of turning a small-batch operation into something that could reach customers across the country.
Today, Copper Door runs six coffee shops throughout Denver and supplies wholesale accounts nationwide. But the size of the business has not changed how Hannah approaches the relationships that make it run. Whether she is talking about her sourcing partners in Brazil, her packaging supplier, or the people who walk through the front door of her cafes, the word she returns to most is relationship. That is not a talking point. It is the foundation of everything Copper Door does.
Sourcing from Women Farmers in Brazil
More than 50 percent of the coffee Copper Door sources comes from women-owned and operated farms across Latin America and Africa. That number is not the result of a marketing decision. It reflects years of intentional relationship-building with producers whose work and stories Hannah has followed closely.
One of the most meaningful sourcing partnerships Copper Door has developed is through the Nascentes Project, established in 2021 through San Coffee in Brazil. The project connects more than 101 women farmers who work together to share knowledge, build supplier relationships, and produce a consistent, high-quality coffee lot that Copper Door can purchase at volume each year. For Hannah, who needed a reliable Brazil base for her espresso blend, finding a supply that could meet her volume needs while also supporting women producers was the intersection she had been looking for.
The reason sourcing specifically from women in Brazil matters goes beyond the numbers. Hannah explains that in Brazil, a single name goes on an invoice for coffee production. On a family-owned farm, if that name belongs to the husband, he receives the governmental retirement benefits tied to that production. Even if his wife worked the farm alongside him, she receives nothing when he passes. The benefits are not transferred. By ensuring that a woman's name appears on her portion of a farm's production invoice, she qualifies for her own retirement and governmental support. It is a structural issue that coffee buyers have a direct role in changing, and Hannah takes that role seriously.
Copper Door is the largest buyer of the Nascentes Project coffee, which means the purchasing decisions Hannah makes have a real effect on the lives of more than one hundred women. That scale of impact, combined with the personal relationships she builds when she visits the farms, is what keeps Brazil at the center of her sourcing heart.
Sustainability That Goes Beyond the Label
Copper Door's commitment to sustainability is operational, not decorative. Their Denver cafes run on 100 percent wind-powered renewable energy, which reflects a deliberate choice to reduce the environmental footprint of their day-to-day business. But what makes their sustainability model especially relevant to the packaging conversation is their partnership with the R+R program.
Customers who bring empty coffee bags back to any Copper Door location can have those bags
upcycled through the R+R program, which diverts flexible packaging from landfills by transforming the material into new products. For a business that goes through significant bag volume across six cafes and a national wholesale program, having a structured take-back and upcycle system is a meaningful step toward closing the loop on packaging waste. It also gives Copper Door customers an easy, tangible way to participate in that effort.
The Story Behind the Bag Design
When Copper Door first launched, the bags were matte black with a black and white logo. Simple, clean, and entirely consistent with what most coffee brands were doing at the time. The problem, as Hannah discovered when she walked through a local grocery store and looked at the coffee aisle, was that everyone's bags looked exactly the same.
That observation led her to work with designer Matthew Alred to completely rethink the visual identity of Copper Door's packaging. The goal was not just to be different for its own sake. Hannah wanted packaging that had more flow, a softer touch, and a sense of femininity, while also integrating the copper color that the brand's name suggests. After months of working through color combinations and moving away from a black-and-copper scheme that felt too stark, they arrived at the mandala floral design that Copper Door uses today. Soft, layered, and detailed, it now appears across both the 12 oz retail bags and the larger 5 lb bags, with the mandala scaled accordingly.
One thing Hannah specifically calls out when talking about her
custom coffee bags is the texture. The Savor Brands bag she uses is not a flat, uniform surface. When you touch it, you can feel the different printed elements of the design. That tactile quality was important to her because coffee is already a multisensory experience. You roast by listening to the crack, watching the color change, and reading the smell. She wanted the bag to reflect that same attention to the senses, not just be something you look at.
Designing for Retail Before the Bag Goes to Print
What separates Copper Door's packaging approach from most roasters is that Hannah thought carefully about the physical environment where her bags would be sold before finalizing the design. She noticed early on that bags with small tabs or unusual base shapes were getting stuck on wire shelving in retail markets and tipping over. That is a visibility problem and a customer experience problem at the same time.
The solution was choosing a
flat bottom bag with a stable base that would stand clean on any shelving surface, including wire racks. She also spoke with merchandisers at Whole Foods about how shelf placement decisions are made. What she learned was useful: taller, thinner bags tend to get placed on higher shelves, which are harder to see from a shopping aisle. Wider, proportionally shorter bags get placed at eye level, which is where buying decisions happen most often.
With that information in hand, the bag dimension choice became a business decision, not just an aesthetic one. The flat bottom shape that Copper Door chose is designed to earn eye-level placement at retail. For a roaster whose growth strategy includes grocery and specialty retail expansion, that is not a small thing. Shelf visibility is marketing, and the bag earns its spot before a customer even reads the label.
What a Long-Term Packaging Partnership Looks Like
Hannah has worked with multiple bag companies over the nearly 20 years Copper Door has been in business. What keeps her with Savor Brands, in her own words, is the communication, the kindness, and the consistency. She knows there is always someone to reach when she has a question, and if one contact is unavailable, another is ready to help. That kind of accessible, reliable support matters when you are running six cafes and a national wholesale program simultaneously.
The relationship also has a personal warmth to it. Hannah mentions that Paul, a Savor Brands representative, has a habit of stopping by the Copper Door cafes unannounced and leaving behind boxes of chocolates or macadamia nut cookies from Hawaii. She usually misses him, but the gesture reflects the kind of genuine relationship that makes a vendor feel less like a vendor and more like part of the team.
For roasters evaluating
packaging partners, the Copper Door experience is a useful reference point. The bag itself matters, and Copper Door's textured mandala design is proof of what great
digital packaging can do for a brand. But the relationship around the bag, the communication, the reliability, and the support over years of business growth, is what makes the difference between a supplier and a partner.
A Roaster, an Entrepreneur, and a Community Builder
Hannah Ulbrich is not easy to put in a single category. She started as a barista, spent years in academia, and found her way to owning and growing one of Denver's most recognized specialty coffee brands. Along the way, she has built sourcing relationships that put money and recognition directly into the hands of more than 101 women farmers in Brazil, powered her entire operation on renewable energy, and designed packaging that earns shelf space through both beauty and strategy.
The Copper Door story is a reminder that the best coffee businesses are not just about the coffee in the bag. They are about every decision that surrounds it, from the farm to the shelf to the empty bag that finds a second life through a take-back program. Hannah has paid attention to all of it, and the result is a business built to last.
To learn more about Copper Door Coffee Roasters and support their work, visit
copperdoorcoffee.com.
3x SCA Best New Product Award Winner
