Brett Horn and Shantel Berteig live on a farm and horse ranch by Hallonquist, Saskatchewan.
Shantel is a full time horse trainer and Brett's off farm job is building powerlines.
“Brett first fell in love with small batch specialty coffee while working over in Yemen building powerlines for an oil company in 2007/2008. Ever since then regular coffee just didn’t do it for us.
We researched roasters, beans and techniques for a few years and when Brett had a chance to buy a 1941 Probat roaster, he jumped on it . They never come up for sale. Ever. The only problem was that it roasts 20 lbs at a time and was a lot of money.
We started the coffee company because the Probat roaster was so big and a little more money than we had first planned on spending.
We were actually just going to roast for ourselves but with this being a bigger roaster and we were looking for some more on farm income, it just made sense to start a coffee company.
Red Barn Roasters was born!
We import the finest handpicked Arabica beans we can get and roast them to a medium to medium dark level. Any darker and the flavour of that quality of bean will suffer.
Barn Burner was our flagship coffee and it’s the one Carter had at Braun's bull sale. It’s a natural Ethiopian bean blend which is Brett's favourite.
Our second offering is Dark Horse. It’s a little more traditional flavoured coffee from a guy named Don Alphonso, who's farm is in Columbia. Brett gets all his Colombian beans from this particular fellow as his coffee beans are fantastic.
The two offerings are distinctly different from each other.
Our mission statement is to get a damn fine cup of coffee to the people who deserve it most but seem to get it the least....hard working people of Saskatchewan.”
