Giddy Sloth Coffee

Carlos had his first cup of coffee at age four. It was Costa Rica, the 1980s, and coffee wasn't a thing adults did while children watched — it was something the whole family did together, sitting at the table for hours. That ritual stuck.

Carlos left Costa Rica at 14, landed in Miami, then Seattle. Nineteen years later, during the pandemic, he found himself sitting at the same table where he grew up, drinking coffee with his cousins. "I like this feeling," he thought. "I want to have this feeling again." By the time he flew home to Seattle, he had a plan: bring the Costa Rican coffee experience to the Pacific Northwest, and build it into a business.

That business is Giddy Sloth Coffee, a specialty roastery and café in Seattle serving exclusively single-origin Costa Rican coffee. Carlos still works full-time as an aerospace engineer at Boeing. He owns the whole thing solo. And he built it in a straight line: 2021 was the year of learning, 2022 the year of the roaster, 2024 the year of the coffee shop. Every year has a name, and every year has a plan.

An engineer's approach to roasting

Carlos didn't stumble into roasting — he engineered his way in. He started on an Ikawa sample roaster, building a full design-of-experiment spreadsheet to map the variables, developing his first profiles systematically. Then he acquired a 2-kilo gas roaster and translated those profiles to open flame. Traditional roasters, he noticed, do quality control after the fact — visual inspection, cupping, adjustments. Carlos did it differently: he built quality into the process itself, treating the roast parameters as process controls so that inspection became verification, not correction.

The move to Bellwether came when the Shop Roaster launched and the team reached back out. Carlos had been in line for an earlier machine but the size and weight hadn't fit his space. The Shop Roaster did — and Giddy Sloth became one of the first cafés in Washington State to bring one in. "Hell yeah," was his response. "I've been wanting to roast with you guys for a while."

The transition from gas to electric was immediate and obvious. On the gas roaster, roasting required him specifically — the learning curve was steep enough that training staff took real time. On the Bellwether, his entire team can roast. "The productivity gains are great," he said. "I don't have to be at the roasting location. If I get a last-minute call from a wholesale account and they need 20 pounds of coffee ASAP, we can turn that out in a couple of hours and have it ready for them same day."

People fear technology like they fear AI taking their jobs. But it's a tool. You still need the understanding — the machine just makes product development faster and easier.

Consistency, proven side by side

For a period, Giddy Sloth ran both machines in parallel — gas and Bellwether — to verify the output. He'd hold up two handfuls of beans: one batch from each. The difference was visible to customers without any explanation. The Bellwether batch was more even, more consistent, roast to roast. "For a while I was roasting out of both to ensure consistency of the outcome, and I would show customers — on one hand the gas roast, on the other the Bellwether. You could see the more consistent, even roast on the Bellwether. For sure."

Consistency matters especially at Giddy Sloth because of what the shop sells: single-origin, high-quality Costa Rican coffee. The customers who seek that out are, in Carlos's words, "really coffee nerds." They notice variation. They have expectations. For that market, getting the same roast every time isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole product.

Carlos also develops all his own profiles, using the preloaded curves as a baseline but modifying from there. His engineering instinct shows in how he thinks about it: for a full-wash coffee he extends development time to bring out nutty, chocolatey flavors; for an anaerobic or geisha he runs a lower overall temperature to preserve fruitiness and complexity. The unifying principle is what he calls "area under the curve" — the total heat energy delivered, regardless of how you get there. It's a process-control framework borrowed from aerospace and applied to coffee. It works.

The canister program: a growler model for coffee

One of the most inventive things Giddy Sloth does has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with what it means to have a roaster running inside your shop. Because Carlos roasts fresh and carries a rotating selection — full wash, anaerobic, honey process — he needed a retail format that let customers experiment without committing to a full bag of something they hadn't tried. His solution: a branded ceramic canister program.

Customers buy the canister once. Then they come back and refill it by the ounce from whatever's fresh that week. It works like a beer growler — bring it in, fill it up, take it home. The canister sits on the kitchen counter with the Giddy Sloth logo on it, a daily reminder of the shop. It builds continuity without requiring a subscription, without generating packaging waste, and without locking anyone into a coffee they might not love.

The program launched in December, just before Christmas, and immediately became a gift item. People bought canisters for themselves and for others, bringing new customers into the shop who'd received one and wanted to refill it. There's also an exclusivity layer: the rarest coffees — the anaerobics, the incoming yellow honey lot — are only available through the canister. They don't get bagged. If you want them, you need the canister. "It gives them something exclusive, something special to come back for," he said.

The Costa Rican experience, in Seattle

The coffee is the entry point. The Costa Rican experience is the brand. Giddy Sloth serves Costa Rican pastries and locally hard-to-find products from the country alongside its coffee. The countertops are made from 100% Costa Rican wood. The branding — logo, design, all of it — was created by a Costa Rican muralist whose work spans Costa Rica, Mexico, and Japan. The music playing in the shop is Costa Rican. A mural is in progress.

The rationale is as much practical as cultural. Seattle has two direct flights to Costa Rica a day — to San José and to Liberia. That tells you something about the level of interest. People want to go there; they're curious but nervous about safety, food, culture. Giddy Sloth gives them a place to try it safely first: coffee they already understand, paired with food and products from a place they're curious about.

Carlos has also tapped into Seattle's Costa Rican community directly — roughly 300 people across Washington state, connected through a Facebook group. He brought in candies that are difficult to find in the US, organized events, and hosted Costa Rican Independence Day celebrations with a local folkloric dance team. A cimarrona — a traditional Costa Rican brass band — happened to be in the Pacific Northwest for a festival and played the shop. The cultural dimension of the business is not decorative. It's the point.

Farm to cup — and working toward owning the whole chain

Carlos sources directly from farms in Costa Rica, with no middlemen. His primary partner is Café de Monteverde, in the Nicoya region of Guanacaste — a farm running a near-closed-loop system where fertilizer and pesticides are produced in-house from the farm's own byproducts. Trees take longer to mature on that system but yield better and last longer. Carlos recently took his full team to Costa Rica to visit, and the social media coverage from the trip generated a wave of new followers and a question he keeps hearing: can we come too?

That question is becoming a business line. Carlos is planning curated group trips to Costa Rica — organized visits to the farms and coffee shops he works with, centered on the experience rather than just the tourism. The 2019 and 2024 Costa Rican barista champion joined one of those sessions; he featured her coffee at the shop afterward.

The longer goal is vertical integration across the entire value chain. Carlos is in the process of buying a coffee farm in Costa Rica — an 80% closed-loop operation he plans to bring to full closed-loop over time. "My goal as a business is to own the whole value chain from farm to cup," he said. "That's the reason I'm doing the business the way I'm doing it. It's not just the coffee shop, it's not just the roastery. It's the whole value chain." Part of that motivation is philosophical: he's direct with farms specifically because he wants to know workers are being paid fairly, without margin getting lost at every link of an intermediary chain.

Running it all while still at Boeing

Giddy Sloth Coffee operates across several revenue streams: the café, an online store, a wholesale account with a local bar (which serves cold brew and espresso martinis and created a cocktail called the Drunken Sloth using passion fruit liqueur and Giddy Sloth coffee), and a wholesale account with Bespoke Café about an hour north in the mountains. Carlos is roasting roughly 15 to 20 pounds a week — enough to supply the café and cover wholesale commitments. The continuous roasting kit means a single loaded session can handle the week's production.

None of this would be feasible while holding a full-time engineering job if his staff couldn't run the roaster independently. They can. The only piece Carlos hasn't delegated is developing new roasting profiles — that stays with him, and with one employee he's grooming into the role. Everything else runs without him needing to be there.

There's no way I could do this without the Bellwether. With my current full-time job and not being there roasting all the time — no way.

Key takeaways

• Giddy Sloth Coffee is built around the Costa Rican experience — single-origin Costa Rican coffee, Costa Rican food and products, Costa Rican design, and a direct relationship with farms in the Nicoya region.
• Carlos is an aerospace engineer who brought a design-of-experiment mindset to roasting — using process control rather than post-roast inspection to build quality in from the start.
• The Shop Roaster replaced a 2-kilo gas roaster and made delegation possible — Carlos's entire staff can now roast, enabling same-day wholesale fulfillment and freeing him to stay at his day job.
• A branded ceramic canister program — working like a coffee growler, refillable by the ounce — builds customer loyalty, eliminates packaging waste, and gates the rarest coffees exclusively to canister holders.
• Carlos sources directly from Costa Rican farms, is in the process of buying his own farm, and plans to operate curated farm-to-cup trips to Costa Rica — with full vertical integration as the long-term goal.
• The business follows a deliberate annual roadmap: 2021 learning, 2022 roaster, 2024 coffee shop, 2025 growth, 2026 farm, 2027 Costa Rican experience travel business.