Still roaming the streets of San Francisco, CA

Sextant Coffee Roasters

A Sextant is a tool sailors have used for centuries to navigate and explore. It is also a symbol of how coffee was originally transported out of Africa.

That’s how we begin the story of Kinani Ahmed, the owner of Sextant Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. Kinani’s family migrated from Ethiopia to US when he was in teens but his Ethiopian roots still had a major impact on his passions & life.

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, so he grew up with coffee all around him. In an Ethiopian household, the mother always prepares the coffee in the morning for the entire family (including the kids 😊) to kickstart start the day. Thus the smell, process, and culture of coffee were all ingrained into Kinani at a very young age.

Surprisingly, he never considered coffee a career!  Kinani dabbled with the career ideas of first becoming a Doctor and then a Computer Scientist but felt that his passions lied someplace else. Many of his family members and friends were coffee farmers and were involved in coffee business actively. So, Kinani zeroed in on the mission of doing more for the Ethiopian community while bringing top quality coffee to the San Francisco area becoming part of burgeoning Third Wave Coffee movement almost a decade ago.

They work directly with farmers across Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, and elsewhere in order to showcase the most flavourful coffees throughout the world.

They roast all of their beans in San Francisco using state-of-the-art equipment designed to highlight the inherent sweetness of the coffee. They want to bring out the natural sugars that develop during the roasting process, then caramelize them at a specific rate in order to create a roast that’s neither too light nor too dark. Using this approach, they are able to emphasize the individual attributes and complexities of each coffee.

Coffee Shop Design:

It’s a coffee shop + roaster, roasting on the premises on a classic Probat roaster and occupying an old, warehouse-like building with high ceilings, skylights, exposed rafters and bare brick walls.

On Folsom Street, near the corner with 10th Street, Sextant is on the southern edge of SOMA and the western edge of the Design District, an area of old industrial buildings. This industrial heritage is still present in the multiple car dealerships and service stations surrounding Sextant.

The coffee shop layout is simple and uncluttered, with an open seating area at the front, more seating in a corridor-like section that runs from front to back (where you’ll find the roaster) and, finally, four round tables in a secluded yard at the back.

Sextant has a glass door on the right, with two floor-to-ceiling windows on the left. Stepping inside, the corridor stretches ahead of you, counter set back on the left, leaving space for an open seating area with small, round, well-spaced tables between it and the window. There’s lots of natural light, including two narrow windows at the back, and regular skylights along the length of the corridor. 

All in all, it’s an awesome place to sit down, work & unwind before heading back home.

The Coffee: Black Lion - Ethiopia / Sidama, Yirgacheffe

The Black Lion - Yirgacheffe Heirloom, is one of Sextant’s prized natural process organic coffee offerings. This heavy, juicy, and aromatic coffee packs a ton of flavour. Sweet and slightly Floral notes are accentuated when drying under the Ethiopian sun creating a malty and Blueberry finish. This coffee is a classic example of what makes Ethiopian coffee so unique and unforgettable. 

Yirgacheffe is a small but fertile region, producing some of the world’s most well-known coffees. Yirgacheffe coffees are comprised of uncatalogued and unique coffee varietals, called heirlooms, that have never been cross-fertilized with more common varietals such as those found in large-scale coffee farms.

Flavour Notes : Blueberries; Honey Wine; Raspberry; Jasmine