Whitney Riegel
The First Crack
There’s an entire world of coffee before it’s in front of you.
In an inconspicuous garage in Midtown Harrisburg, Whitney Riegel climbed a small step stool with a white, seven-gallon bucket of green coffee beans propped on her shoulder.
The beans clinked as she emptied them into a funnel atop a bright orange coffee roaster.
Moments later, they were circulating in the drum of the machine.
Riegel, Little Amps’ director of coffee, eyed the beans through a small circular viewing window.
“It’s slowly starting to turn,” she said. “Here, in a couple of minutes or so, they’ll become more of a well-developed brown.”
In her role, she leads a team that does roughly 50 roasts a week (over the course of three days) for the company. She has held her current position for a little under a year.
Riegel started at Little Amps in 2023 as a barista—hired after moving to Harrisburg just to work with the company, which has been a staple in the Harrisburg coffee scene for 15 years.
“Little Amps was the very first specialty roaster in the city,” explained Peter Leonard, the CEO and head of business development. “And the first specialty shop to open in the city.”
Roasting has always been an important part of its operations. At the time of the Green Street location’s opening, in 2011, Little Amps founder Aaron Carlson told TheBurg that he tried to “roast perfectly” to respect all the stages (such as growing, processing and selecting) that have already taken place in the process.
Little Amps’ roaster
“I want to get the right roast for the right bean so that it tastes like its origins,” he said.
In the years since, Little Amps has expanded downtown, operating a second shop within view of the state Capitol Complex.
Its roastery is just around the corner from its Green Street location, dotted with burlap bags of coffee, a bagging station, and, Riegel said, a space where they can do “cuppings” to taste how batches of beans have roasted.
Taste-wise, she said, they’re always making sure that they’re bringing out wanted elements from the coffee beans. If it doesn’t seem quite right, they can alter things accordingly.
“Like this Bumba,” she said, of a coffee bean imported from Burundi, a country in Africa just south of the Equator. “We were originally tasting it not as bright as we wanted. We thought that maybe the flavor was a little bit muted, so I extended the development time to pull out more flavor and to further roast it a little bit more.”
Based on where the coffee beans being roasted originate from, and the flavor profile Little Amps wants, they choose different profile graphs (guiding recipes) to follow, explained Riegel.
“We will take a profile that we’ve used in the past of a coffee from a similar origin, or of the same origin—or a similar area—and use that as a reference to kind of determine how the coffee will roast,” Riegel said. “From there, numbers-wise, it can be meticulous.”
Little Amps’ coffee bagging station
She pays careful attention to the temperature of the beans, through software on her laptop, that shows her the extent to which they’ve been heated or cooled.
Riegel first fell in love with coffee at 16 years old, working at a Starbucks. She’s been exploring the field ever since.
“I love learning about the back end of coffee,” she said.
In addition to roasting, her days now are spent working closely with importers, evaluating coffee samples and making projections about how much of each bean the company might need for the coming year. She also still works as a barista at Little Amps on Sundays, keeping her coffee brewing skills sharp.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” she said. “It’s a lot of new things—a lot of new connections.”
Little Amps roasting
Another Jolt
A few years after Little Amps burst onto Harrisburg’s coffee scene, Andrea Grove opened her company, Elementary Coffee Co., in 2014.
She began vending inside the Broad Street Market with three years of coffee trade knowledge and two years of roasting under her belt.
At the time, she had her doubts about whether the city would be able to support a second specialty coffee shop—but customers quickly proved her wrong.
“It is really cool to see a city that doesn’t have a ton of resources at its disposal support such good coffee,” she said.
Andrea Grove
For the first two years, Grove roasted Elementary’s beans after hours at the Linglestown-based St. Thomas Roasters, whose owner originally taught her how to roast.
“He and I are still really good friends,” she said. “Anytime his roaster breaks, he comes and roasts here. My roaster, the drum stopped spinning one time, and I was waiting for a part to come in, and I was able to go roast there.”
By 2016, she’d purchased her own roaster for Elementary. She installed it, initially, inside the market, so the shop’s patrons could watch the process unfold. It all took place in the stall beside Elementary’s current stand in the stone building.
“We’re right beside where we used to be,” Grove said. “The stack that the pizza place uses? We put that into the market. That was our smokestack.”
Plans to move the roaster to Elementary’s North Street location, which opened in 2019, fell through due to the building’s low ceilings.
“We ended up having to kind of hustle and find another place for it. We were already leaving the market. And so, we found this place,” Grove said, gesturing around her, standing inside a small Uptown garage that Elementary splits with the pop-up milkshake vendor, Milkshakes!
“We’ve been here for five years,” she said.
Elementary beans
In addition to owning and running Elementary, delivering beans and filling shifts as a barista when needed, Grove is the company’s sole coffee roaster. She spends three days roasting per week.
Her roaster, like Little Amps’, is gravity-fed. Beans go in the top moments after Grove scoops them out and weighs them.
While they circulate in the drum, she occasionally pulls out a long-handled spoon stationed inside the drum, allowing her to better smell the development of the beans mid-roast.
She perks up when she hears the coffee start its “rolling crack.”
“This is when the coffee starts creating its own heat,” she said. “You have to really watch the temperature because it wants to spike—and you don’t want to burn your coffee. Or have your coffee taste burnt.”
She opens a door on the roaster’s barrel, and the beans toppled out onto the cooling tray. As they do, she takes time to scribble in a journal the details of the batch—bean blends, roasting temperatures and more.
Andrea Grove
“After it cools, it goes into a bucket,” she explained. “I start the next roast, and it’s a nice continuous process.”
Grove said that she likes to roast for up to four hours at a time. She estimates the process of taking a bean from green to brown is half science, half creativity.
“You have to sort of understand what’s going on in the roast, and that just takes time to build up,” she said.
Depending on what else is happening, she said, the beans—bagged at a table nearby the machine—could be over at one of Elementary’s stores by later that day.
“It is a pretty quick back-to-back,” Grove said.
Elementary roasting
Specialty Central
Harrisburg’s specialty coffee scene expanded further in 2021 after Tony Diehl, an owner of the Denim Coffee, secured a Walnut Street retail spot he’d had his eye on in Harrisburg.
Prior to going full-time at Denim, Diehl was in the city for work—and hungry for lunch.
“I turned the corner at the Capitol to get a cheesesteak—one of the highest-rated cheesesteak places—and I stopped immediately when I saw the space at 401 Walnut St.,” he remembered.
Tony Diehl and Matt Ramsay
At the time, it was half-vacant and rundown. Inside the window sat used furniture—with different things up for sale via a sign on the window with a phone-number that said, “If you see anything you like, call.”
“I called the number, and I said, ‘Hey, I like the space. Get everything else out of there,’” Diehl said. “‘I want to make this a coffee shop.’ And he said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Go away.’”
But later, Diehl found out that the owner of the space, the voice on the other end of the phone, was also running his favorite cheesesteak restaurant.
“I made it a regular part of my routine to stop at our Carlisle shop and get ice lattes and baked goods when I had to be in the office at my other job in Harrisburg, and I would drop those off in the morning for them,” Deihl said. “I did that for about a year. Essentially, just wore him down to the point where he said, ‘OK, just take the space. Make it a coffee shop.’”
At the time, this marked Diehl’s, and fellow owners Matt and Kristin Ramsay’s, third retail space for Denim.
In addition to the company’s flagship Carlisle location, they had opened a store in Chambersburg, the borough where they now roast their beans. The company’s Chambersburg headquarters was previously an ice factory—originally built as a nuclear fallout shelter—in 2024.
The roastery inside boasts a large recirculation roaster with six attached silos that can hold near 2,200 pounds of green coffee a piece.
Matt Ramsay said that they bought the machine at the same time they bought the new building—an upgrade from a smaller roaster that sat at the front of the building.
According to Ramsay, Denim technically doubled the batch size of its old roaster but tripled its production.
“Even though the batch size only doubled, we can go through it faster,” Ramsay explained.
It also has highly precise heat controls that Ramsay compares to driving a Ferrari.
“I want 900? Boom, 900,” he said. “875? Boom, 875.”
Curtis Davidson
Denim’s head roaster, Curtis Davidson, mans the machine, controlling batches via a touchscreen computer.
From Denim’s silos, beans are sucked up through tubes into a hopper, where they wait to be roasted. The machine then streamlines much of the roasting process.
“For the most part, you know, everything is automated,” Ramsay explained. “Once we dial the recipe in, the roaster will do a lot of the work for us.”
Based on its settings, the machine controls heat, airflow and drum speed.
Among the highlights of the machine for a roaster? The chaff of the coffee bean (like a skin) comes out the back, into a trashcan. Any stones that may have gotten into the batch, instead of being picked out by hand as they would be at a smaller roastery, are automatically sorted by weight. An airstream chamber pushes the lighter coffee beans to the top while everything else falls.
Still, Ramsay said, the roaster has to make a lot of decisions about end temperatures, development times and more.
“It combines having to do something intuitively and tracking it with numbers and recipes and all that other kind of stuff,” said Davidson, who moved from the Bay Area to come work for Denim. “It works both sides of my brain.”
The variables in terms of resulting coffee flavor profiles are infinite.
“One of the reasons I got into coffee is because you will never reach the end of it,” Ramsay said.
Denim now has two locations in downtown Harrisburg (its second, a kiosk in Strawberry Square) and is slated to soon open a third downtown location on the ground floor of the Menaker apartments.
The new location will be their eighth overall—a big step toward the company’s goalpost of 10 shops. That would allow them a large enough purchasing quantity to buy directly from coffee farmers and cut out the middleman, Ramsay explained.
Ramsay fell in love with coffee and the community it offers while a student at Shippensburg University.
“All communities benefit from these third spaces,” he said.
Denim beans
The new space will have tables and a meeting room, allowing it to have more gathering space than Denim’s snug Walnut Street shop.
Diehl added that they’re excited to expand in Harrisburg because of its already impressive coffee scene, tilting his hat to Little Amps and Elementary.
“Anybody I’m telling to come out and see our Harrisburg shop, I say, ‘While you’re in town, walk over and see their gorgeous spaces. See what they’re doing in specialty coffee. Try it all,’” he said. “It’s a unique thing to have that level of specialty coffee exist within that close, tight footprint.”
Denim roastery
Check out the Roast
Coffee shops mentioned in this story can be found in Harrisburg at the following:
Denim Coffee
401 Walnut St., Harrisburg
320 Market St., Harrisburg (Strawberry Square)
17 S. 2nd St., Harrisburg (opening soon)
www.denimcoffeecompany.com
Elementary Coffee Co.
256 North St., Harrisburg
1233 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg (Broad Street Market)
www.elementarycoffee.co
Little Amps Coffee Roasters
1836 Green St., Harrisburg
133 State St., Harrisburg
www.littleampscoffee.com
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