If you’ve walked through our doors at Alternate Route Coffee Co., there’s a good chance you’ve asked us one of three questions. We hear them at least once a week, sometimes once a day, so let’s talk about them.
But before we dive into those, there’s something worth knowing. Alternate Route Coffee Co. is a specialty coffee roaster. Importing, roasting, and distributing exceptional coffee is the whole reason this business exists.
Our storefront, however, has evolved quite a bit over the years. We originally envisioned the space solely as a tasting room, for our own QC cuppings, tasting events, etc. Then people started coming in to pick up a bag or two of coffee, so we added some retail shelving. Before long, even more people were walking through the door asking if they could grab a coffee to go, so we added the espresso bar.
Not because we set out to run a café, but because our customers kept asking for it.
If you’ve ever run a business, or spent any amount of time making a detailed plan for anything, you probably already know the end result rarely looks exactly like what you pictured at the beginning. Businesses evolve, plans change, and sometimes your customers have better ideas than you do.
That evolution has shaped a lot of how we operate, including the three things you probably came here wondering about.
“What an interesting location for a café!”
We hear some version of this almost every week, usually from someone who has just spent no less than ten minutes squinting at Google Maps trying to figure out exactly where we are. We’re tucked just north of the Edmonton International Airport, in a commercial and industrial area, nowhere near a main street and nowhere near the kind of foot traffic a typical café would want.
Here’s the thing: we’re not a café!
We picked this location specifically to run a roastery. It gives us the space we need for roasting and storing green coffee, without the price tag that comes with a prime, high-traffic location. Being close to the airport and a major highway also makes a lot of logistical sense for importing green coffee and getting roasted coffee out the door to our wholesale and retail partners.
So yeah, while it might look like an odd spot for a café, for a coffee roastery, it’s actually pretty close to perfect. The espresso bar just happens to live inside a working roastery.
“Why don’t you serve any food?”
Simple answer: We’re not a café! We’re simply not set up to be a kitchen.
Running a full food program means commercial kitchen equipment, food safety systems, prep staff, and a menu designed around quick service and turnover. That’s just not what we’ve built here. Our team is small and our expertise, equipment, and our space are all focused on sourcing, roasting, and quality control.
The espresso bar is really an extension of that. It gives us a place to actually serve the coffee we roast, poured by the people who know it best, while giving us a chance to connect directly with our customers and share a little more of our story.
If we tried to add a full food program, something would have to give. And honestly, it would probably be the thing we care about most: the coffee itself.
“You don’t work weekends?”
Nope!
And it comes down to the same idea as everything else. Our hours follow a roasting and distribution schedule, not a café schedule.
Weekdays are when green coffee shipments arrive, the roaster is running, wholesale orders go out the door, and our team is doing the work that keeps the whole operation moving.
But there’s something a little deeper here too. Alternate Route was built around the idea of, well, taking the alternate route. Choosing to enjoy life while you can. Working to live instead of living to work.
Closing up on weekends isn’t just a logistics decision. It’s a little bit of that philosophy in action. Our team gets their weekends back, and we think that’s worth protecting.
So, what are we then?
We’re a specialty coffee roaster first, with a small espresso bar that lets you experience our coffee right at the source.
We’re not trying to be your neighborhood weekend café, and that’s a genuinely happy choice on our part. It lets us focus on the part of the business we love most: finding, importing, and roasting exceptional coffee, while still leaving room for a life outside of it.
If you’re up for the drive out to see us, we’d love to pour you a cup, show you around, and share what we’re working on. Just don’t expect brunch.