Dana Reyes
Founder & Head Roaster
Dana built the company out of a porch experiment and still writes every roast profile by hand. She cups everything before it ships and has opinions about water hardness she'll share whether you ask or not.
A working roastery, not a brand
Two people, one old German roaster, and a stubborn belief that good coffee shouldn't need a manifesto.
Our story
Ferrous & Field started because Dana couldn't find a bag of coffee in Richmond that tasted the same two weeks running.
In 2018 she was buying green coffee in five-pound increments and roasting it in a popcorn popper on the back porch of a Fan District rowhouse, logging every batch in a spiral notebook that's still on the shelf above the roaster. The popper gave out around batch ninety. By then she'd talked her old college friend Theo — a machinist who'd spent a decade rebuilding industrial equipment — into helping her track down something sturdier.
What they found was a 1968 Probat L12, a 12-kilo drum roaster, sitting disassembled in a barn outside Lynchburg. It took Theo most of a winter to get it running: new burner orifices, a rewound motor, a cooling tray fan he machined from scratch. The first clean batch came off it in March 2019. We named the company that spring — ferrous for the iron the whole place runs on, field for the farms the coffee actually comes from. The hyphen was Dana's idea. The ampersand was Theo's.
We rent the back third of a shared woodworking shop on West Main Street. It smells like sawdust and chaff and is too hot in August. We roast Mondays and Thursdays, cup every batch the next morning before it ships, and throw out anything that doesn't taste like it should. We've grown slower than our accountant would like, which is exactly the rate we wanted.
What we believe
Coffee is an agricultural product with a short, honest shelf life. Most of what makes a cup good happens long before it reaches us — on the farm, at the mill, in the way the cherries were picked and dried. Our job is to not get in the way: source carefully, roast it to show what's there, and get it to you before it goes flat. That's the whole mission. We're suspicious of anything more complicated.
Roastery / Spec Sheet
- Founded
- March 2019
- Roaster
- 1968 Probat L12
- Batch
- 12 lb green
- Roast days
- Mon & Thu
- Location
- Fan District, RVA
We'd rather sell you one bag you reorder than three you tolerate.
Who's here
The whole staff
Four of us now, counting the person who keeps the books and the dog who keeps the chaff company.
Theo Lansing
Co-Founder & Machinist
Theo keeps the Probat alive and handles green coffee logistics. If something in the shop rattles, he hears it from across the room. He roasts the Foundry Blend most weeks and won't admit it's his favorite.
Priya Sundaram
Cafe & Wholesale Lead
Priya runs our small tasting counter and manages the dozen Richmond cafes that pour our coffee. She trained as a barista in Seattle and can dial in an espresso faster than the rest of us can find the tamper.
Marcus Webb
Packing & Fulfillment
Marcus bags, stamps, and ships every order, usually with a record on the shop turntable. He joined in 2022 after subscribing for a year and asking if we needed help. We did.
What makes us different
Three things we won't budge on
A / DATES, NOT VIBES
Every bag is stamped with its roast date
Not a "best by" guess — the actual day it came off the drum. Coffee is freshest in the two to four weeks after roasting, and we want you to know exactly where you are in that window.
B / SMALL ON PURPOSE
We cap the batch at twelve pounds
Bigger batches are more efficient and harder to control. We'd rather roast more often than chase volume. It's the main reason we'll never be the cheapest bag on the shelf.
C / FAIR GREEN PRICES
We pay above the commodity floor, always
Good coffee is only sustainable if the people growing it can keep growing it. We publish what we pay per pound to our subscribers each season — no rounding up for the story.