Buona Caffe

Also known as Buona Caffe Artisan Roasted Coffee. We bought a 1-pound roaster on eBay, built a website with a GoDaddy template and started Buona Caffe Artisan Roasted Coffee in our kitchen in January 2010. It was only a short time before we rented a whole 250 square feet of production space, bought a 12-pound roaster and began supplying coffee to local restaurants and whoever managed to find us down the alley that led to our office. It was very much a nights-and-weekends operation until August 2011, when John was laid off for the second time in 2 1/2 years. At that point, we closed the book on our newspaper career and went into roasting coffee full-time. About a gazillion things have happened since then. The biggest was the opening of our coffee bar on June 13, 2013. We have been voted best coffee by the readers of Augusta Magazine for six years in a row. FodorsTravel.com named us one of the top indie coffee shops in America and we started roasting coffee for the Georgia Governor's Mansion in 2014. That is the super-abbreviated version of the story.