Cat & Cloud

Cat & Cloud is a specialty coffee roaster and cafe anchored in Santa Cruz, California, co-founded by Chris Baca, Jared Truby, and Charles Jack. Baca, a decorated barista competitor with US Barista Championship experience, brought technical credibility to the operation; the trio built their brand around a philosophy that specialty coffee should feel approachable rather than austere. The name and visual identity — loose, illustrative, deliberately playful — signaled from the start that they were not interested in intimidating the people they were trying to serve.

Launching out of Santa Cruz in the mid-2010s, Cat & Cloud grew its national profile substantially through its podcast, which became a widely-listened resource in the specialty coffee industry, covering business, craft, and culture with unusual candor for a roaster-run show. That platform seeded a loyal subscriber base well beyond California. Their producer commitment — $1 from every pound sold returned directly to the farming partners they work with — is presented as a standing practice, not a seasonal campaign.

The current lineup spans single-origin coffees from Honduras, Guatemala, and Peru alongside house blends. Processing experiments are part of the rotation: the Honduras Nelin Guzman appears as an anaerobic natural, and flavor descriptors across the range lean fruit-forward (sweet berry, black cherry, clementine) without tipping into the experimental-processing maximalism that some specialty buyers treat skeptically. Roast profiles occupy a medium register — a thread on Home-Barista.com notes the roasts tend 'closer to medium than light' — which positions them as accessible to a broad range of brewing methods and preferences.