At Prototype, we do things a little differently.

We’ve put a lot of time and energy into reimagining what a cafe and coffee roastery could look like, and we’ve come up with unique spaces where we can create and share coffee in a way that we’re excited about.

Our coffee menu is designed to feature a wide variety of top quality coffees, carefully and thoughtfully sourced by our import partners who develop long term and healthy relationships with farmers and exporters around the world. Because we respect the diversity of flavours available in coffee around the world, we offer over 15 different coffees at any given time on our brew bar and several options for espresso as well.

What makes our roasting style most unusual is that we have designed our production roasting around a roasting bar in the same space where we brew our coffees. In our Strathcona Roastery and Tasting Room, all our roasting for brewing, retail, and wholesale happens in four small Aillio Bullet R1 roasters located right behind the counter in the tasting room. It’s a transparent and lean production system that allows us to carry a large selection of different coffees without the waste that can result from committing to bigger batches. At the same time, the system of four roasters can efficiently produce a lot of coffee quite quickly and gives us incredible control over the roast profile during the roast.

As we design our roast profiles, we spend time learning what each coffee has to offer and how it behaves in the roaster. Once we have an understanding of each coffee’s potential, we create a roast profile that showcases its origin flavours in the most flattering way, maximizing sweetness and balance. For us, that means that we tend toward a medium-light roast profile for most of our coffees.