Lex Eats Local: The Beans and the Bear

Joshua Cox holds a bag of his Wüfyre coffee at the Capital City Public Market.

When Joshua and Shayna Cox first lit the burner of their new Giesen roaster, they had yet to come up with a name for their coffee brand. Luckily, the flames were inspiring.

“It’s a huge cast iron machine and it’s really cool, it looks really old-worldy,” Shayna said of the roaster. “So we lit it up for the first time — it has a big gas burner — and we were like, ‘Whoo, fire!’ That’s where the name came from.”

Wüfyre (pronounced “whoo, fire!”) was the consummation of a three-year coffee obsession. Before firing up their Giesen, Josh (a pricing analyst) and Shayna (a property manager) spent years experimenting with a single-serve air roaster. Most nights, they quaffed the results until well after dark.

Josh and Shayna Cox, pictured at Capital City Public Market.

“Once we get off our day jobs we have a few things that we do around the house. Then we go over to the shop and we roast coffee until midnight pretty much every night of the week,” Shayna said.

Josh is the bigger “coffee geek” of the pair and serves as Wüfyre’s roaster. The motivation to start his own brand was rooted in a 2017 trip to the Specialty Coffee Association’s Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle. There, the couple tried their hand at cupping (aka tasting and grading) coffee for the first time.

“They were asking us to cup the coffees and we had no idea, either one of us, how to cup. We were like, ‘Okay, we’ll just try to follow the people in front of us I guess,’” Josh said.

“He just handed us a spoon and he’s like, ‘Get in, get it!’ And we’re like, ’Okay!’” Shayna remembered. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Shayna Cox poses at Capital City Public Market.

The Coxes were hooked. Josh studied under coffee experts Willem Boot and Marcus Young of Boot Coffee, and when he started roasting for friends and family they told him, “You should sell this.”

Today, Wüfyre operates a Boise-based roastery and bean subscription service with biweekly deliveries. They specialize in dark roasts, which Josh says most roasters underoast (failing to reach a sweet taste) or overroast (making charcoal). He enjoys the challenge of finding the middle ground.

“I think a really good dark roast is just as hard to achieve [as a light roast] or even more so,” Josh said.

On Saturdays, locals can taste Wüfyre brews at Capital City Public Market in Garden City. One chilly morning in November the Coxes offered up a dark roast Sumatra — with tasting notes of cedar, earthy and sweet — and a medium roast Costa Rica, redolent of mulled wine and spice.

Wüfyre is still a micro-roastery, but the Coxes have purchased property to build a bigger operation in Mountain Home. They daydream about multiple Giesen roasters, a signature Wüfyre blend and their very own line of cold brew, which could be ready as early as Summer 2022.

Asked if they plan to drive all the way to Mountain Home for midnight cupping sessions, the couple exchanged a glance.

“We probably would,” Shayna said.

This story was originally published by Boise Weekly. Read the original here.