León, 2011. In the back room of a jazz bar in the city center, amidst sacks and a roaster that shouldn't have been there, we started roasting coffee. There was no business plan. There was a specific dissatisfaction: after years of serving coffee at Café Jazz Plaza, no supplier reached the level we wanted.
The turning point came earlier. A trip to La Rioja, a visit to a winery, and on the way through the town center, the decorative roaster at the entrance of a shop. We went in, ordered a Kenia, and something changed. In Spain, specialty coffee barely existed as a concept — what we drank that day we didn't quite know what to call, but we knew it was something else.
From then on, it was years of self-taught learning. The little formal training available in Spain at the time wasn't enough. We built the rest ourselves, roasting, tasting, and seeking out baristas at competitions to try what we were doing. For a long time, we didn't have our own brand, just the bar's name.
The brand came later, when the craft was already there. The name, the slogan, the identity — Saint Augustine, "some vices are unconfessable" — were born from a conversation with a friend with a background in philosophy and theology who understood better than anyone what we wanted to be.
During the pandemic, we left the bar and moved to a warehouse. It was the right decision. Since then, San Agustín is just this: a coffee roaster in León, with over a decade of craft behind us.
