Mount
Pisgah, near Candler, overlooks Mountain City Coffee Roasters
A popular
1950's restaurant on Tunnel Road in Asheville
Cupping coffee
Coffee ring

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  • Mountain City is a micro-roaster of specialty coffee. We roast coffee every week and place the Fresh-Roast® date on the bag so you'll always know when your coffee was roasted.

  • We sell to everyone at the same wholesale price whether you're brewing your own at home, retailing in a grocery store, or have a coffee shop. Our prices are posted on-line -- just go to our price list page.

Our coffee is roasted in a small, German-made Probat roaster one batch at a time, a process sometimes called artisan or craft roasting. We don't have automated controls on the roaster -- we use only a couple of thermocouples, our eyes and ears, and this open-source software to keep track of the process.


We like to proselytize about the optimum methods of brewing coffee. Here's the Roastmaster brewing a pot in Mountain City's state-of-the-art coffee lab.

Most of our roast levels are light to medium so you can taste the characteristic flavor of each origin. Even our French Roast isn't so dark it no longer tastes like coffee.


So where did the name Mountain City come from? My wife suggested it, from its use in novels by Asheville born-and-raised writer Gail Godwin. She calls Asheville Mountain City in the way Thomas Wolfe called Asheville Altamont in his novels:

Oh, I remember so well the day I arrived in Mountain City. It was spring of 1937.

A Southern Family, 1987

Godwin's 2010 novel, Unfinish Desires, is set almost entirely in Mountain City. If you're from around here, you'll recognize a lot of places and things, from the Enka plant to the Man's Store to the S&W cafeteria. If you're from around here and don't know what those are, you need to get out more.

Godwin was apparently not the first to use "Mountain City" for Asheville. From a 1906 City Directory, there were listings for two companies with the name. One was a "steam laundry", but the other was my kind of place --

MOUNTAIN CITY DISTILLING CO, distillers and shippers of pure NC corn whiskey, furniture nr So Ry passgr station, P H Thrash mngr phone 469