Catapult is Roseline Coffee’s easiest recommendation: a light-to-medium blend built to be good at pour-over without asking you to think too hard about it. It’s not the most interesting bag we’ve reviewed, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s the bag you buy when you want to stop shopping for coffee and just make coffee.
Who Roseline Coffee Is
Roseline started in 2012, when Marty Lopes — a former coffee buyer at Barista PDX and Thomas Hammer Coffee Roasters — set up a 1.5-kilo roaster in Portland and started roasting on his own. The name is a small piece of latte-art nerd trivia: it’s the line that splits a rosetta into two symmetrical halves, and for Lopes it stood in for the standard he was chasing — the difference between good coffee and great coffee comes down to details that thin.
In 2020, Keith Schuman and a business partner acquired Roseline from Lopes, and they’ve spent the years since turning a single roastery into a genuine local chain — the company now runs seven cafes around greater Portland, including spots in the Woodlark Hotel, KOIN Tower downtown, Lake Oswego, and the Alberta neighborhood. A new location is on the way at 2803 E. Burnside, in a space that used to be a Starbucks, expected to open this fall. It’s a good sign for the neighborhood and a good sign for Roseline: growth like that only works if the coffee going out the door is still worth showing up for, and Catapult suggests it still is.
What’s Actually in the Bag
Catapult blends beans from Ethiopia, Honduras, and Guji, roasted light-to-medium — Roseline calls it “light & balanced,” which is accurate. The tasting notes on the bag are caramel and cinnamon, and that tracks: it’s sweet without being syrupy, with a little spice on the finish rather than the sharp acidity you’d get from a full light roast. It’s a forgiving cup — it holds up fine if your grind or pour isn’t perfectly dialed in, which is exactly what you want from a blend meant for daily use rather than a competition table.
This isn’t the bag to reach for if you want a wild, funky natural-process single origin that tastes different from anything else in your cabinet. It’s the bag for the other 300 mornings a year, when you just want something genuinely good and don’t want to think about it.
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Roseline Coffee — Catapult Blend, 12oz Whole Bean
Light & balanced roast, Ethiopia/Honduras/Guji blend, caramel and cinnamon notes. Roasted to order in Portland, OR.
How to Brew It
Treat it like a medium roast, not a delicate light roast: water just off boiling (around 205°F), a medium-fine grind on a V60 or Kalita Wave, and a standard 1:16 ratio. It’s balanced enough that it doesn’t punish you for erring slightly coarse or fine, which is part of why it’s a good everyday bag rather than a fussy one.