For Steve Rosemergy, the trouble started when the world shut down.
He’d spent the better part of 25 years searching for the perfect cup of coffee, and when the pandemic choked off his supply of the beans he loved, a coworker floated an idea that set him off on his next chapter: why not roast your own?
He brought it home to Marcus Menard, his partner in life and, now, business. Marcus didn’t just say yes; he said go big. “If you’re going to do that,” he told Steve, “buy a commercial roaster, so that if we ever decide to sell coffee, we can.”
That single piece of advice grew into SteffenMarkkus Specialty Roasters, the San Pedro micro-roastery the two launched in early 2023.
An electrical engineer by trade and a software engineer in the aerospace industry, Steve approached roasting the way he approaches everything—with precision. He spent roughly a year experimenting with beans from around the world, learning from experts and attending roasting conferences before selling a single bag. Not satisfied with off-the-shelf equipment, he built his own microcontroller to run the roaster, calibrating every batch so that one roast equals the next.
“Everything I do is pretty consistent,” he says—and in an industry he calls wildly variable, consistency is the whole game.
Ask Steve what makes a great cup, and he’ll talk ratios: roughly half is the farm, a quarter the roast, and the final quarter the brewing. Great coffee, he says, balances bitter, sweet, and sour against the flavors baked in by a bean’s origin: the chocolate of one region, the blueberry note in an Ethiopian, the orange Marcus swears he tastes in a medium roast (and that Steve gently ribs him about). The pair stock coffees from Hawaii, Ethiopia, and South America, each one distinct down to the individual farm.
If that sounds a little like wine talk, that’s the point. Once or twice a year, the two host hands-on workshops—a barista session covering every brew method under the sun, a cupping class where guests taste several coffees side by side with a flavor wheel in hand, even a cacao tasting at a downtown San Pedro yoga studio. (They always send folks home with a sandwich, lest anyone leave wired on five cups of coffee.)
SteffenMarkkus isn’t a cafe. It’s an online roastery with a hometown heart. The largest share of its customers lives right here on the peninsula and in San Pedro, and Steve delivers to their doors himself, ringing the bell, chatting a while, handing over the beans. “We know them all very well,” he says.
That neighborly instinct is a long way from Marcus’s first impression of the town. The couple landed here in March 2015 after stints in Northern California, the Central Coast, and Washington, D.C., where Steve worked with Carnegie Mellon on defense programs and both men earned master’s degrees. Marcus, who grew up in LA, had written San Pedro off as strictly industrial, until a Christmastime look at a house above the glittering Port of LA changed his mind. “San Pedro has neighborhoods,” he realized. Today the two live near Averill Park with views of downtown and the ocean, full converts to the town’s mom-and-pop charm.
What’s next? Maybe a Downtown San Pedro “roasting lab”? Not quite a coffee house, rather a retail place to sample the roast of the day, wine-country style, and perhaps train the next wave of enthusiasts. For now, Steve and Marcus are happy to let the business take them along for the ride. “This is fun for us,” Marcus says, one carefully weighed cup at a time. spt
For more information on SteffenMarkkus Specialty Roasters, visit steffenmarkkus.com.
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