Coffee Roasters Daniel Biro - Rapids End Coffee Roastery
By Justine Primo Coffee Lover
The Kawarthas offer an abundance of coffee roasters. I met up with Daniel Biro, who is the owner of Rapids End Coffee Roastery at 721 Rye Street in Peterborough. Daniel didn’t start out roasting coffee. In fact, a Roastery was far from what he was doing. He was a musician in a pop punk band, Hawk Nelson. The band toured around the world for 15-20 years racking up many awards from the GMA and the Junos. They also had a Grammy nomination in 2009. Daniel says his love of coffee came while touring. “Along that journey, I fell in love with coffee. On tour, one of my favourite things to do was to explore little coffee shops. The kind of places where people are and things are happening. We did our first two albums in Seattle, which is a big coffee hub.” As their music career wound down, Daniel says, “I thought, could I do this someday? My wife supported me. It’s all risk but I encourage people to do something that you love. I don’t think money or status is going to fulfill you at the end of the day. But I would trade it all to do something I love,” he says. Daniel started roasting in 2019. He says, “Quantity is not really the name of the game for Rapids End. It’s about quality. I only want to serve coffee that I believe in. I want to trace it back to the farms. I want to know their practices, if it’s organic, that they are paid fair and that I’m paying fair. A lot of farmers are being taken advantage of and that’s not cool. Fair trade has helped some with that. Micro roasteries are taking it one step further and working directly with farmers. If I invest in you and your family, you can actually do a better job and get better coffee to market, thus making customers happier with better tasting coffee. So that’s what we are trying to do.” The name Rapids End comes from the aboriginal Page 12
name for the area, which is Nogojiwanong. It means ‘Place at the end of the rapids’. He says, “Other than honouring that traditional name, I feel it’s something we all have in our lives. We all experience turbulence and rapids. So Rapids End is about taking a moment.
