About Us

The husband-and-wife team of Marcia Robles and Parker Pruett founded Liminal Coffee. The idea for the business began in 2016 when they ran bootcamp workouts for friends where they served up kettlebell swings and burpees followed by post-workout brewed coffee using the beans they had roasted. Inspired by the personal connections they helped to create through coffee, they began Liminal Coffee in 2018.

Marcia, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, worked as a personal trainer and group fitness instructor and was all too familiar with unspeakably early mornings. She used coffee as a way to discover the most unbreakable and non-drowsy version of herself. With more waking hours in a day, she felt the need to take on a challenge she had never professionally trained for, but one she knew would test her physical conditioning and overdeveloped shoulder muscles. She began a career in the food industry and took on positions as a pastry cook where she deadlifted bags of flour and bicep curled large mixing bowls of dough. 

Parker grew up running the back roads of coastal Maine. Occasionally providing lost tourists with the unhelpful, yet often true Mainer observation “You can’t get there from here.” Parker moved to Palo Alto in 2001 to train and compete in track. Some years later, while commuting to work, encountered Marcia, who shared his enthusiasm for fitness and bicycle commuting.  Together they frequented the third wave coffee shops of San Francisco. In December of 2017 Parker found an opportunity to roast coffee for holiday gifts at Bay Area Co-Roasters (CoRo). Selecting Christmas gifts is exhausting and fraught with disappointment. Parents don’t like their children to receive sharp objects, people don’t appreciate taxidermy like they once did in the Victorian era, everyone older than 12 has read Harry Potter.  Roasting coffee was a way to provide unique gifts that wouldn’t clutter up a house or contribute to diabetes. The process of roasting coffee captivated Parker. The coffee roasted that day was tasty and inspired him to embark on a journey to learn how to roast coffee and to build a coffee business with Marcia.

Liminal Coffee is produced at Bay Area Co-Roasters (CoRo) in Berkeley, California. We select organic coffees that shine on their own, but also pair well with milk (although, milk pairs less successfully with workouts). We roast our coffees to a medium degree of roast. Medium roasts retain more of the subtle flavors of the coffee bean, when compared to dark roasts, while providing delicious caramel, chocolate and nutty notes without the bitterness and ashiness of a structure fire. We hope our coffees inspire you to meet up with friends and crush a workout.