Dark Matter Coffee

Jesse Diaz started what became Dark Matter Coffee in 2007 out of Star Lounge, a dive bar on the edge of Chicago's Ukrainian Village. By February 2008 he'd decided to sell only coffee he roasted himself, and Dark Matter launched as its own business rather than a side project running out of someone else's bar.

The name is a deliberate reference to physics — dark matter as the unseen force that drives the mechanics of the visible universe — which Diaz has said maps onto how he thinks about the company's creative and music-scene ties as much as the coffee itself. The branding leans into that cosmic, slightly occult visual language across packaging and signage, a look that's become as recognizable as the coffee.

On the product side, Dark Matter was among the first roasters in the country — by some accounts the first — to put barrel-aged beans into regular production, aging green coffee in spirit barrels before roasting for flavor characteristics ordinary roasting can't produce.

Diaz still runs the company, which has grown to eight locations across Chicago and, as of a recent opening on the Bowery, one in New York — its first outside Illinois.