Like a lot of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Vikram Shirvastava and Rekha Shivapa’s founder story began at their shared day job — he in hardware, she in software — centered on a common passion that took flight in a garage and culminated in a product the pair was proud to bring to market.

Moksha Coffee, the roasting company they started two decades ago, is a business to be sure: they supply popular Palo Alto spots like Ada’s Cafe and Zombie Runner. But it still doesn’t pay the bills, won’t land VC funding or become the next Blue Bottle and keeps both of them absolutely happy.

Shivapa, who grew up in Mysore, India, watching her family members roast homegrown coffee over an open fire, enjoys the process of sourcing shade-grown beans from artisanal producers in her native country. Shirvastava finds the roasting process itself utterly satisfying — the tweaking of numerous variables to match the moisture content of a particular bean, say, or the humidity in their facility on a particular day.

How satisfying? He wrote his own software to control one of his smaller roasters. Together the pair roasts 2,000 pounds of beans a week in a bare-bones industrial office space off Old Middlefield Way in Mountain View.

Rekha Shivapa and Vikram Shirvastava—co-owners of Moksha Coffee—pictured at headquarters in Mountain View among some of the 3000-plus pounds of beans they roast per week. (Photo by Charles Russo)

And they’re not alone. Hidden in plain sight up and down the Peninsula are a handful of commercial coffee roasting operations, most of them tiny, many of them run by coffee shop owners who took an interest in where their beans come from and why coffee tastes the way it does. Some have been at it for decades, others just a few months. They’re riding the so-called Third Wave of coffee popularized by West Coast roasters such as Blue Bottle, Four Barrel, Verve and Stumptown, which, broadly speaking, stipulates that coffee should be grown sustainably, purchased responsibly and roasted less. If you grew up drinking East Coast coffee-cart crude, Third Wave is the joe that has tang like fruit, and may take some getting used to.