Us
LiRu Coffee is the story of our family, a new direction in life, and something that started simply because I fell in love with roasting coffee.
My name is John Taheri, and my wife, Tara, and I started LiRu Coffee together. The name comes from our two sons, Liam and Rumi—Li from Liam and Ru from Rumi. From the beginning, we wanted this to be something personal and connected to our family.
Tara worked as an architect before stepping away from her career to focus on raising our boys. Her creative background became a big part of LiRu. She created our logo, designed our coffee bags and labels, and works behind the scenes on our website and online presence. While I spend much of my time with the coffee and the roaster, Tara has shaped how LiRu looks and how we share it with the world.
For many years, I’ve worked as a dental hygienist, a career I still enjoy today. Along the way, I wanted to explore something different—something creative that I could build and genuinely enjoy. That’s when I discovered coffee roasting.
It started as a passion at home—learning about different origins, experimenting with roast profiles, and discovering just how much flavor can exist naturally inside a coffee bean. The more I roasted, the more it pulled me in, until that passion became LiRu Coffee.
At the Roaster
When I’m at the roaster, it’s just me and the coffee. I’m watching, listening, smelling, and making small decisions throughout the roast. Everything else disappears for a while.
I remember roasting an Ethiopian coffee that was supposed to be beautifully floral, with notes of jasmine. But my first few roasts kept missing it. I knew those florals were there; I just wasn’t bringing them out.
So I kept trying. I roasted it three or four times, making small adjustments and lowering the heat each time. Then I tasted the next roast, and there it was—the floral character I had been looking for. I had finally found what that coffee needed.
That experience helped shape one of my strongest beliefs about roasting: I don’t believe coffee should taste burned or be forced into a roast profile that doesn’t belong to it.
Farmers put an incredible amount of work into growing, harvesting, processing, and preparing each coffee before it ever reaches my roaster. When roasting creates a dominant burned flavor, we lose much of what they worked so hard to produce.
I believe the beauty is already inside the coffee—we’re simply here to reveal it.
Every coffee is different, so I don’t roast every bean the same way. My goal is to bring forward what makes each one unique and honor the work that went into producing it.
A Family Story
LiRu is still a small roastery, based right here in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Tara and I are building it together, with Liam and Rumi’s names at the heart of everything we do.
I’m still the one standing at the roaster, watching the coffee turn inside the drum—and that’s still how every batch of LiRu begins.
John & Tara Taheri
Founders, LiRu Coffee