A Drummer Walks Into a Coffee Shop

Tohm Ifergan was born in Mexico and came of age in Chicago. He toured as a drummer for Of Indian Lakes — spending years on the road, moving through cities, filling the gaps between shows with barista work. Coffee, for a touring musician, is both fuel and culture: something you find everywhere, something whose quality varies wildly, something you start to appreciate deeply when you encounter it at its best in an unexpected place.

Those years of touring gave Ifergan something specific: a mental map of the world's best roasters. Oslo, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Paris, Rotterdam, Melbourne, Boston — he sampled the extraordinary work being done at Tim Wendelboe, Coffee Collective, Nomad, Kawa, Manhattan, Market Lane, George Howell. He returned to Los Angeles and realised that none of these roasters were available there. If you wanted to drink the world's best coffee in LA, you couldn't — not without importing it yourself.

In 2017, he left his barista role at Portola Coffee Roasters and opened Dayglow in Silver Lake, on Sunset Boulevard. The idea was simple: a wine shop for coffee. Not one roaster. Not three. The world's best, curated, available in one place.

The Maximalist Philosophy: Why More Works

The conventional wisdom in specialty coffee, when Dayglow opened in 2017, was that a serious café should carry no more than two or three roasters. Specialisation was the mark of quality. A deeply curated, narrow offering signalled expertise. Carrying ten, twenty, thirty roasters suggested a lack of commitment.

Ifergan rejected this entirely. His model was drawn from wine retail — the bottle shop that carries hundreds of producers, where the curation is the expertise, where the staff knowledge and selection criteria replace the single-roaster identity. "In beer and wine it's more compelling to see a deeper, well curated list," he has said. "My goal was simply to seek out and offer what is currently the best of the best. Seasonality is crucial in coffee and when you're dealing with so many up-and-coming roasters, our job is to find the gems."

The result is that Dayglow carries — and has carried — some of the same roasters available on BrewFusion's platform: Coffee Collective, La Cabra, Nomad, Square Mile, Drop Coffee, Koppi, The Barn, Hex. The overlap is not accidental. The best multi-roaster curators globally, whether in physical retail or online, converge on the same universe of quality roasters because quality is recognisable and consistent.

Modbar and the Aesthetic Revolution

One of Dayglow's most visible contributions to American specialty coffee is its embrace of the Modbar undercounter espresso system — an equipment design that hides the machinery beneath the counter, leaving only the group head visible above the bar surface. Where a traditional espresso bar is defined by the machine's physical presence (a La Marzocco or Synesso as visual centrepiece), Modbar creates a completely open counter with unobstructed sightlines between barista and customer.

Dayglow implemented Modbar across all of its locations and became so closely associated with the aesthetic that it helped define what a new generation of specialty coffee bars look like. The visual result — clean, minimal, barista-forward — fits the Dayglow philosophy perfectly: the equipment serves the coffee, not the other way around.

From Multi-Roaster to Roasting Brand

The natural evolution of a multi-roaster model built on deep knowledge of what makes great coffee is to eventually make great coffee yourself. Dayglow has developed its own roasting brand alongside its multi-roaster retail operation — producing coffees that reflect the same philosophy as the retail selection: seasonally sourced, carefully roasted, transparency-forward. The roasting brand draws on years of Ifergan's relationships with the world's best roasters as both a buyer and a competitor for the world's best lots.

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