It’s just past 10:30 p.m. on a Monday night in the kitchen of the BeHe (that’s “Between the Heights”) Twiggs Coffee on Adams and Idaho. Colin Spear has just finished baking about 60 loaves of handmade, organic, naturally leavened bread. A barista at the University Heights Twiggs on Park and Madison, Spear has single-handedly powered the Ingrained community bread project every Monday night for the past month, kneading the dough by hand and baking it in small ovens.

“I’m using convection ovens, and they’re not at all made for bread,” Spear laughs, “so I’ve got about eighty pounds of quarry tiles that I put into the oven before I start to bake.”

Spear learned to work with dough at a bakery in his hometown of Durango, Colorado. A San Diego resident of two years, he started baking loaves at home for fun about three months ago and brought them in to share with co-workers. The craft loaves were such a hit that, in no time, he had thirty shareholders signed on at $20 a month for a fresh loaf every Tuesday morning.

The weekly staples are country French and whole wheat. This week’s rotating specials are a Kalamata olive and a golden raisin flax seed bread with sunflower seeds on top. Spear also bakes a roasted garlic parmesan, a polenta rosemary with pumpkin seeds, and a molasses multigrain loaf, among others.

Ingrained currently has about fifty shareholders, but Spear estimates seventy as the ideal number to sustain his operation before adding another baking day.

“It’s all about keeping it small,” says Spear.

Email Colin Spear at [email protected] for more information.