Alchemist Jam

Danny Roberts learned to make jam working for a local company in his mid-twenties, then expanded the repertoire making all the jam for a brunch restaurant. He and Jennifer Fisher started dating, started making jam together, and for five years ran the business as guests in other people’s kitchens — subletting restaurant space during quiet hours, selling at farmers markets.

In 2021 they got a place of their own on Ford Street, just off Third.

Everything is still made by hand in copper pots, ten pounds of fruit at a time. They’ve resisted outsourcing production as the company has grown, preferring to keep charge of the cooking and pick their own fruit when time allows. Summer berries come directly from farmers at the markets they sell at, or from farms across Yamhill, Clackamas, Lane, and Multnomah counties. Off season they source through Blue Reaven in Amity. Occasionally neighbors turn up with a bumper crop.

The jams are herb-forward and strange in the best way — raspberry cardamom rosehip, peach habanero, rhubarb lemon thyme. Organic cane sugar, organic lemon juice, organic herbs. The labels are illustrated: butterflies on the peach habanero, a bluebird among roses on the raspberry cardamom rosehip, a smiling sun on the mixed Oregon berry.

Then there’s the bakery, which is what the line out the door is usually for. Long-fermented naturally-leavened sourdough boules and baguettes, cinnamon rolls, focaccia, croissants, buttermilk biscuits with jam on the side, sweet and savory galettes and scones, hand pies filled with their own preserves. Grains are 100% local and organic. Coffee is an exclusive roast from Bastion in Portland.

The shop itself sells more than food — cookbooks, fermentation guides, books on mending and canning, handmade soaps and candles, Waldorf toys, zines, and local art, some of it Danny’s own.

Alchemist’s Jam was featured in Forbes in 2025 for its work on food resilience and preservation.