What is there to love about coffee?
I remember the first time I drank coffee. I was young. Probably about 6 years old or so. There was a stack of foam cups next to a coffee pot in the karate school my family would frequent that was generally left unattended. The black plastic straws and coffeemate powder looked so sophisticated and adult in my childlike eyes and if I stood on my tiptoes I could barely see the top of the coffee pot and the red can from whence the coffee came resting on the warm water resevoir, keeping the preground coffee nice and warm all day long in its plastic can. The smell was unique to me. In a house of fermented Korean food and starchy midwest cooking mixed with Glade air fresheners I remember the nutty aroma of the coffee cutting through the yelling and sweat of the karate studio and muting all the chaos like some siren’s song tempting me to rebel against my order to “stay put” while left alone in the waiting room. I stole a cup, I poured a little into it, and I found a sugar cube and stuck one in my mouth and one in the cup. I added the coffeemate powder, mimicking what I’d seen adults do, and I stirred with the tiny black straw. The feeling of the straw scratching the bottom of the cup sent tingles up my elbow. The swirl hypnotized me into a playful frenzy as I watched my sugar cube fade away into a wisp of artificial hazlenut flavored aroma. With no one else around, unattended with nothing to monitor me but the lax 1990s parenting, I took my first sip of coffee. It was like candy. It was like medicine for an ailment I didn’t know I had. It was like nothing I had ever known and if you gave it to me today I would tell you it was terrible.
The first time I roasted coffee I was 19 years old. I started on a San Franciscan SF-25 natural gas roaster in firetruck red. It was in the corner of an eyeglass store and the owner wanted the corner spot of the building so badly he put a cafe in it just to put his optical shop in the cafe. The owner knew nothing about coffee and there, with no one else around, unattended by the lax business practices of a wealthy man who only knew greed, I learned what a roastery was. It was whatever the roaster demanded it be. A place of quality, a place of punk rock attitude, a place of high art, a place of smoke and fire. It was just as chaotic as a karate school, or as elegant as a ballet. It was organized chaos in beverage form and I loved it. The owner had hired me since I had barista experience already and left us few brave souls who wanted to use the roaster mostly to our own vices to train each other. We learned the “smellovision” method which was taught pretty much straight from Alfred Peet’s philosophy by a guy from the “head office” who had studied roasting in the 70’s and 80’s in the California 2nd wave scene. This method is free of computers and only uses sight, sound, smell, a thermometer, and a timer. We had little pucks of roasted beans in a clear plastic window to compare roasts to. This method is basically ancient by today’s standards but I am glad I learned it and was there for the transition to computers and heavy data profile roasting.
I learned that before coffee is brought to what we call the “general consumer” It goes though a few steps. First it is grown. It is a cherry shrub and there are 4 species of it that are widely utilized. 2 are widely consumed and they are robusta and arabica. Of those 2 species there are a few subspecies, we call them varietals such as the arabica varietals Gesha, Catuai, and Bourbon. Like the breeds of a dog, or better yet, different types of apples. I was taught early on in roasting that a good adage is that all apples taste like apples but not all apples taste the same. This is true with coffee as well. It is those little differences between a honeycrisp apple and a Fuji that create a flavor profile. After it is grown it is harvested by hand and it is prepped for market. This includes drying, washing, curing, and other steps that the processors decide in whatever order they decide. There are so many ways to process coffee. We’ll get to that at a later time but it is fascinating in its own right. Afterwards it is packed, usually in 60kg burlap sacks, and sent to the exporter where it is often freighted on a container ship to its final destination nation. An importer receives it and then, finally, the roaster gets a chance to have it. We live on an island so we have to freight our coffee to a place on the mainland, then take a ferry to go get it, then bring it back home ourselves. We buy full bags of coffee by the pallet and are happy to do so to provide the highest quality coffee at a great price point. Some folks order coffee in smaller boxes of 20kg. It’s all a matter of preference, there is no easy method to moving it around. It’s heavy, expensive, and easy to destroy in the wrong environments. Whichever the case is it’s very likely whoever roasted your coffee took great care in its arrival to their roastery.
The Robusta coffee was the first coffee I ever had. A “commodity grade” product it is often shunned in the world of specialty coffee. Maxwell House, Farmer Bros., and Folgers are all examples of the acrid acidic and smoky coffee that robusta is. A low altitude growing and hardy version of coffee with high caffeine but little nutrient density. Vietnamese coffee is made from robusta as well and I would consider it a fantastic presentation of this rarely respected coffee. Arabica is the other widely consumed species. Often grown higher in elevation and less hardy this plant makes about a pound of seeds a year. Its cherries soak up nutrients and produce complex sugars, acids, and phenolic compounds from rich soils and reward their caretakers with bright and picturesque fruits. It is from these fragile plants that we get the coffee Lopez Island Coffee Roasters uses. Most specialty coffee roasters only use arabica beans. I have certainly roasted my fair share of robusta over the years with great success but still prefer arabica for its superior flavor.
The process with which you roast these coffees is generally the same. We ourselves use a propane powered 1995 Diedrich IR-12kg as our production roaster and an induction heated 1kg Aillio Bullet R1 V2 as our sample batch roaster. Both are drum roasters. They are essentially hollow metal drums with a heat source and a fan that pulls cool air in, lets hot air out, spins the beans, and take on the energy from the heat source. Roasters will obsess about three things while they work: time, temperature, and color. You begin by heating your equipment up, like preheating your oven. Once the machine is at the “right” temperature to begin, the magic starts with the drop. We call this the “charge”. Once the bean mass and drum meet, the temperature plummets. Within about 90 seconds or so on most drum roasters, you hit your turning point. This is the point where the temperature in your roaster begins to increase. We then ride this rising temperature until the beans finish. Along the way they dry out and turn yellow. They then enter the famous Maillard reaction which is basically the toasting phase. Then when the internal temperature hits about 350, usually when the drum is around 380-400 on our machine, they will enter first crack. It sounds like popcorn. It’s like a hundred pieces of bubble wrap being crunched at once. I remember the first time I heard it. Like a tiny audience cheering you on, the beans continue to crack and release their water. It is an intoxicating sound on a large machine, the chaos and activity having such a sensory action. Many roasters continue past this phase until they reach a second crack, a time when the oils in the bean essentially boil and pop just like the water did. This is where oily beans may come from. If you leave any bean out long enough after second crack the oils will start to surface. Many people equivocate oily as a good sign but most of us in the roasting world know that it is often a sign of burnt beans if the coffee leaves the roaster shiny. Some people like burnt beans, I am not among them. Most roasts will finish around 400-425F. (204~220c). Even on the French roasts we do we’ll go quite past 2nd crack into a later phase of the roast but the beans will drop without the sheen of oils. This is something that has taken quite a bit of practice developing darker roasts that remain clean and unburnt.
Vials of roasted coffee.
From left to right:
Nordic Ultralight, City Light, Medium, Vienna Med Dark, French Dark
So with this in mind we are left with the reality of variables. The infamous “general consumer” is often sold so many ideas in fancy wording to steer certain choices in and out of their cups. Labor ethics, economics, fertilizer, ecological effects, dark, light, medium, French, Italian, Nordic, Spanish, Turkish, City, Vienna, blah blah blah. It is endless now and it will never end. If I may say any piece of advice to the coffee consumer it is this: learn what you like. Then learn why. Do you like Folgers coffee with coffemate? Why? As a child I liked the smell, the warmth, and the sweet syrupy mouthfeel. As I got older I learned to drink coffee black and the thought of adding anything artificial became unappealing. I personally like light roasts. I like them because I can taste the bean and I feel like it’s a connected respect to the grower to consume the coffee lighter. Like a rare steak in a fine restaurant. This particular morning I tested a batch of French roast that I had chosen for its high sugar content. The carmelization was extreme and resulted in a vibrant candy like beverage that was slightly smoky but light and sweet all at once. I despise the term “coffee snob”. I hate punching down on coffee drinkers like those of us that can discuss anaerobic naturals vs red honey are somehow superior to the lineman going to work with his green Stanley flask of Maxwell House. We drink coffee in America because we rejected tea. We rejected tea because we wanted to tell the British crown we were free. Coffee in America is a working class beverage, an every person’s drink. It is for all to enjoy in any way they want and we are happy to provide it as such. We offer coffees we may not love ourselves but we always drink them and we always listen to feedback. We love to explore new roasts and techniques and only wish to find customers who either enjoy what we do or like to try new things regularly. All are welcome here. We are always researching new ways to roast coffee and are checking our data for clues as to how to improve our coffees. Once our coffee is in your hands we have no control over it. You can blend it with Cafe Bustello for all we know. Toss some cloves in it, dump coffeemate in there, just maybe don’t leave the pot on for 9 hours unattended in a karate school full of children these days. The point is, we are here as a roastery to provide what we think is a great showcase of quality coffee in all its forms. Coffee is a wonderful thing a lot of us share in common. So many of us drink it every day yet we rarely have coffee together with everyone we know who drinks it. It is a deeply personal experience that has great ritual and ceremony that is often so very private to our own homes. We intend to write more about coffee and welcome you to learn what we know and grow with us as we share coffee together. Let us know what you like, and why.
Jeff