Accidental Roaster

Instructions for Consumption

"This record has been styled with today's hi-fi in mind. For optimum results it should be played at high volume in a room with no views other than those afforded by the use of subliminal image video apparatus. Dancing is allowed though electrical stimulation of the nervous system is unnecessary. The music has been motorized in sequence to conserve real time. File under Absolute A-Go-Go."

Above is from liner notes from "Sound on Sound" by Bill Nelson's Red Noise.

This is how I often feel about coffee, too.

One of the benefits of sitting at home doing mindless data entry work is being able to break out the old vinyl.

Supermarket Coffee: Is There Really Choice for Educated Consumers?

Silly me. I knew we were out of coffee at home yet I didn't get to a decent coffeehouse in time to buy a bag for this morning's cup.

And it was the second time this week we made that egregious error.

Which left the supermarket for this morning's coffee. Earlier this week it was Melanie doing the emergency coffee. She went to Market District (Giant Eagle) and bought a half pound of an organic Mexico. It was not good. It wasn't even Kiva Han quality, which is saying something. Baggy and old tasting, obvious defects in the beans. No significant tasting notes other than old and nastily herbaceous. Surprisingly no chocolate at all, perhaps the flavor one would most associate with Mexico. In other words, just a big cup of yecch. Part of that is the low quality of beans, their age and storage in transport/warehousing, part of that is the rapid air roasting combined with open bin storage.

I could've warned my wife against the in-store roasted stuff. I suppose if your taste is to french roast, you can find something you'll like at Market District/Giant Eagle because it almost doesn't matter what you use for beans when you're roasting to near-black and oily. Most of their in-store roasting offerings are quite dark and oily.

But we're not the kind who drinks that stuff. We don't want even the vaguest hint of carbon flavor in our coffee. Absolutely no french roast. No Peet's. No traditional Starbucks blends. No to anything that smells burnt (which we can usually test by squeezing a bag, which will expel some odor through the one-way valve).

Yesterday was my turn to go shopping. I look around the aisle. I see a lot of silly marketing on bags and labels ("antioxidants!" "extra strength!" "low acid!") targeted to those who are not drinking coffee for taste but for addiction (and really, coffee is pretty healthy on its own).

Our goal on this trip is to find a medium-roast whole bean coffee that's relatively fresh. We don't have high expectations and recognize we'd do much better at our local independent coffeehouse. But it's too late for that. We're already lost in the supermarket.

I see brightly colored bags suggestive of the tropics (Jim's) and bold simplistic designs (Joe) along with familiar brands like Eight O'Clock, Peets, Starbucks and Dunkin. There are bags with cute brand names, Italian brand names, British brand names (?!). Yellow bags, orange bags, black bags, green bags, red bags... even plaid bags.

I'm guessing there are about two dozen different brands of bagged arabica coffee (not counting the robusta-heavy cans and jars from the big four producers) with anywhere from two to 12 different offerings for each brand on the shelf. There are numerous espresso and "breakfast" blends, a whole lot of decaf, french roast and flavored stuff, a number of Colombia origin beans and a few Sumatrans. Not much for other origins (and next to nothing for specific farms).

The only medium roasts are offered by Eight O'Clock, Dunkin Donuts, Gevalia and Starbucks' new "Blonde" offering.

The selection is about 4:1 ground vs. whole bean, meaning 80% of what's available for purchase is already guaranteed to be stale. Of the remaining 20% that's whole bean, you can assume most of that is well on its way to staleness, since there are no roast dates, only "use by" dates which can be as far as a year out from roast date depending on brand.

I was willing to try to Starbucks Blonde. But it was only available as pre-ground. I looked at the Gevalia medium roast. Same thing, pre-ground only.

So of the dozens of brands and hundreds of offerings available, there were but two choices for someone like me who wanted whole bean and a medium roast: Eight O'Clock or Dunkin Donuts.

Before I became part of the Specialty Coffee universe I was an Eight O'Clock fan. In New England, it (along with Millstone) were often the only two whole bean coffees at most supermarkets in the 90s. Back then - before Dunkin was on the shelves - even someone with no coffee experience knew Eight O'Clock was by default the freshest coffee available.

But I'd never bought a bag of Dunkin. Having recently been in Connecticut for three months, I knew I could drink the brew bought at store nearest our office in Milford black. It wasn't the tastiest stuff, but it wasn't horrible, especially if you got a fresh pot. And there weren't many other options even in the winter of 2011/2012 in that part of Connecticut.

What the heck. Let's buy it.

(NB - from this point on, the post is less about supermarket "choice" which has already been proven as dismal, and more about how to brew the stuff. Geekery to pursue, proceed at your own risk).

I'm not sure how people brew this stuff at home, but I do know that i they're following the directions on the bag there's a good chance they're doing it wrong. To wit:

"This bag makes up to 40 cups (6 fl oz each) of that great Dunkin Donuts taste."

"Measure one heaping tablespoon* of ground coffee per 6 fl. oz. of water (adjust to taste)"

"* This coffee is specially blended and roasted to acheive the signature Dunkin Donuts taste of home. We recommend using 1.5 tablespoons of ground cofee per 6 fl. oz. of water.

I don't know why they'd give two conflicting sets of directions on how to brew a cup of Dunkin (a "heaping tablespoon" vs. "1.5 tablespoons"). Pick one and commit to it. It's confusing.

There are 340.2 grams of coffee in this 12 ounce bag. A six ounce cup should normally require about 10-11 grams of ground coffee (about a 16:1 water/grounds ratio). That would imply 34 cups or less, not 40. The instructions are telling people to brew overextracted (weak) coffee. In addition to being watered down, this overextraction would produce more notes on the bitter end of the taste spectrum. I'm not sure why they recommend this.

Pehaps this is your taste, and if so, go for it. But if you've tried Dunkin in the past and find it somewhat bitter (or maybe you're intpreting the taste as sour) try adding more grounds to your coffee filter.

Brewed to SCAA standards (let's assume no scales used, we're talking roughly two tablespoons for a six ounce yield) the cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee is actually not bad. It's even slightly better using a little less than two tablespoons (which is about a half ounce.)

In fact, using SCAA guidelines, you'd only get about 24-25 six-ounce cups from a 12 ounce bag. So Dunkin's second (asterisked) brew formula for 1.5 tablespoons isn't far off. Assuming you're not grinding too finely, your average tablespoon of coffee is around 7.25g. So 1.5 tablespoons gets you to 10.875g. I'm using 12, which is in between the SCAA guidelines (two tablespoons being 14.5g) and what Dunkin itself recommends with their asterisk. YMMV.

If you are using scales, it's much easier to be exact. A good place to start with the math formulas needed to brew a proper cup is here. I don't usually weigh water for our home Technivorm. I use a formula that I need twice the grams of ground coffee to the number of ounces of water I'm pouring in (e.g. if I'm putting 24 ounces of water into the brewer, I need 48 grams of coffee). This will invariably produce a cup with an extraction in the 18% extraction range (+/- 1). And yes, I've measured it with a refractometer and software designed for this purpose. If I wanted to be more accurate it would be easy to do, but I find that overkill for our morning pot.

(Note that temperature also plays a key role and you really want one of these to brew with.)

Sorry to get sidetracked with that bit of geekiness. The main point is that the Dunkin cup, brewed to Trier Coffee standards in our house, offers up quite a bit of pleasant cherry notes and some baker's chocolate in the hot cup, along with an underlying (and not pleasant) taste of old licorice. No sign of baggy flavors or age. Unfortunately the cup breaks down a bit as it cools, becoming noticeably flatter as much of the fruit disappears.

I've had a handful of coffees from "third wave" roasters that I enjoyed less. And which cost much more.

It's worth noting that Dunkin coffee is scrupulously tested in what's probably the best coffee lab in the country (Coffee Labs in Burlington, VT). I've been to the lab and seen dozens of 5 lb bags of Dunkin waiting to be tested for just about everything a coffee could be tested for. Leaving taste preference aside, with that knowledge you can be relatively assured that Dunkin will at least be fairly reliably consistent bag to bag. 

I'm not suggesting Dunkin is good enough to become the defacto coffee in our house. Far from it. We'll always opt for fresher roasts of a myriad of single origin coffees that allow us to continue to expand our tasting experiences and broaden our knowledge of taste profiles for coffee-growing regions and microclimates and what 'signatures' a given roaster might impart to those coffees.

Unfortunately I'm not going to find those options in a supermarket. Not Giant Eagle. Not Trader Joe's. Not even Whole Foods (which surprisingly offers very few medium-roast single origins despite featuring more local roasters at its stores).

So when we're dissing "supermarket coffee" it's often not just the blue cans and the red cans of really stale robusta blends. It's pretty much everything in the aisle.

At least we now know we can live with Dunkin Donuts in a pinch.

Barista Competition Thoughts, 2012 Version

As with most learning pursuits, the longer you're in the pursuit and the more informed you become, the more your opinions change.

In coffee this is most easily seen in palate development of anyone who's been around coffee awhile. The blueberry Harrar coffee that blew you away when you first got into coffee is now relegated to the ferment defect shelf. You loved the wild flavors in that PNG a few years ago, but you realize now that was due to a having a great varietal but poorly-funded and inadequate processing. Even that Guatemala from a respected farm from three years ago doesn't bring back much nostalgia because you learned it could be so much better when the pickers only picked the ripest cherries instead of also picking those not yet at peak ripeness.

The more you learn, the higher up the quality ladder you want to reach. You're living the axiom of "the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know." That's one of the key things that makes coffee both tremendously engaging and painfully frustrating. It's still fun though.

But you have to realize you're an "insider". Your job is to taste coffees. Lots of coffees. From everywhere. As a result your palate will be more informed than the average consumer. What you know - and what you taste - is only from your hard-won experience.

In fact, it's often the case that in trying to serve what you think tastes best and trying to communicate it, you get labelled a snob or pretentious. Even though all you really want to do is share the amazing things you're drinking with everyone else in hopes they'll be appreciative of those tastes and tell their friends.

So it is also with barista competitions. The longer you're around them your expectations change on what you hope to get from them. At least that's how it works for us.

This is our eighth year of watching and/or being involved. After winning the third MARBC, we knew there had to be more. And there was. The bar kept rising. Baristas got more knowledgeable about sourcing. Many visited the fincas from which their beans were grown. Some were involved with roasting. This trend saw its logical conclusion with last year's USBC being won by Pete Licata who personally planted, grew, harvested, processed and roasted the coffee he was serving.

Where could you go from there?

You can step back. You can remember that while the competition rewards the barista who marries both professionalism and a tasty set of drinks, there are others watching. And they want to learn something. So what can you impart beyond your own ego and skills. What's going to make someone watching this competition suddenly make a connection between what you're doing and saying and better understanding his/her own cuppa?

In the past few years we've seen a lot of attention paid to beards and vests, to bling cups, to soundtracks, to amazing numbers of glasses being used, to hopper switchouts, to 20 shots being pulled for a single performance. 

But in the past three years there are but two seminal performances we remember for content. The baristas giving those performances both made the finals. Neither of them won. But we remember them.

The first was Charles Babinski back in 2010, who created his own props to illustrate the three elevations at which the beans he was using were grown and why that knowledge mattered to his performance.

The second was weekend at the SERBC, where Michael Harwood deftly described the effect of the different acids present in the varietals he selected to use and matched those acids with the coffees served. He even referred us to a book to learn more. The performance starts around the 4:50:00 mark in this video.

The success of any individual specialty coffee being sold at any given shop is highly dependent on the staff being able to sell the owner's/roaster's vision. We're asking for $3-$10 more per pound than what these customers are used to drinking and what they've found acceptable in the past.

We have to not only get the already interested to tell their friends, we have to convert the somewhat interested in order to build specialty coffees' slice of the pie. The SCAA isn't much help. They'll be the first to admit that helping retailers sell more specialty coffee is their primary weakness.

Sure, there's training out there. At a cost of time, travel and money, all of which are in short supply for the typical retailer. More often than not, it's books and videos. Videos are mostly limited to latte art and specific brew recipes. Books are usually too general to be of much value or read like a science textbook that'll cure insomnia.

What Babinski and Harwood have done with their presentations is make the complex digestible for everyone. On a free video ripe to be used for barista training or customer education.

We'd like to see more of that.

I Say Potato, You Say No No No

Had a somewhat embarassing experience yesterday at a friend's cafe. They were serving a locally-roasted Burundi via airpot. I ordered a cup and it was fine. I drank it down while working on my laptop in the cafe.

I ordered a second cup of the same coffee from what was a freshly-brewed airpot. The smell was different. The taste was certainly different. Potato.

I discreetly brought it to the owner's attention and it so happened the guy who roasted the coffee was also there. The owner tasted it and said he didn't taste anything. The roaster said it was all in my head.

I'm not sure what to think here. I've had a lot of issues with potato in Rwandan coffees over the years but rarely with Burundis, although it does happen. Certainly many industry colleagues have commented that once you experience potato in your cup a few times, it gets stuck in your head and you may think you notice it even when it's not present. I believe we experienced that at Aldo with the Rwandans we were ordering. And we stopped ordering Rwandans because of it. None of us trusted Rwandan coffees regardless of the roaster's stellar reputation.

However, I have a Rwanda coffee at home right now (from Sightglass) and haven't imagined potato at all. And I certainly wasn't thinking or experiencing potato in the first cup of Burundi at my friend's shop.

But the second cup, yeah, something was definitely wrong. I'm convinced of that. And I think I have the experience to be credible on that.

I left the rest of the cup as I couldn't drink more and ordered a pourover of Kenya. And it was good. Nothing more was said about the cup I didn't finish.

So was it potato my head? And if so, how did it get there?

What's a Trier?

The recurring theme around here is that I think about a future in coffee more than I think about a future in social media or tradeshows, even though those latter two are what saved our ass and represent the best chance to regroup and save up the money that will make a future in coffee possible.

The other recurring theme is that people think I'm crazy to want to start a roastery at a point well past "mid-life crisis". At best I'll be 56 and change at startup. Maybe 57. If it gets going at all.

But having that dream "out there" is what gets me to wake up every morning and drives this old body to do what it takes to get through each day.

I've registered the URL "Trier Coffee" and created a Twitter account for same.

As anyone who's been around a roaster knows, the trier is the half tube device used by the person roasting the coffee to visually inspect the beans at any time during the roast process. Looks like this (although ours won't be rusty).

I like the name a lot. It implies we'll be inspecting and testing our coffees regularly (which will be true, of course). I'll give Sightglass Coffee credit for the inspiration (the sightglass being another feature on a roaster to do visual inspections).

Additionally, "trier" kinda sounds like "try our", which isn't a bad thing (if we decide to do this in Connecticut, 'trier' in a New England accent sounds more like "try a").

There's a lot that still has to happen before we take step 2. Sell the house, decide where to do this, get some investors, find the right facility, compare roasters, etc. etc. etc. But for now, just having the URL and Twitter account makes it all seem a bit more real.

More to come when there's more to report.

Home for the Holidays?

Been back in Pittsburgh all week. Going back to Connecticut tomorrow.

Odd feelings all week long. Mostly along the lines of "where is home?"

Spent a lot of time throwing crap out and making minor repairs. There's a lot more crap to throw out and a lot more repairs to go before we start showing the house to sell it. Can't even move in the basement since it now houses enough equipment and supplies to furnish a small cafe.

There's no true deadline for getting all this done other than we'd like to get out from under the mortgage(s) and taxes. As I'm still on contractor status, every day I'm here is a day I'm not getting paid. So it's challenging to help Melanie get this done when I'm only here weekends.

When we bought this house, we figured we'd be here for decades. Then again, that was a different time. The house was for entertaining and family visits. Five years later, once we started Aldo Coffee, there was little time for either. Now the house is an albatross. It was very affordable for where we were a decade ago. No longer.

But it's still home. For now.

Pittsburgh has changed in many, many good ways since I first started visiting 15 years ago. The best ballpark in MLB. A Google complex. An actual restaurant scene with actual chefs who could make it in any city. An influx of talented and visionary 20-somethings starting all sorts of businesses. A vitality the city hasn't scene since Carnegie.

Even the Washington Post noted that for 2012, Portland is out, Pittsburgh is in.

It's a hard time to be leaving. I feel there's unfinished business here. If money weren't an obstacle, I'd start a roastery tomorrow. There's room here for the roastery/training concept Melanie and I have discussed to death. The market has finally caught up to us.

But it comes down to money, as it always does. One of us needs a big job to support a start up until it can support itself. And nobody's hiring 55 year olds.

So the house has to go. We'll have money coming in from the sale of Aldo for another couple of years. But that's not the big chunk we need to finance a build out and equipment. Hopefully the house is the asset that will provide that big chunk.

Although it's only been a little more than two months since I've gone back to corporate, I already know it's not where I want to be. It may be where I have to be for now - and maybe longer.

Where I -- we -- want to be is back in coffee. It's what we both feel is supposed to happen, although neither of us can figure out exactly how.

Or where.

Maybe there's still a chance that's in Pittsburgh. Maybe it's in Connecticut. Maybe it's further south or north.

While we're not sure what that place is, we're pretty sure that a coffee roastery/cafe will be where home is. Whenever and wherever that comes.

Happy New Year.

What's Up With Fairfield County Coffee?

I work in Milford. I'm currently staying in Stamford until Melanie sells the house in Pittsburgh, then we'll look for our own place.

It's pretty easy for me to hit EspressoNEAT on the way to I95 each morning. And I'll do that 2-3 times a week. But once you get past EN, the coffee in southern Fairfield County pretty much sucks. Lots of french roasts/dark roasts/flavored bullshit. But nobody else here is doing much of anything with single origins, pourovers (or even decent batch brews).

In New Haven it's different. There's lots of drinkable coffee. Maybe none as good as EN, but still satisfying, roasted well, served competently.

When I think of food in CT, I usually consider Fairfield County ahead of the rest of the state (OK, except pizza) for a higher concentration of places that are above-average.

So what's with the coffee? It's like EspressoNEAT is the Packers and most everyone else is the Manning-less Colts with a few Seahawks and Bills mixed in.

It's too soon to jump back into coffee (and I like the money I'm currently making), but I'm thinking it might be nice to get a garage, stick a roaster in it and open a place on weekends (or maybe just one weekend day). Hit some farmers markets. Do some online sales. Get a few chefs on board. Maybe even do breakfast. Not a big moneymaker, but something that would be fun for us to do, raise the bar a bit more coffeewise and enable us to make some new friends in our (sort of) new home.

Going to start studying up on zoning and emissions. Maybe it never happens. But if all of sudden a Probat L5 shows up on Craigslist...

Life as a Civilian

Making do without all the commercial equipment.

My office desk in Milford this morning looks like this:

- Hario slim hand grinder

- Handsome Coffee

- Cafe Solo (in back)

- Clever dripper (blooming)

- Pino kettle

- Cup (in lieu of scale - it holds ~25g of beans. I can usually eyeball w/i 0.5 grams of intended dose of 24g, but will be getting a scale soon.)

It's better coffee than anything else in the office. Or in Milford, or really anywhere between Darien and New Haven.

Almost makes me want to serve some to others. Almost.

Last Aldo Standing

Just because we sold Aldo Coffee in Pittsburgh doesn't mean you can't still find an Aldo Coffee shop.

In fact, we were at "the other" Aldo Coffee this weekend to meet the famous Aldo Maiorana at his roastery/shop in Greenport, NY (Long Island).

Aldo is quite the character. We'd have loved to spend more time with him, but as we dropped in unannounced (and he'd never heard of us), we were happy he gave us what time he did.

Interesting guy. Born in Italy, grew up in France. Said he started doing coffee in the US because he wasn't happy with what was here (this was back in 1987). He also made bread for awhile, then switched to biscotti, which can be found at numerous specialty food shops on LI, in Manhattan (including Dean & DeLuca) and elsewhere. And yet he stands by his claim that he's not a baker.

As short as our visit was, meeting and talking with Aldo was delightful. While he roasts considerably darker that we would, he does buy sustainably and knows his naturals from his washed.

We did have some drinks. And while the espresso roast was darker than what we typically drink, the shots were pretty smooth and sweet with a licorice bite. Plus he gave us a delicious scone and a bag of his famous biscotti which was an over-the-top gesture of hospitality.

Anyway, it wasn't about the coffee. It was worth the trip just to meet the other Aldo. Glad we did.

Truth

One of the most profound movie quotes ever, courtesy of Dustin Hoffman's Bernie LaPlante in Hero, speaking to his son:

You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin', and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that's your bullshit, so to speak.

It applies to corporations and their employees. It applies to media. It's what political parties and organized religion are built on (and that's not an anti-religious statement). Even your parents had their own brand, which you probably inherited and either adopted or are still working to reject.

Sadly, it also applies to coffee, not just the big guys, but the small indies who, while generally doing good work, choose their layer of bullshit in the dogma preached by cult of personalities they follow.

Honestly, no place is completely safe from it.