Category — Personal

Been dead-quiet around here for a long time–but not because nothing’s going on. After a lot of personal transitions (all good!) and tons of just plain ol’ busywork, I’m ready to unveil both the new design of WayOfCoffee.com and the new design of FremontCoffee.net.

For most of this year I’ve been relegating my blogging to my “personal” journal and in the background I’ve been doing what it takes to help get the roastery off the ground–just the day-in, day-out grunt work of obtaining permits, troubleshooting ductwork and utility lines, solidifying my list of suppliers, getting a credit account for the business, etc. etc. I’ve been a coffee roaster for a long time but I’ve never started from scratch on the business end, and let me tell you: it’s a long journey to get from an empty basement of a retail operation to a production roastery.

But we’re open, Fremont Coffee customers seem to be positive on our coffees, we have our first few wholesale accounts, and all those early kinks seem to be pretty much worked out. That includes updating Fremont Coffee’s website, http://www.fremontcoffee.net, as well as the new look for Way of Coffee. Hopefully they’ll both be easier to read and navigate.

I’ve always disliked it when bloggers come back from a long period of not posting just to apologize for not posting, so I just want to note that I’ll be moving all blogging duties to this blog over the next week or two. That does mean that Way of Coffee will have more elements of a personal blog than a news site, but I think that’s a good thing. I don’t want Way of Coffee to become yet another news content aggregator, and that’s admittedly what it became by the time I took a break from posting in January–there was a lot going on getting the roastery setup, but I didn’t think the world would be excited by tales of beauracratic runaround.

So starting now Way of Coffee will essentially replace my personal journal (although it will remain coffee-focused–not surprising since my life involves coffee quite a bit) and FremontCoffee.net will be where we post news relating to the roastery, including cuppings, art shows, new products, and more.

The most recent post on That Other Coffee Blog about roasting with an audience got me thinking about my own experiences roasting coffee in a public (or semi-public) environment. At my last shop our roasting room was actually set apart from the retail floor; we used to have our 12k Samiac sitting on the retail floor, but roasters make a lot of noise, and we discovered that we were annoying the customers with the smoke and noise as much as we had trouble focusing with the goings-on of a busy shop all around us. Perhaps more importantly, as our wholesale business grew we started running out of room for the green coffee bags.

So we moved roasting operations to a room in the back, into the conference room we used to rent out. Customers would still frequently wander back to the roasting room and ask what we were doing. Invariably they would ask if I was “grinding beans” in the roasting machine. I’m not sure why grinding is always the first conclusion people jump to–I don’t know of any food production industry that requires a 1350lb, burning cast-iron monstrosity to grind anything–but there you are.

The pros of roasting for an audience are pretty clear…you become an ambassador for your coffee knowledge, you help educate customers about the finer points of specialty coffee and the time and effort it takes to produce, and you build a reputation as a coffee pro. The disadvantages are a little less obvious, but they’re definitely worth considering. Frequently stopping to answer questions can take your attention away from the beans, and I’d be lying if I said that it never happened that I burned a batch because I was explaining to a customer all the ways a roaster prevents burning a batch. Also, the more busy the wholesale side of things gets, the more pressed for time you are on a daily basis. I did occasionally have to politely ask interested customers to come back another time as I was busily packaging hundreds of pounds of coffee for a wholesale shipment.

Now I’m in a somewhat ideal situation: my roasting room and cupping lab is in the basement of our retail space. On busy days where focus is important, I can kind of shut myself in and work uninterrupted. But we also have a street-facing garage door that we can open, so there’s plenty of opportunity to hold roasting demonstrations and cupping sessions. In short, I can be as public as I like, which is great. I like roasting for an audience, but I also tend to get “zoned into the beans” and once I get into that flow I like being able to run with it.

Occasionally on this blog I post drink ideas such as the Cafe Cubano and the Dufrain. Though I get ideas from all over, I like to experiment on my own from time to time with making new types of drinks. Sometimes they work out, and I’ll continue to share ideas on this blog as I discover them. Sometimes they don’t work out. Just for fun, I thought I’d share some drink ideas I experimented with that didn’t come out as I’d hoped.

• Brewing star anise with the coffee grounds–When coffee became scarce and expensive in New Orleans in the early 20th century, many turned to adding chicory root to stretch out their coffee rations despite its unpleasant taste. In that spirit I tried using unpodded star anise to add a rich licorice flavor to my coffee brew. Unfortunately the result came out something like dirty, sour tea. (For the record, anise makes a great tisane by itself.)
• The “tequilatte”–some liquors complement coffee very well. Tequila is not really one of them. In the interest of full disclosure here, I’m not a huge tequila fan. Patron makes a coffee liqueur that’s acceptable, but since I feel like adding coffee-flavored liqueur to coffee is kind of cheating, I used regular tequila. It was…okay in coffee by itself, but adding it to a latte? Blech.
• Vanilla extract and sugar in place of vanilla syrup–I typically prefer my coffee black, but that’s not to say I don’t enjoy sugar or syrups occasionally. In a rush one morning I noticed I was out of vanilla syrup, so I hurriedly used a packet of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla extract instead. Basically the same thing, right? It wasn’t the same.
• Irish espresso–a macchiatto is just an espresso with a dollop of milk, so I thought replacing the milk with irish cream would be a home run. Unfortunately the thickness of Bailey’s turned the result to a dense sludge. It actually didn’t taste that bad, but its cough-syrup-like consistency was off-putting.