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.

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.

• 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.

Here’s the crated machine, just off the truck (you can see our afterburner in the background):

Here I’ve started breaking down the crate, and you can see the machine’s nameplate. Normally the nameplate on San Franciscans is brass, but for some reason a previous owner decided to paint the plate and all the fittings a uniform black. I don’t mind, though I’d prefer the original brass:

See more pictures, including the fully assembled machine, after the cut.

Here’s a “before” shot of the rest of our space, with sinks and furniture waiting to be installed, light fixtures waiting to be hung, and walls waiting to be painted:

The machine freshly uncrated, but still unassembled:

Me cleaning the machine with a vaccuum. I still need to give the roaster a once-over with an alcohol solution but we got the majority of the dust and chaff and stray old beans off:

….aaaaaaaaand the finished, fully assembled machine! We reconnected the exhaust pipes and the wiring on the fans, and it’s ready to be hooked up to the ducting and afterburner. Of course, we still have to install the ducting, which is a whole new ballgame…:

I’ll continue to update as we get closer to officially opening the doors of our roastery. I’m excited to be able to blog about the process as we go…if you’d like to see or hear about any particular steps in the process, feel free to shoot me a line and I’ll be happy to blog more about it.

While the machine was being crated , we learned some interesting lore about it: it turns out that this San Franciscan was Cafe Vita’s first roasting machine, as well as being the same machine that launched Caffe Fiore and Pioneer Coffee Company. (Pioneer is who we, in turn, purchased it from.)

So this 12k San Franciscan has launched three successful Seattle coffee roasteries…let’s hope it can launch a fourth, eh?

It’s an older machine, mostly manual the way I like it, with an aftermarket digital temp probe which will help with roast profiling. I need to clean it inside and out, install the new cooling fan motor that came with it, and then put it back together and hook it up to our ducting and gas line. Also, it’s painted black-on-black and we may strip the fittings and nameplate back to the original brass. A lot of work involved but it’s worth it for the right machine.

Here’s the “before” picture, showing the machine as we saw it in many pieces sitting in the back of a warehouse… (Forgive the poor image quality, I was using my iPhone camera in a darkened room.)

(NWS for very strong language)

The site asks you to pick your poison from a huge list of commercially available caffeinated drinks such as Coke, Red Bull, and coffee in its various forms (drip, espresso, etc.). Then you put in your body weight in lbs or kg, submit, and the site calculates how much of the given beverage it would take to reach the LD50 of about 13 grams of pure caffeine. LD50 is the term for “lethal dose”, determined by how much of a substance it would take to have a survivability rate of 50% or lower even with prompt medical attention.

As it turns out, it would take exactly 146.25 shots of espresso to send me to that great Espresso Vivace stand in the sky. How ’bout you?

Oh wait, you probably mean another kind of Turkey.

(I have got to get one of those Turkish-coffee-dispensing backpacks…)