At his roastery located inside Java’s at the Market, Joe
Palozzi, who has been roasting coffee beans in the Rochester area under one
name or another for more than 30 years, pulls a tiny scoop from the latest
incarnation of his century-old coffee roaster and looks closely at the smoking beans
heaped in it. He turns the scoop this way and that in the morning light. He
slides it back in to the roaster, and pulls another sample before walking back
to his chair to chat for a few minutes.
           “You gotta
have a good-quality bean,” Palozzi says, waving in the direction of a pallet
heaped with burlap sacks of green coffee beans next to the massive roaster. “The
beans will tell you how they want to be roasted.” A few minutes later, he opens
the door on the roaster and an avalanche of medium-brown beans spills out along
with a gust of acrid smoke that fills his roastery for a few minutes. He grabs
a wooden paddle and starts moving the beans around, helping them cool quickly
enough that the oil inside them doesn’t bleed out — the rough equivalent of
resting roasted meat to keep the juices inside. Once the air clears, the smell
of the beans is intoxicating, a mix of chocolate and, oddly, flowers with just
a whisper of smoke.
           Across town,
Rochester’s newest coffee roaster,
Benjamin Turiano at Joe Bean Coffee Roasters on University
Avenue, is tweaking the time and temperature graph
on the computer attached to his coffee roaster. The basic machine looks not
unlike the one Palozzi uses, but the hardware attached to it, and indeed the
room in which it sits, looks like a university research lab. Turiano combines
his knowledge of the growth region, farm, harvest date, and type of beans he roasts
with a connoisseur’s sense of flavor, aroma, and texture, creating a profile
database for each type of bean that he roasts. This information, combined with
ultra-fine control over temperature over the course of the roasting cycle, creates
coffees that are engineered to be brewed slowly and meticulously. Served in
small quantities with great ceremony, they are meant to be savored and
appreciated like fine wines. At Joe Bean Coffee Roasters on University Avenue,
you don’t drink coffee, you “cup” it — sniffing and tasting your way to
blackberries, oranges, caramel, cinnamon, toasted nuts, nutmeg, and wood inside
your tiny tasting glass.
           Palozzi and
Turiano define the extremes of coffee roasting in the Rochester area, an old
guard and a new in the field of artisanal, small-batch coffee roasting. Within
this relatively small field there are a variety of approaches to roasting
coffee, and wide variations in quality and consistency between roasting
establishments. French roast, for instance, at three different places varied
widely in color, flavor, and intensity, returning three strikingly different
coffees ranging from intense but refreshing to muddy and burnt tasting. There
is, as Turiano told me, no local equivalent to the home-beer-brewers’ clubs and
associations for coffee. And there’s very little in the way of standards to
describe various roasts. Every roaster is free to roast to his or her own
understanding of the various styles and flavor profiles, falling back on personal
tastes, experience, and customer feedback in producing beans that sell.
Popularity is the sine qua non of a
“good” roast.
In our area, it seems that every third business that
opens is a coffee shop of one sort or another. But most of them purchase their
beans from third-party roasters with large suburban production facilities, or
exist as branches or franchises of larger operations like Buffalo-based Spot or
the national chain Starbucks. There are relatively few businesses in the
Rochester area that actually roast their beans in the same place that you can
buy them and drink coffee made from them. Java’s at the Market (a branch of the
Java’s family of coffee shops, which roasts at the Public Market and
distributes to its five locations and to various restaurants, including Good
Luck on Anderson Alley); Canaltown Coffee Roasters (which roasts at its
location on East Avenue); Boulder Coffee (also roasts at the Market); Coffee
Connection (a not-for-profit collective that roasts at its flagship shop on
South Avenue); and Joe Bean Coffee Roasters (formerly of Webster, but roasting
from its facility on University Avenue for the past year). All of these are small-scale,
single-roaster operations, turning out a labor-intensive product in relatively
small, expensive, but very quick-selling quantities.
           The typical
coffee roaster — the machine, not the person — holds 12kg (or 26 lbs.) of green
coffee beans at a time. Most roasts take about 30 minutes to complete, not
including sorting the beans before roasting them, cooling them afterward, or
the time that the beans must rest before they can be used. This small scale of
production creates a product that is both limited in quantity, labor intensive,
and relatively expensive.
           Most good-quality
beans sell at retail between $15 and $20 per pound (the green, unroasted, beans
command less than a tenth of that price from the grower and about a third of
that from coffee brokers in large cities like New York). Specialty beans,
particularly from small producers or Fair Trade and organic growers, can cost
significantly more — sometimes more than $30 per pound. In the way of
businesses in which the difficulty of obtaining or creating the item not only
contributes to its cachet but also justifies its cost, coffee roasters will
often go on at length about the quality of their beans, the work involved in
searching for them or negotiating special deals in developing countries, or the
mystery and art of roasting and brewing their coffee. To a coffee roaster,
particularly a specialty roaster who spends several hours a day tending his or
her beans, there is no such thing as “just a cup of coffee.”
           Peter
Pelletier, who has been roasting beans for his Canaltown Coffee Roasters on
East Avenue for a bit more than 20 years, is a fine example of the artisanal
roaster in action. His shop is small, tucked in the elbow of a tiny strip mall
on the corner of Winton Road and East Avenue. His roasting room is even
smaller: it has just enough room for his massive Probat roaster (the German
company Probat is one of the largest roaster manufacturers in the world), a
rack of syrups for use in flavored coffees, a sorting table, and a narrow aisle
in which he can stand while he tends the beans. Bags of raw beans are stashed
throughout the shop both for convenience and decoration.
           On a normal
day, Pelletier will roast for four or five hours, running through eight to 10
batches of beans, most of which will go out the door as either beans or cups of
coffee within a week of roasting. You can come into the shop and order a cup of
dark roast or his medium roast Rochester blend — a caffeine-forward coffee with
a surprisingly full body and an aggressive finish that will surely snap you out
of your morning haze. But you’d do well to let him step out from behind the
counter and take you on a walk through his wares, which include a wall full of
bins of house-roasted beans, and candy jars brimming with specialty beans from
small farms in distant lands.
           Pelletier,
like Palozzi, has a philosophy of roasting that raises it to an art form, or at
least a highly refined craft. “There are subtle flavors and differences in each
bean,” he says over a cup of silky-smooth, flowery tasting Costa Rican Lamanita
coffee (he spent about 10 minutes telling me about his visit to the plantation
where the beans are raised, and sharing a coffee-table book about the place and
its beans). “There is an optimum roast for each bean, and depending on where it’s
from, it will give you what you need. The region really helps — you don’t want
to over-roast something from Central America or Africa,
but Indonesian you can roast as dark as you want because it’s dark and syrupy
already.”
Pelletier and Palozzi got into the coffee business,
and have stayed there for most of their working lives, out of love for a good
cup of joe and the desire to share that love with the world. But that’s not the
only way that Rochester’s roasters
have found their way into the business. Lyjha Wilton, founder of the Boulder
Coffee family of coffeehouses, got into the business in large part because he
couldn’t find a tenant for the site that became his flagship store on the
corner of Alexander Street
and Clinton Avenue. As he
tells it, the coincidence of having an empty rental property and the
acquisition of a high-quality espresso machine for a song at an auction got him
into the coffee business.
           The first Boulder
opened in 2005. Today there are five branches of the chain, including a robust
presence at the Public Market that anchors what is quickly becoming a mini-Market
in itself — it is now home to vendors of specialty Italian cookies, artisan
olive oil, high-end meats, and superlative Mexican food each Saturday.
           For Wilton,
who purchased the Java Joe trademark along with the building at 1 Public Market
in 2009, coffee is a business and a profitable one: he told me that he just
recently sealed a deal to distribute Boulder-branded coffees at Wegmans
supermarkets in the Rochester area, and he looks forward to future growth. Wilton,
though, is not a roaster himself.
           When Wilton
purchased the Public Market space he hired a roaster with 10 years of
experience to take over its operations. The direct-fire coffee roaster was
already in the building. That is the roaster that Boulder
uses today, roasting 12 hours each week to produce the 12 to 15 varieties of
coffee that the shop sells as beans at the Market and brews at its other
locations. Wilton says that getting
the roast right and learning the nuances of the roaster was a “steep learning
curve,” but one that resulted in a distinctive taste and style for his Fair Trade,
organic beans.
           Joy
Bergfolk, executive director of the not-for-profit coffee house Coffee
Connection on South Avenue,
also sells Fair Trade beans. Roasted in a Probat roaster by Cathy Martin, who
learned her trade six years ago from the Coffee Connection’s founder Nancy
Sawyer-Molina, Coffee Connection’s beans are a little darker than those of its
peers (I found its French roast to be darker and more aggressive than any other
I tasted), but Martin’s lighter and medium-bodied roasts are pleasant and have
well-balanced acidity and a clean finish.
           While the
product is ultimately important, there are other reasons to support Coffee
Connection, chief among them that the shop is the public face of Project
Empower, a faith-based organization dedicated to helping women recovering from
abuse and addiction to get back on their feet again. As Bergfolk put it, “If
you are socially conscious, Coffee Connection is a no-brainer place to get your
coffee,” letting you support a worthy cause, a growing local business, and the
idea of Fair Trade while sipping a certified organic brew.
All roasters are acutely conscious of where their
beans come from — although not all of them adhere to the Fair Trade line. Many,
like Peter Pelletier and Joe Palozzi, travel to the places their beans come
from to see how they are grown and negotiate sales directly, imbibing a bit of
the flavor of the beans’ terroir in the process. But nowhere in Rochester is
the point of origin of your beans, and the time when they were harvested, more
important — or perhaps more clearly articulated for you — than at Joe Bean
Coffee Roasters on University Avenue.Â
           Joe Bean is
the outgrowth of a more pedestrian coffee business of the same name, founded by
Kathy Turiano in Webster in 2004. That business, which roasted largely for the
wholesale and restaurant trade, provided a launching point for Turiano’s newest
venture — an effort to elevate coffee to the status of wine or craft beer — in
2008. Open for a little more than a year at its University Avenue location with
Turiano’s self-taught son, Benjamin Turiano, acting as head roaster, Joe Bean
is not a place where you just drop in for a mere cup of coffee. It’s an
experience that must be savored. Take a seat at the bar in the tasting room and
you’ll likely be asked whether you’d like a flight of coffee. Those familiar
with wine and beer tastings will understand the format, if not the context. For
$7 you get about nine ounces of coffee and an intricate performance and
presentation not unlike a Japanese tea ceremony.
           Standing
next to a 4′ tall glass apparatus that I’ve since been told is a Kyoto coffee
drip (to me it looks like Wyle E. Coyote’s chemistry set), my barista measured
boiling water with a chemist’s precision, and eventually delivered me three
beakers — along with printed tasting notes — on the coffees that I’d ordered.
Trust me when I tell you that at this point you should not ask for sugar,
regardless how you normally take your brew.
           The coffees
were certainly distinctive. Unlike others that I drank over the course of three
days, there was a clear difference between the beans and their roasts. The Joe
Bean Blend, a mixture of Mexican and Colombian beans, has a well-balanced
roastiness. Colombian Ocamonte beans — harvested between September and January,
grown in a low pH mixed soil at 1,200 to 1,700 meters above sea level, perhaps
by a left-handed man wearing a blue shirt — were slightly smoky and very round
in the mouth. And Ethiopian Sidama beans had an almost citrusy tartness that
would make a great palate cleanser between courses of a lavish meal. But I kept
thinking how much better they might have been with just a touch of sugar.
           That said,
what Kathy and Benjamin Turiano are doing at Joe Bean, although a bit ahead of
its time, is important and interesting. It’s an attempt to bring the same sort
of rigor and craft to coffee roasting as has been brought to bear on other
craft beverages over the centuries. But those who drop into Joe Bean looking
for a quick morning pick-me-up rather than an experience might be better served
to grab a cup of joe elsewhere. Getting a simple cup of coffee can take 15
minutes or more and would certainly overtax my caffeine-starved brain in the
morning.
           At Java’s on
Gibbs Street on a recent spring
afternoon, the tables outside are full. The line at the counter snakes around
the inside of the shop and threatens to spill out the door. Owner Mike
Calabrese sits with me watching the queue inch
forward (his partner Chuck Cerankosky pops
out of the kitchen briefly on his way out to the Public Market, where the pair
is putting the finishing touches on their newest restaurant venture, Cure). Customer
after customer orders coffee, more often than not by size of the cup rather
than roast. The question of what beans are being used doesn’t come up at all.
Almost everyone goes from the cashier straight over to the stand where the milk
and sugar are kept fully stocked.
           Calabrese
tells me that the two coffees I’m drinking are from Guatemala and Sumatra, and that they were roasted for him by the original
“Java” Joe Palozzi. Boulder got the name, he says, “but we’d rather have the
coffee.” I can detect a slight difference between the brews and a bit of the
signature roastiness that all of Palozzi’s coffees have, but I’m not convinced
that if you mixed them up I’d be able to tell you which is which. What I can
tell you is that they are both wonderful, that the people watching is good, and
I’m suddenly having a very good time.
This article appears in May 9-15, 2012.
