Roastmaster's Blog

Sometimes I pace around the office soliloquizing on the finer details of coffee or on grandiose generalizations about the state of our industry. Mark, usually eyeballs deep into his laptop, stops and watches me amble and ramble, wondering how deep the well of thought might extend, how it might end, and if there is hope interwoven into my usually-troublesome insights. And that’s why I was glad that Mark went with me to Portland last month to attend the annual conference of the Specialty Coffee Association.

The Specialty Coffee Association. That sounds … well it sounds big to me. But when we told the transit cop on the Portland train that we were in town for a coffee conference, he laughed and said he never imagined there would be an entire conference just for coffee. And he’s right, to some extent. There isn’t an entire conference just for coffee because this one seems to pretend to focus on coffee while its manifestations are everything but. The idea that people actually drink and enjoy coffee as a solitary beverage is one I was duped into believing way back in 2002 by the National Coffee Association’s statistics on coffee consumption in the U.S. But once I opened the DoubleShot in 2004, I realized almost no one drinks coffee. The majority of coffee is consumed in a way that masks the actual taste of the beverage. Which I could understand if we were talking about oatmeal. But we’re talking about coffee. Imagine if almost all the whisk(e)y in the world were consumed with Coke. Wait… Is it? (I digress.)

When I first started roasting coffee, it was with a small fluid bed roaster, a bunch of regional coffees (save one: a single estate coffee called La Minita), and a book entitled “Home Coffee Roasting” by a guy named Ken Davids. I read that book and roasted the coffees and made lots of notes, and over time my skills at roasting and tasting began to develop. In 2006, in the midst of the Starbucks saga, I sent Ken Davids a pound of my Ambergris Espresso Blend, as he was reviewing what he probably called “boutique” espresso blends on his website, CoffeeReview.com. This was an exciting time for me, and I was thrilled when Ken rated my espresso 91 points (or was it 92?) and he emailed to tell me that he was glad my coffee turned out to be one of the good ones. Boy was I glad as well; an affirmation from the man whose book launched my roasting career that I was doing it right. And then I noticed on Ken’s website all the coffees that scored higher than mine had logos next to the review which clicked over to the roaster’s website, and all the coffees that scored lower than mine did not. So I emailed Ken and asked him to put my logo on the site. And that’s when I found out the whole thing was a sham. A pay-to-play scheme in which top-rated coffee reviews were bought with “sponsorship” dollars.

•

Mark and I went to see Ken speak in a lecture hall at the conference and, still affected 17 years later, I was salivating at the idea of standing up during the Q&A to ask Ken about his shady scoring practices, widely acknowledged throughout the industry but shrouded from unwary consumers. Ken is an affable but awkward old man, and as we watched him stammer around the podium, Mark whispered that this might be his swan song. He talked about a book on coffee he wrote in the ’70s that sold a quarter million copies over the years, the roasting book that got me started, an unheralded book on espresso, and a new book entitled “21st Century Coffee.” Scatterbrained and directionless, he rambled for 45 minutes while I sat sweating and cogitating, but in the end I simply couldn’t attack the poor guy in his last shining moment.

There used to be a waggish monthly I enjoyed, entitled Mountain Bike Magazine. I’ve never been a fan of sitting and looking at pictures or reading descriptions of people doing something I’d rather just be doing, but this magazine was witty and sarcastic and kept me up to date on the latest gear. And then they published an issue with a negative gear review of the latest suspension fork released by the major player in that space. The following issue was thin, and it began with a letter from the editor explaining that the shock company had pulled all its ads because of the low star review. And that was the end of that. So I sort of understand Ken’s dilemma; once you start, you can’t stop.

•

There once was a man named Andy. He owned a company in California that roasted coffee, and a local Tulsa shop was using it. A barista of that shop would bring by some beans now and then, and we’d brew and taste and talk about it. Then one day, he brought an Ethiopian natural that blew me away. I went to the website and read all about it. About how they’d bought it “farm direct” in Ethiopia, etc etc. Excited, I emailed Andy to find out how he pulled off the thing I’d been wanting so badly to do. I can’t quite remember what happened after that, but suffice it to say I realized Andy wasn’t being completely honest about that whole “farm direct” part. (Unless, that is, we were ALL buying coffee farm direct.)

Feeling slightly annoyed at the misinformation and deception sprawling throughout specialty coffee, I decided to record an episode of my podcast, AA Cafe, entitled “Liars in the Coffee Industry.” We talked about silly stuff and then got into the heart of the matter. I called out Ken Davids for taking money to give good reviews. (Or was he giving good reviews in order to get sponsorships? No, wait, that’s how “Best in the World” and “A-List” market reviews.) I also talked about Andy and his misleading rhetoric with the Ethiopian coffee and his loosey goosey definition of “farm direct.” And then I got ready for the backlash from dissing one of the most prominent authors in specialty coffee.

•

Back in 2005, one of my customers, Joe Holsten, told me I should start a podcast. I’m not sure why he thought this was a good idea, other than the possibility that all podcasts back then were just long-winded rants, which I was prone to brandishing behind the counter anyway. I didn’t even know what a podcast was, and when he explained it I told him no one listens to podcasts. A couple weeks later, Joe came in and told me Apple was about to add podcasts to the iTunes app, and with that AA Cafe was born. We were certainly one of the first coffee podcasts, along with another called portafilter.net, and today we remain the longest-running coffee podcast in existence. Portafilter was run by two specialty coffee pros named Nick and Jay. Nick turned out to be a loudmouth who got himself into trouble for not paying his bills. And Jay – he started out with a shaved-ice business that morphed into “Spro,” then expanded and contracted as Jay’s interests and acumen developed. Jay brought the fruit loops latte to the barista competition around 2007, and then my favorite, the Lobster Bisque Latte. He said it didn’t taste very good, but he was trying to make a point about the hazelnut lattes being presented during the US Barista Championships. And I told him then and there he should be the president of SCA. But they don’t elect people like Jay. He’s too progressive. Anyway, Jay posted about the AA Cafe episode, “Liars in the Coffee Industry” on a message board (remember those?) called coffeed.com. And the shit hit the fan.

But not the way I thought. I was lambasted for talking about one of my peers in the industry. And I even got poorly written emails from uneducated cafe owners. It seemed like the entire industry was dogpiling on me. People were pissed that I had the gall to publicly impugn Andy, a fellow specialty coffee roaster. And no one said a word about Ken Davids. I emailed the moderator of the site to see if they would give me access to post in my defense, but they declined. And that was probably for the best, because eventually Andy appeared in print, doing his best to defend himself and explain the way he bought this coffee “farm direct.” And then the message board fell silent. Someone asked him to please explain again, and it became blatantly obvious Andy had bought this coffee through a broker, no matter how hard he tried to tie himself to an Ethiopian farm he’d never been to. I waited for all the naysayers to send me apologies, but none ever came. (In retrospect, there were so many other things in that podcast episode people should’ve been mad at me for. So inappropriate.)

It was perfect timing, seeing Jay get out of a car and walk down the sidewalk toward the convention center entry. He was holding a camera on a selfie stick, interviewing a Mexican woman who I obviously should know. I posted up, arms crossed, directly in his path. And as soon as he spotted me, he turned the camera around to show this “old school” roaster, Brian Franklin from DoubleShot. We reconnected for a few moments as we strode into the conference hall, and I told him about the Ken Davids lecture. He laughed, as Jay always does, and told me he was enjoying the solitude of having no cafes and being able to roast in his underwear if he wants. And he said he’s trying to be a “YouTuber.” So I guess I’m on YouTube. We parted ways at the bottom of the escalator and Mark and I proceeded onto the trade show floor.

•

One of the strangest things about being at the annual expo for the Specialty Coffee Association (of America AND Europe) is the fact that it’s really hard to find a good cup of coffee. There were lots of tropical smoothies and a booth giving away bananas for some reason. We stopped by the Hario booth and saw the new colors of scales and a guy made us a pourover that tasted under-developed on a teal-colored one. I saw baristas behind an espresso machine and looked at their sign to find they were serving caramel pecan lattes or some such thing. We tasted oat milk eggnog (oatnog) and some guy made us try chai tea on nitro. Matcha and whipped cream and “milkadamia.” At meetings with importers, they would ask us, almost dismissively, if we wanted coffee. Longtime friends and brokers confessed to loving coffee with maple syrup, an Australian chai made with honey, coffees flavored with fruits and aged in wine barrels, anything but the taste of actual coffee. Thank god for the staid, sportcoat-clad traditionalists at the La Minita booth. A group that you might call “old school,” that you might’ve deemed sell-outs for being acquired by a Japanese tea company, and that you probably could ridicule for the percentage of coffee they trade in the commercial market. But they seem to be holding the line (and even pushing the envelope, though ever-so-slightly) when it comes to specialty coffee. So at their booth I had a tiny, tiny cup of coffee. Black.

I sauntered over to the coffee stand of one of my brokers, waiting to talk to him, knowing he probably wasn’t looking forward to our conversation. Coffee is hard. And good coffee is dependent on so many things going right. It requires a lot of people caring and doing an excellent job at every level. I’d previously questioned this broker about a coffee he sold me which turned out to have been poorly harvested from a farm not properly managed and then inappropriately milled. And when he finally acknowledged me, he looked as though I’d kicked his dog. “Worst coffee you’ve ever roasted?” Yeah, it’s not good. Whether or not he knows I’m right is still in question, but I’ve been doing this a long time and I know coffee. I probably wouldn’t know if your caramel pecan latte tasted like it should. And I might not know which chai is best. But I know coffee. And I know when people aren’t being honest about things in the coffee industry. Mark stood off to one side, observing the awkward, depressed conversation, and then I felt someone standing next to me. Too close, really. The broker shook this interposer’s hand and then turned back to me and said, “You know Andy, right?”

Yeah, I know Andy. And now Mark does too.

“How did you get into coffee?”, people ask me.  It’s kind of a long story. 

I was riding my bike down Riverside Drive, on the river trail, for what felt like the millionth time, and my mind sort of hit this pothole and it was deep and red and depressing, and I felt like I couldn’t ride that path any more.  

I started out, like everyone else, sipping the last, cold remnant of Folgers out of my parents’ squat, heavy, ceramic cups.  I can still remember the taste.  And the smell.  But it wasn’t until I was a big boy that I started actually drinking coffee.  It occurred to me one day, and I distinctly remember this, that I was completely independent and that I could do anything I wanted.  Anything.  (Not true, but an enticing thought nonetheless.)  That feeling of freedom was liberating.  I had freedom and responsibility.  I had my own apartment, all by myself, and I was responsible for paying the bills.  I owned my own business and was responsible for making the money to pay those bills.  With freedom comes diversity.  Decision-making.  Discovery.  I did all sorts of things and tried all sorts of coffee.  And I learned that coffee tasted better without sugar.  I found out that french press was a good way to brew coffee.  But not with a blade grinder.  I made “espresso” and pourover coffee, and moka pot.  And then one day, much to my surprise, I learned that coffee didn’t have to come to me already roasted.  It didn’t have to be roasted in a factory or in a large, industrial roaster.  I could buy a very small coffee roaster and learn how to do it myself.  

I’ve told this story over and over again through the years, and you’ve probably heard it before, but it’s the core of the very beginning and the true essence of the DoubleShot.  I bought a small home roaster and various green coffees, and I read a book about coffee and roasting.  I roasted and brewed and tasted coffee for the first time.  The explosion of flavors in my mouth was startling.  I wasn’t sure what to think, but I knew coffee had changed forever for me.  It was the first time in my life that I’d ever tasted coffee that wasn’t stale.  And thus, the foundations of DoubleShot Coffee Company were conceived.  After a few years roasting in my apartment kitchen and riding my bike down the river trail, I decided to strike out, take my bike and roaster to Colorado, and open a coffeeshop in the Rocky Mountains.  To share fresh, delicious coffee with the masses!

As you know, that didn’t work out.  And after two years slumming it in pristine mountain country, I returned to Tulsa, where this taste for fine beverage began.  

There are endless details to this excursion:  trials, hurdles, victories, mistakes, discoveries, everything.  Just about anything I can imagine; it’s happened here at the DoubleShot.  I remember some things, and a lot I don’t.  

The beginning of life in this long, skinny strip mall space at 18th and Boston was difficult.  I was younger and much fitter and so I guess I had a lot more energy to work more and still play a little in the night.  Everything I had went into the creation of this concept, and so each night I would go home to an apartment that was really more a storage unit for my sleeping body.  For three-and-a-half years I lived without gas or electricity in a run-down habitation, in order to skimp on the bills.  And truthfully, it’s likely the DoubleShot wouldn’t have made it with that extra burden.  And so I suffered for my craft.  It was cold in winter and hot in summer, and the shower was always a little warmer or cooler than the air.  And then one day I upgraded, beneath the smog of mold-infested lungs.  My lungs!  Possibly my biggest asset, my lungs have carried me far throughout my life.  And taken the biggest punishment.

One December day, as I find myself every December now, I decided I was fat and out of shape, and I needed to do something drastic.  So I signed up for an ultra-marathon.  My first one.  I started taking one day off on the weekends and I implemented a training regimen that was based on 9’s.  I’d run 9 miles the first weekend.  Then 18 miles the next.  27 miles the next, and so on until I got to a distance that was unrealistic.  I finished that first 100, but it took a lot of caffeine and perseverance.  (They don’t call it “running a business” for nothing.)

Running has been a parallel to life for me, ever since I realized the liberation that running gave me.  Just like in life, you can’t choose your natural ability, but you can decide the effort you put in and your willingness to persevere.  And, as I’ve coached aspiring entrepreneurs through the years, it’s that unwillingness to quit that makes all the difference.  My high school football coach, Chris Stiles, used to say, “Men,” (he was the first person in our lives to call us men)… “Men, we’re all going to face adversity, but you have to keep on giving 110%.  You’re going to get knocked down, but you have to get right back up.”  He was right, and I’ve tried to live some version of that doctrine.

As I reminisce about the history of the DoubleShot, there are two times in my life that I can’t really remember.  For ten months, I worked the DoubleShot all by myself.  With no employees, I barista’d all day and then roasted and ran the business (poorly) at night.  I was sleeping ~5 hours per night, sometimes lying down on the floor by the sink or napping on the sofa when I was just too exhausted to finish the dishes.  And I was exhausted, fighting TMJ and sleep deprivation.  But that was one turning-point in the life of the DoubleShot.  I proved I could go it alone, found some extremely supportive friends, and made a statement about how important it is that coffee quality be foremost at the DoubleShot.  But, like I said, most of that time is a blur.  I was a robot.  An exhausted robot.

Most people don’t know this, but the DoubleShot almost didn’t come into existence, because I came near to death just a couple months prior to its opening.  I was staying with my parents in their new house, and my dad was working in Chicago.  My mom went to visit him, and while she was gone, I began to feel sick.  After a couple days, I woke up early in the morning and realized I was about to die.  So I went to put the dishes away, so my mom wouldn’t find the dishwasher full when she got home.  (I didn’t want to be remembered for that.)  But I couldn’t do it.  So I sat down to think.  And it occurred to me that I had carbon monoxide poisoning.  I can’t remember all the details, but I remember driving to Lowe’s with terrible tunnel vision to buy a carbon monoxide detector.  I remember the look on my mom’s face when I picked her up at the airport.  I remember not being able to stand any more because lactic acid had built up in every muscle in my body.  I remember the doctor telling me I should be dead.  And that I also had the flu and meningitis.  And I remember the pain.  But I survived.

And so did the DoubleShot.  It has survived the downturned economy, employee turnover, crazy neighbors, debilitating thefts, a car through the window, threats from Starbucks, twitter, myriad disappointments and failures, and the tragic loss of a few friends.  And it has continuously grown, and seen even more daily successes.  We’ve developed new coffees and relationships in Colombia, and seen the real face of coffee in many farms throughout Central and South America.  We’ve doubled the size of our store, employed professional bakers, and trained the most talented and passionate baristas around.  We’ve been featured in a documentary (The Perfect Cappuccino) and a story in Wine Spectator, and inspired an episode of Portlandia.  (We even got to serve coffee to Kevin Bacon.)  And we’ve seen the delighted faces of countless customers throughout the years who experienced that same amazement I felt all those years ago after my first home roast, my first taste of fresh coffee.  And that was the goal.  So for all of you who enjoy our coffee and appreciate the effort we put in to always make it fresh and delicious, we count each of you as part of our success over the past 10 years.  Thank you.

This week, we will be celebrating with a few delicious coffees.  Online, we are offering The Decade Collection, a set of 3 coffees that I think encapsulates the DoubleShot at 10 years old.  You can buy that set here starting at midnight on the morning of our birthday.  Mark Brown and I discussed the Decade Collection and what it means to be 10 on our podcast, AA Cafe #87.  In-store on this Wednesday, we will institute a new brewing method for the DoubleShot.  And in that brew, we will be drinking the new Ethiopian natural, Beloya, as well as the amazing Perci Red - a natural Gesha, and probably the most interesting coffee we’ve ever sold.  Perci Red, as you’ll remember, is from Ninety Plus Gesha Estates in Panama.  

The first time I visited Panama, I walked up the mountain at NPGE, skirted by tall, thin Gesha trees, and at the top, where the rainforest crested the other side of the mountain, I waded through tall grass into what seemed like a paradisiacal scene.  Valleys swept away all around, hawks floated on mountain breezes, wild flowers colored the otherwise-green landscape, and trees laden with huge, ripe, orange fruit guarded the entrance to this eden.  These oranges enticed my palate, and so I plucked and peeled one bright, textured orb.  And upon biting into the first dripping slice, I was shocked.  Absolutely shocked.  As this was the most sour thing I’d ever tasted.  It turned out not to be an orange, but some sort of orange-looking lemon.  But this is as it should be with life and with coffee.  The unexpected is what makes it exciting and memorable.  You think you know what coffee tastes like until that one day you taste fresh, DoubleShot Coffee.  

And the story continues.

Celebrate with us Wednesday, March 5 with amazing coffees all day and a party from 7-9p that evening.

I turned off the air conditioner in my house five days ago.  Yesterday the temperature crept up into the nineties outside, and in my house, the insulation I so fervently felt I needed made sure to keep that thermal energy from escaping.  And so here I sit, sweating beneath the impotent, oscillating ceiling fans.  My body radiates in a futile attempt to generate a moisture barrier to cool my skin through evaporation, adding to the haze of humidity that permeates my lungs like second-hand smoke in a crowded bar.  I pick up where I left off on a dog-eared page of Out of Africa, hoping Karen Blixen will carry me off to a place where the heat seems justified.  And where I might crawl into bed under a translucent net to keep from the mosquitoes that so debilitated Henry Morton Stanley on his long trek across Tanganyika in search of Dr. Livingstone.

My legs are tired because my lungs don't work right because of this damned air conditioner.  And because I rode my bicycle 68 miles yesterday.  A twinge of pain in my knee.  And in my ankle, where I turned it on a rubber tire trying to reenact my youthful and more agile days of high school football.  And a scene drifts across my mind, as if a movie projected on the shadowy ceiling silhouetted by the outline of deer antlers, of Hemingway's gangrene-addled invalid adventurer in the Snows of Kilimanjaro.  

I've just finished another AA Cafe podcast, and I can still feel the hike and conversation with Steve Holt of Ninety Plus Gesha Estates on the farm, in the mountains, surrounded by rainforest, sweating in the unbroken rays of the midday sun.  Steve brings us up the mountain and around the largest Gesha farm in the world, describing the coffees of Panama; and across the Atlantic Ocean, across the dark continent, to the origin of coffee and of Ninety Plus to tease us with tastes of what's to come from Ethiopia this year.

Ethiopia is having a good year for coffee, and we hope to gather a nice crop from a variety of regions and processes (or of the influence of fruit, as Steve Holt defines it).  The newest of our Ethiopian coffees is from the Harrar region.  It's called Deep Blue, and it is a dry-processed coffee, which means the fruit had a large influence on the taste of the coffee.  This Harrar Deep Blue is a product of many very small farmers, who picked the coffee cherries when they ripened and laid them whole on mats and cement patios to dry and shrivel into coffee raisins in the high-elevation equatorial sun.  The coffee, from its terroir and its unique varieties and the weather that allowed the coffee to dry properly at each farmer's home, blends together to give us brilliant flavors of chocolate and blueberries and cinnamon.  So good.

Reminds me of an experiment we did back a couple years ago in Colombia, at the farm of Las Animas, where we asked Gabriel and Orfilia Escobar to let the fruit influence their coffee.  And I remember my visit last year to Concordia, when I rode in the back seat of a pickup truck over dirt roads, winding through coffee trees with no leaves bearing immature green fruit that would never ripen because of a fungus called the Eye of the Rooster.  We rolled up to Finca San Rafael, where Alfredo Correa tends his grandmother's coffee and has produced such an amazing product for us in the past, but instead of picking or milling or sorting coffee like Alfredo usually is during the harvest, we found him working on his motorcycle.  The Eye of the Rooster took 95% of Alfredo's crop and the sweat of all his years of toil dried up on the mountainside and was replaced with the sweat of a young man with almost nothing to show and no way to pay.  Somehow Alfredo produced one bag of super-high-end coffee this year that rivals the best washed coffees we've offered, and we have that bag.  It's a great example of fruit influence in a washed coffee.

I've just finished a cup and washed it down with a rinse of water and the taste instantly transported me to another sweaty time in college, working for my dad.  He is adamant that it must be hot inside in order to lay commercial floor covering, and so we worked on dirty concrete floors with scratchy carpets and heavy ceramic.  And all day long, we drank coffee out of the little metal-covered plastic lid that screws on the top of my dad's beat-up green metal thermos, on our breaks and in between our breaks; and when we needed some water, we would fill up that empty cup and the residual coffee would lend a distinct, mild, flavor to the water.  And the residual coffee in my mouth lent a coffee taste to everything.

The "coffee taste" can't be so easily generalized or genericized any more, as the variety of DoubleShot Coffees spans a breadth of flavors broader than all the Scotch of Scotland.  And even one coffee can become three (like the Holy Trinity) when extracted through different methods.  We are going to do just that.  One coffee, three brewing methods.  On June 28 at 7p here at the DoubleShot, we will premier Alfredo Correa's Colombia Finca San Rafael through pourovers, presspots, and espressos.  Three different stations will allow you to learn the method, pose questions of the barista, and enjoy the unique flavors that permeate each cup.  Alfredo's coffee has depth that is best explored through different types of extraction.

This event is brought to you by Coffee Illuminati, and proceeds will be used to build a swingset for the children at Ninety Plus Gesha Estates.  You can register for this event at the DoubleShot by talking to your barista or by emailing info@coffeeilluminati.com