Day 115 - Hena Coffee Roasters

I spent a pretty spectacular 3 hours today with Lanie Tauber, one of the duo of brothers running Hena Coffee Roasters out in very industrial East New York. They are the third generation of coffee roasters in their family. Their grandfather Harry H. Wolfe was a roaster for then-ubiquitous Martinson before setting up his own shop with his son. Harry H. Wolfe & Son was a roasting house that worked under contract to other coffee companies, commissioned to render the art that is roasting their coffees for their labels.

Cutting out a lot of details (for a change), Hena is the latest incarnation of the family's coffee roasting heritage. Lanie and brother Scott operate in the specialty coffee market--higher end products for fancy restaurants and gourmet shops.

I'm a fairly recent coffee drinker, so I assume almost everyone else in the world knows more about coffee than I do. But Lanie was gracious enough to give me a crash course in the art of buying, blending and roasting proprietary combinations of coffee that give each roasting company their signature tastes and characters. I learned the spectrum of roasts from lighter American City roasts, through Vienna roast, French roast and, finally, Italian roast. All the same coffee--just a matter of how long it's in the roaster. And the difference between the different roasters can be a matter of seconds in small batches. That's part of the art, too.

Lanie and I mixed together a few handfuls of green coffee beans from Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala and Columbia and then tossed them into his vintage Jabez Burns & Sons sample roaster. This is an ingeniously efficient machine that is--for nerds like me--perhaps more of a highlight to witness than the magic of roasting coffee itself. Gas jets are lit beneath a pair of small rotating drums that, to me, evoke clothes dryers except each is about he size of, well, a can of coffee on its side.

A small amount of our green beens are funneled into the roasters where they are kept in constant motion above the flame. Bafflers line the drum to ensure the beans flip and are not just running along the smooth sides of the drum. With only 1/4 lb of beans in the roaster, it doesn't take more than a few minutes for roasting to begin. Lanie likes to say coffee is a food. And as he talked I went a step further and thought of it as wine. The terms used for the aromas that are released at different points of the roasting are widely discussed at coffee samplings. Like wine, the terms seem to be as precise as they are subjective. Smelling the grassy, earthy bouquet of coffee beans taking on heat and just beginning to give off some aroma was straightforward enough. But when I went a step further and said I thought I detected a nuttiness, I got a frown from Lanie who explained that that would bad. He smelled it and detected no nuttiness. What do I know?

Over the next 3 or so minutes, the beans quickly moved through the American family of roasting shades and into the espresso family: Vienna, then French, then Italian. Lanie took a scoop out every few seconds not so much for him to check progress (he can do this blindfolded) than to show me how quickly the beans progress through stages. Different oils come to the surface at different temperatures, producing a popping sound at two distinct points along the way. He'd put the scoop beneath my nose, I'd inhale and immediately recognize lovely, familiar notes which, when I offered them aloud, caused Lanie to furrow his brow again in worry, check it himself and gently correct me. (This is why, while fascinated by and a lover of good food, I'll never be a proper foodie. Secretly, I want to be. But I'll never know how.)

A few seconds more and we dumped the hot beans into the trough in front of the roasting drum which quickly passes cool air over them to arrest the roasting process. If this wasn't done, they'd continue to cook. Another minute and we ground our VERY fresh coffee. We placed a tablespoon into some sampling cups and poured boiling water on top and let it steep.

Who samples coffee? While they can be retail events in the way that wine tastings have become, they don't seem to have caught on. Most roasting houses have sampling rooms in order to test the quality and characteristics of the green coffee beans they're purchasing from growers and brokers. Wholesale customers can also arrange to come and taste different blends and products.

After a minute or two of steeping, each cup developed a crust of oils on top called the crema. This is key. The best time to smell brewed coffee's aroma is as soon as that crema is broken with a spoon. That is the point at which they are the most concentrated. After that, sampling would proceed with several coffees of different blends or different roasts, or both. A spoon is used to take a sample, it is slurped into the mouth to aspirate it, and then sloshed around all parts of the tongue and palate to trigger all of the taste sensors. And then there is a big old spittoon-like vessel into which it is to be spat, not swallowed.

UPDATE
It turns out that you can roast coffee at home either in a hot-air popcorn popper or in a good pan on a medium-high heat on the stove. My friends and I did the latter to great effect this past weekend with a bunch of green coffee beans Lanie was kind enough to send me away with. I'm now a convert!