Meet Barrington Coffee Roasting Company, Part 1: Barth Anderson

Barth Anderson and Gregg Charbonneau: Barrington Coffee Roasting Company

In the Berkshire town of Lee, Massachusetts—a sleepy New England village with an off-season population of roughly 6,000—there are two men whose interests are more Longberry than Tanglewood: Gregg Charbonneau and Barth Anderson of Barrington Coffee Roasting Company. Barth and Gregg (or Gregg and Barth—it’s almost impossible after a while to not say one of their names without the other tagging along) have been churning out small batches of single-origin coffees together since 1993, when they bought the Diedrich IR-12 on which Gregg had learned to roast coffee in the ’80s. “That was just kind of a great idea, or we hoped it was a great idea to barter for our first coffee roaster,” Barth says. “Even at that point it was a pretty vintage machine!”

After the jump, Barth talks about sourcing single-origin coffees as a tiny microroaster, the magic of single-origin coffee, and how he & Gregg went from Scotch and cigarettes to Sulawesi and cappuccinos. Tune in next week to read what Gregg thinks about roasters who own coffeeshops (he’s one of ‘em).

How did you and Gregg meet and decide to start a roasting company together? What is the love story of Barrington Coffee?
BA: It is pretty much a love story. Gregg and I met in college in 1984. We became friends immediately, and it was through sort of a love for and exploration of things that you eat and drink. In the early ’80s, I got into single-origin coffees, I worked on a Rancilio, I was pulling shots and I was preparing Turkish coffee to order, and that definitely was something I was doing when I got to college. Gregg really got into coffee during that time; in about ’85 he started roasting. We just had a love of coffee, even more so than our love of exploring something like wine. I don’t mean to get too sordid about this, but we would smoke all different kinds of cigarettes and taste different kinds of Scotchs and explore those kinds of flavors, but coffee kind of won out. We thought we would give it a try in 1993 and see if there was a market for single-origin coffees. We live in the Berkshires, so we have this tourist economy, which means there are a lot of people here in the summer and not so many here in the winter. That means we could try out our roasting on a group of people who would be coming from more urban locations to our very rural location and taste what we’re doing and give us feedback.

Has being in a partnership with someone and doing work that can at times be intensely personal affected your relationship at all?
We’d known each other for so many years prior to starting a business together that we had already sorted out a lot of the kind of potentially problematic personal issues that could be the demise of a business partnership. We knew where we stood, we felt a great degree of trust and had a lot of water under the bridge. It was really all Gregg’s idea! He had been the one roasting the coffee, and he wanted to open a coffeeshop simultaneously. He was like, “We can do all of this! We can open a roastery and I could do the shop or we could do the shop, and I’d love to do it with you.” And I said, “Great, but I am totally burned on retail.” [Laughs] I had been a barista on and off since the early ’80s. I just wasn’t up for that. So we partnered on the roastery together. We’re liberal-arts educated people; we never really came to being in business together with a background in business whatsoever. We had had other endeavors together: one small business together was doing espresso machinery repair, but that was pretty loosey-goosey. There weren’t that many espresso machines in the Berkshires in 1990. [Laughs] Other than that, coming into this decision that we came to respect so highly and treat so carefully, we thought our friendship—no matter how strong—deserved to be formally addressed and delineated in the form of a very specific partnership agreement. But we really have no ever had any issues along those lines, ever.

That seems like it’s probably pretty rare.
We’ve known a lot of people who have gone into business together and we’ve seen a lot of sad outcomes, and that’s really depressing. It can be such a beautiful and strong thing when people get together and when they’re on common turf. But the trials and the challenges are often greater than the potential of the union. It’s hard to watch other people fail in that way. It takes so much to put a business together in the first place, and if the friendship doesn’t work out it destroys that business.

All these years later as partners, do you have specific roles within the company, or is everything pretty much 50-50?
It used to be just the two of us! We’re both still active roasters here—we share that task, and we always have—and we all cup together. All seven of us [who work at BCRC] cup all the coffees. Four of us are fully trained at roasting: Gregg, myself, Christina and Paul. And whenever there’s a weighty issue that comes to pass, Gregg and I always consult each other. We’re of the belief that if we can’t come to an agreement, then we won’t just go with one or the other’s choice, but we’ll make sure the final decision is mutual. We talk through any number of issues together; it could be me feeling really torn about a farm that we’re working with and the quality of this year’s harvest, or it could be him saying we need to really look at our accounts payable this month and deal with X or Y from a financial standpoint. I think that alludes to our more specific roles. In terms of dealing with the finances, he takes the first seat with that stuff. In terms of sourcing green coffees, dealing with farms, purchasing coffees, contracts, agreements—that’s my bag. Honestly, there are so many different roles that each of us perform. At this point there’s seven of us here, and we’re all full-time and really plugged in.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you source your coffees?
At this point we’ve been in the mix for so long that I have a lot of really wonderful connections with people growing coffee and people working with growers and acting as importers. It’s been a very long process, being in this since well before the Internet was happening. The way we’re able to access information now is just so luxurious! [Laughs] Originally it took going to the Library of Congress and getting into the card catalog and figuring out who knows what. I did that for years and years and years and years, and I still do it. But now, rather than following leads and trying to get closer and closer to origin that way, I’ve made a lot of those connections by cupping, cupping, cupping, getting samples over and over and over from different farms, trying them side by side, keeping really detailed cupping records…

There has been so much talk lately of Fair Trade coffee versus direct trade, and it’s interesting to me the ways that smaller roasters deal with and among these different models. What kind of changes have you seen in the process of buying green beans over the past few years?
There have been some radical changes in the industry in terms of all these different concepts and certification programs, and the way TransFair has made people aware of how that business of coffee is done. It’s opened different doors and really changed the ways that coffee can be bought and sold. That coupled with Vietnam’s flooding of the global coffee market, which pushed the world into oversupply, raised real awareness of programs that try to protect people in that situation. I think that’s made for a lot of outreach in origin—with the help of people who may act as importers and such—but that all gave birth to a new sort of bright idea, I think, that farms could actually work directly with roasters. I don’t mean to blow over a whole bunch of history there, but that’s basically my analysis of one very major thing that occurred that directly affected specialty coffee during the time that I’ve been doing this, and a number of different evolutionary steps coming out of that theme of farms getting directly connected. We did not have even an inkling, in my perspective, in the early days—I was just working to try to connect with coffees that were impeccably grown. Just following deer trails. [Laughs] It was like solving a mystery: Who’s got the most amazing coffee in Colombia this year that I can access as a tiny coffee roaster, and how do I negotiate getting a hold of it? It was really impossible, in a way, but it’s become more possible.

Do you deal most often with producers themselves?
A lot of the farms that I work with are so small that they have designated importers that they work with. They are a huge part of what makes it all possible, and it is the integrity of those relationships that then help us realize acquiring the coffees that we’ve fallen in love with. If a farm is big enough to work with directly, then we certainly will. If the coffee’s only available through an auction, then we’ll go down that path. What matters is, first and foremost, that we fall in love with a coffee. Then we do what we need to do to try to acquire it. It could take us down any number of paths, because we’re dealing with dozens of different countries that have totally different realities. A broker, for instance, might in one case be part of a traditional model. They have to do what they do and how things have historically been done; we do what we think is right in that context. It’s very hard to generalize. I wish I could say, “Sure, I buy absolutely every coffee from an individual at each of the origins that we work with.” It’s just not possible: There are other relationships that predate our connection to that coffee. But if we’re in love with it, we want to do anything we can to try to acquire it. We do pay homage to that relationship that may already exist and proceed along those lines.

And does that become difficult, negotiating all these different kinds of relationships?
It’s a tricky, tricky double-edged sword. We may work with a farm for a number of years and purchase their entire reserve crop for two years, and then all of a sudden, boom. They had a lousy year. And I know that the market that I have is not the market for that coffee. When quality and, in this case, a market or lack of a market are your guiding principles, then you are also trying to generate a market and you’re building all these relationships to support the sustainability and production of a quality coffee and the people who are producing that coffee. If you can’t complete the circle and actually put the coffee into somebody’s cup, then it’s not going to be a relationship that’s sustainable at all. In fact, it will immediately go back to ground zero. There are many different threads that sometimes exist between a farm and how a farm gets its coffee out of the country of origin—a broker or an importer—and those threads can actually act to protect the sustainability of that market by finding a market. Even with the highest-quality coffee—you might have 10,000 pounds of 98-point geisha, but can you sell 8,000 pounds of it? Is it going to sit on the shelf? Are you going to be able to go to that producer the next year and say, “Here I am,” or “Sorry”? Importers and brokers can be incredibly valuable in that respect. It’s not always the case that they need to be there, and by no means is it that way for us. But those are some of the positive sides of things that I see in importer relationships or broker relationships that a company of our size can do a great job of building and creating better coffee on the planet. It’s like, is coffee bought directly from a farm is any less fairly traded than TransFair certified coffee? These are huge discussions. The answer for us comes down to: Is the coffee extraordinary? Do we love it? If the answer’s yes, then let’s try to do it justice and maintain and support that relationship.

Does that become more difficult because of Barrington’s size?
It gets a little more complicated when you’re dealing with cooperatives and certified coffees. When you’re a smaller roaster, you can’t go to the co-op and say, “Can you ship me 60 bags this year?” I have to get together with other roasters and build a container of coffee, and then proceed in that fashion. That’s sort of also something that we’re starting to see change, that coffee doesn’t have to be transported from origin in a container.

You and Gregg have always had a strong focus on single-origin coffees. Where did that inspiration come from in the early ’90s?
Single-origin coffees are what brought me into coffee! It was exposure to two different entities: the Schapira brothers and George Howell. I became aware of single-origin coffees and that coffees are grown in different parts of the world and could potentially taste different based on where an how they’re grown in like ’78, maybe ’79. The Schapira brothers wrote sort of an epic book, one of the earliest books in the specialty coffee world. Those guys were roasting coffee for a shop near where I lived, and there was coffee from Djimmah in Ethiopia there for me to order a French press of in 1978, when I was 11. I was deeply into the world of French press, pressing coffee and preparing traditional Turkish coffee, which is something I still love to do. I was pretty young, but I was really into it. I thought it was really fascinating. Growing up in Worcester, I was near Boston, so I would go to the Coffee Connection, and I would taste George Howell’s stuff. At that time I was really intrigued by his treatment of Celebes Kalosi.

As a roaster, how has having a single-origin focus been different or challenging for you?
What’s interesting for me in offering single origin coffees is related to the subjective decision-making process that we superimpose onto, say, an origin, when I know that an origin is capable of so much more than some idealized “What is the most perfect Costa Rican cup?” kind of a program we seem to have as Barrington Coffee for our main menu single-origins list. For us to say, “This is our choice for the finest coffee produced in Costa Rica this year,” that superimposition of what an origin is supposed to taste like—it’s banal, in a way. It’s almost not fair to an origin and it’s almost not fair to the producers within the origin, but we have to start somewhere. It’s not dissimilar to the approach to how we roast our coffee. But that group of subjective reasoning is what makes Barrington Coffee Barrington Coffee. It’s what we think is extraordinary and what we think is the classic example of coffee from a specific region, and how we feel that coffee should be treated in the roaster. We try to be objective by keeping the realm of possibility open with every new year’s harvest and bringing in different coffees that have different profiles and doing limited runs of them. Not every Costa Rican coffee is going to have those subjective characteristics that we’ve said is classic Costa Rican. We could offer ten different coffees that are totally different from each other but are from the same origin, but I haven’t been able to build a market that way. We started at ground zero up here, with people looking at us with a sidewards glance when we would tell them what they were drinking was from a particular farm or a particular region. I think the wonderful world of exploration that exists with unblended coffees is still in its infancy stage.

What is one of the most surprising or unexpected things you’ve learned about coffee over the course of your career?
Wow, a philosophical question at the end! The deep introspective sociological question. [Laughs] The thing that perhaps makes it for me is a little bit more of an abstract kind of answer. But I would say that for me, one of the most surprising things is how much I continue to enjoy the dialogue with coffee. I’ve worked with coffee all of my adult life and much of my youth; that dialogue and the continuation of that dialogue is still very fulfilling and holds great promise and excitement and possibility. For me that’s probably the most surprising thing about coffee, that it has endeared me to it so deeply, as if it were a person. It’s a process. And I’m surprised that I’m still as deeply enamored of being a part of that process as I am today. That’s definitely not a pat answer! It’s a lifetime’s worth of work. It’s just what we do. And it’s why we continue to love what we do.