Skyler, barista at the Paradise Cafe

This is the first part in a series wherein our intrepid Press Pot walks into a random café and puts the working barista on the spot. Look out, friends—who knows when we will be in your city, in your shop!

Paradise Cafe is a New York coffeeshop of another, possibly simpler era (think Central Perk from Friends) nestled unassumingly among the weirdly high-end boutiques of Eighth Avenue in lower Chelsea, New York City. After the jump, today’s barista—North Carolina native Skyler—tells me a little about her life behind the bar (after having served me a small cup of Equal Exchange Colombian.)

How long have you been working in cafés?
I’ve been in coffee for six years, but I’ve been in this shop about four months. I actually live on the Upper West Side, though—I found this job through Craigslist. I only moved to New York in July!

How do you like living in the city?
I love New York. This is where I’ve wanted to live forever. It’s the center of the theater.

Do you study theater?
I study musical theater at AMDA, but I hope to go to the New School eventually. I’m a performer/director/et cetera. I work here on weekends because I’m a full-time student.

How did you get started working in coffee?
I got into it because it was the first job I found, actually. I was a 16-year-old driving around looking for a way to pay for gas.

How do you like working at the Paradise?
I love it here because it’s cute and out of the way. It’s so stereotypically “coffeeshop.” [Laughs] People walk by and want to come in because they see the bright yellow walls. It’s friendly and laid-back. The atmosphere is great, it’s chilled-out, it’s very congenial. People like to convene with you when you’re a barista.

What is your favorite coffee drink?
I’m a purist. I like regular coffee, half-and-half, a little bit of sugar.

What is your least-favorite coffee drink to make?
Americanos, actually. I think they’re kind of boring!

Amber Fox (photo by Tonx)

Sitting across a booth from barista, consultant and forward-thinking coffee professional Amber Fox in a Manhattan diner, I couldn’t help but regret that the tape recorder could pick up her “aboot”s as clear as day but not the twinkle in her eye. (That’s only one of many reasons I hate tape recorders.) Canada’s coffee scene must be mourning the loss of this recent New York transplant, but it sounds like if we’re not careful, Gotham might be doing the same before long.

After the jump, Amber talks about why she isn’t grumpy about working at Café Grumpy, the role of gender in producing nations, and how poor Grandpa just can’t seem to understand why his little Amber would want to work so hard, for what, just a cup of coffee?

So tell me a little about your life in coffee so far.
I started a little over four and half years ago. I was living in a city about an hour outside of Toronto, and there was a café that just opened; they were starting to do third-wave type coffee. I kept going in there, and I had a brewed coffee that blew me away. They had an espresso machine and they were pouring latte art, which is something I had never seen. I went in and had this cup of coffee and kept going back and bothering them, saying, “You know, when you hire someone I think you should hire me!” [Laughs] In the summer, just on a whim, I wrote up a cover letter and a résumé for them. It was a couple who owned it, Dawn and Phong Tran—but not the Phuong Tran who is in Washington! [Laughs] When I brought in the cover letter, Phong said, “Oh, we were just talking about you today because we’re going to hire!” I was their first employee. At the end of the summer, I moved to Toronto to transfer schools.

And already you knew you wanted to stay in coffee?
I knew I wanted to work in coffee because I became enamored with it—I started to fall down the black hole. [Laughs] I started walking around in Toronto trying espressos in different coffeeshops. There’s a huge Italian and Portuguese community in Toronto, and I would go into every Italian coffee bar and keep having these horrible espresso everywhere. Finally I just did a Google search—“latte art” Toronto—and I came up with Bull Dog Coffee. [Ed. note: Bull Dog Coffee is still the first item that comes up when you do this search.] That was where I really learned how to pour latte art, because it was really busy. It was intense, that was where I learned to be superfast, always thinking five steps ahead: doing dishes, cash, bussing, and making all the espresso, serving treats and things like that. Having a good time! It was great because it taught me how to perform a little bit, how to be onstage and enjoy it, because I’m a pretty shy person. It really brought me out of my shell. It was a lot of fun because I got to flirt with everybody and make friends… I was there for two years. [Pauses] I quit when I stopped drinking the coffee. I was really excited about coffee. I would be researching and bringing in coffees from different places and trying different espressos and the owner wasn’t really interested… I was working at three coffee bars at the time.

Wow, three?!?
Yeah, I squeezed it all in! [Laughs] I worked at Mercury Organic and Dark Horse Espresso, which is where I just left when I moved here [to New York]. I like that because it’s good for customers to see the same person at a bunch of different coffee bars because then they know it’s not competition, it’s not like different sports teams duking it out. It’s that we’re trying to raise the quality and the standard across the city and bring a different experience to the city that it’s never had. It’s interesting on a personal level to work in different bar situations, to keep learning.

You were an environmental-studies major. Is your passion for coffee rooted in that?
It seemed like a natural progression to go from environmental studies to the social justice and environmental aspects of coffee. I started writing lots of papers on shade-grown coffee, organic certifications, Fair Trade coffee, bird-friendly… I became interested in being more critical in the Fair Trade certification as it stands. I was also interested in international and community-development theory and practice, and gender studies has always been something that I’ve tilted toward. It all came together; coffee just makes sense. I’m so lucky that it wraps up all my interests. It seems like it’s the same story as most other people who get into coffee: “I started at a little bar…”

Yeah, but I think that’s kind of interesting in and of itself. I wonder how many other industries are like that, have that same kind of similar story.
Yeah, I don’t know—like wine or cheese?

I guess it’s different because it’s not like you often meet someone who’s really into cheese who started by “working in a little cheese shop.” There just aren’t that many of them around. I think it’s interesting that so many people view a barista job as kind of akin to working at McDonald’s—a counter job, right? But how many McDonald’s employees get, like, really into cheeseburgers?
Yeah! [Laughs] You can gain a deeper appreciation for coffee as a barista, but it’s true, you do hit a glass ceiling. It’s a little hard to move out of being a barista into something else, if you’re really interested.

I agree. I think that often the problem is that it can be so easy for a barista to become so singularly focused on the product they’re working with that they don’t get a chance to learn about other coffees, which can be stifling.
I was always interested in tasting other coffees. I like to be nonpartisan! I liked working at a bunch of different shops and maintaining a little bit of a perspective on things. For me what it was was starting to travel into the States, coming to trade shows and start going to a lot of different cities. I’ve traveled a lot in the last year and seen a lot of cafés and tasted a ton of coffees from different roasters. That has really opened my eyes. And the first time I came to New York and had espresso at a bunch of different bars, I was just blown away.

Have you been to the Pacific Northwest?
Yeah! I just spent a month and a half on the coast.

How have you found coffee to be different or similar at home, in the Toronto area, in Seattle and Portland, here…?
The first time I came to New York… the triple-ristretto phenomenon? [Laughs] I’m still a little… It depends on the coffee. But it’s sometimes… man. It’s just… gritty. It’s hard. It gives me heartburn. I don’t know, I’d love to go to Australia and taste their version of ristretto. But that was one major thing I noticed coming to New York. In Toronto, nobody was pulling triple ristretto. In Toronto, everything is doubles. We experimented with triple, but I just find it too heavy. The body and the syrupy texture take over. Not always, but with most.

[A waiter comes by and offers me more coffee. Yes, I was drinking diner coffee. “Sometimes you have to have a diner coffee,” Amber graciously offers. I decline the waiter’s offer.]

I’d love to go to Italy and taste those shots. I don’t think that coffee here is really roasted for that. I can never quite get that sweetness out of it.

What made you move to New York—the land of the triple ristretto?
I started coming down here when Liz [Clayton] moved here. I ended up being down here a lot to visit and meeting everybody here. The coffee community here is really stellar. There are so many awesome people, and there’s no ego, which is really nice. It just seemed like the community was really strong and everybody across different shops is hanging out with each other, supporting each other; there’s dialogue between shops. It was really dynamic. Different roasters come in and leave, accounts change all the time, lots of new shops opening. It was [Gimme! Coffee manager] Jenni Bryant, actually, one of the times I was visiting—we were hanging out and she goes, “You should move here.” And I was like, “You’re right. I should move here! What’s stopping me?” [Laughs]

How has it been so far?
It’s been a little… [Cautiously] I’ve only been here for three and a half weeks. I’m still adjusting to the city but… I’m… not in love with New York. I love the coffee scene here, but the city itself…

You’re going to hate this, but they say it takes five years.
[Pained expression] Yeah?

Yeah. When I first moved here I hated it more than anything in the world. And every time anybody said, “Just give it five years,” I got so mad. But it really was almost literally five years, I woke up one day and looked at the city and went, “Where have you been all my life?”
Ugh, really? I mean, I come here with a lot of friends already here, I know a lot of people, I walked into a fantastic job… I’m really happy at Grumpy. It’s great. And it’s been a really easy transition. [Café Grumpy barista] Phil said something to me one night when we were closing: “It’s like you’ve been here two years already.” Which is quite a compliment! [Laughs] It’s easy to integrate when you’ve worked at so many different shops.

No kidding! But you’re still not sold?
I… I don’t know how long I’m going to stay in New York, honestly. I don’t know how much I should be telling you! [Laughs] I think it’s just that after graduating and traveling on the West Coast before coming here… I’d never been to Portland, and the environmental geek in me was really interested in seeing it. Last minute before moving here, I bought a one-way ticket out there. I went and had so much fun with Ed [Kaufmann]. There was the Meet the Producers: Panama event, that was really interesting; there was a cupping at Stumptown; we drank a lot of coffee; I rode a scooter around Portland; had a lot of fun; drank a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon… I had a very American experience! [Laughs] Then I went to Seattle and did basically the same thing. I really fell in love with that city this time. It was so nice to be able to walk into shops anonymously and just have a coffee. Then I went up to Vancouver and judged the Canadian regionals. Then went over to Victoria, did some touristy things on the island. Then went back down to Seattle for a couple days, and then I went to San Francisco for Slow Food Nation. I am so glad I went. San Francisco is beautiful. I completely and utterly fell in love with that city. After a trip like that, falling in love with the West Coast so completely to coming to the East Coast, where it’s so the opposite… [Laughs] I definitely have the West Coast on my mind.

Well, at least stay here for the fall Barista Fling!
Oh, for sure! That’s the thing: People here are so down-to-earth, it’s so great. It’s how it should be. We’re not in it for it to be a personality cult; we’re in it to let the coffees speak for themselves. We’re only a conduit for the coffees. That’s what I loved about Slow Food Nation. I was a taste captain, so I just walked people through tasting three different coffees. It was fantastic: I didn’t talk about the roaster at all, it wasn’t important. We talked about who grew it—by name—the region, the terroir, and then the tasting notes of the coffee and how it was processed, and what that process did to the flavors in the cup. To be able to show that to people and explain it and see their eyes light up? Thousands of people a day? It was so nice to give the general public an experience they weren’t expecting. It was so nice to not have to say, “I’m from such-and-such café and here is my T-shirt and I am branded,” but to be able to convey that this is an artisanal product that comes from a producer not in this country, but from around the world. This is their lifeblood, this is their passion, this is what they do. We’re just representing that. I feel so much pressure as a barista to represent the coffees properly. It’s like “Oh my G-d, all the hard work that went into this for nine months, and then the processing, the shipping, the roasting…”

I know that you have an interest in the role of gender in coffee production, and I wonder if you’d talk a little about that.
I really, if I could write my dream job, that’s what it would be: working specifically with women in community development projects in coffee communities. I did a degree in environmental studies, which is a little different than environmental science in that it’s more of a social science, understanding why we think about the environment the way that we do and how to change the cultures that exist around the environment. So I became really fascinated with postcolonial theory and international issues and gender issues—which are, for me, embroiled in the way that I think about everything. So I was writing these papers, and I had an opportunity to write a thesis, and I started thinking about the things that I was interested in, and I sort of said, “Why doesn’t anybody talk about gender in coffee?”

That’s something of a huge question.
Well, that was the broad question. I started with that and began to realize that what we take for granted in terms of basic feminist questions about the division of labor haven’t really been asked in relation to commodities. I had heard about Café Femenino, which is a women’s coffee cooperative in Peru, and I narrowed my question down to “How do Fair Trade initiatives address gender issues in coffee communities?” Like the high incidence of domestic abuse due to poverty, and who is actually doing the labor on these farms. You kind of hear that women actually do the majority of the labor in coffee, but it’s not really reported. In this case, the cooperative is Fair Trade certified, so I wanted to take a specific look at how Fair Trade addresses gender issues, because that’s part of their mandate, part of what they do in their community development projects. It’s a difficult issue to address, I’m not knocking them for it. In general I think that’s why it’s not talked about, because it’s uncomfortable. It’s multifaceted. It’s not like you just put in a well and all of a sudden you have clean water. Now here we are in the present-day, and if roasters like Intelli and Counter Culture and Stumptown, the ones who are interested in paying for quality coffee but not necessarily going through Fair Trade conduits, how do roasters like that address community development issues, and then how do they address gender-community development for education, health care, anything like that? There’s a postcolonial, well, neocolonial flavor about what we’re doing. We’re starting to be a bit more self-reflective in this industry. And that’s great.

What do you see as an example of neocolonialism?
It’s this idea that you’re the one with the power, the white person with power, and you’re going in and “saving” the poor farmer. It’s the same thing as in the past. That’s lesson number one in international development right now is to empower the people there to do their own development, basically. It’s a very hands-off approach in a lot of ways. This is one of my criticisms of Fair Trade: Coffee is produced in a huge geographic area of the globe—you can’t apply the same price or the same certification requirements to such a large area. You can’t broadstroke something like that. You can’t even use the same parameters in one community in Mexico as you would in the one 100km away from it. It might not work. The social conditions are different, the capital that exists is different, the history is different. We should be very, very careful before we start applying these things to all of our coffee problems. We have a lot of momentum right now, and that big stone is rolling downhill, but it’s going to flatten us all if we’re not careful.

How do you feel about specifically marketing women-grown coffee as such?
It’s a double-edged sword, but I think it works… Well, that branding of it and the premium that’s charged for it is really such a small part of the project. What happens when you’re separating out the women, rather than them being criticized for being separatist feminist or that women’s labor is being recommodified by using that branding, because I don’t think it’s that at all… I know that what I saw is that it functions as a way to empower women in that machismo culture. What I saw was women that were actually being asked for the first time what their experiences are and what their opinions are and how things can change. For women to speak up in a group like that is unheard of, really. It’s astounding, the impact that it has.

Does your family “get” the coffee thing?
Eh, not really. [Laughs] My Grandpa is the one who’s still… you know. Every time I see him he says, “So. You’re going to work in coffee.” I have business cards for my consulting business, so I gave him one of those: “You know, it’s a real job!” It’s a hard thing to explain to people, because it’s weird! If you take a step back from it, it’s just coffee to the average person. I bought my mom a French press and I showed her how to use it, and then the next time I went to her house she said, “Can you show me how to use this again? I forget.” [Laughs]

What is one of the most unexpected or surprising things you’ve learned about coffee so far?
Oh dear. I feel like it should be something poetic! It’s hard to sometimes think back to the first year I was in coffee, when everything was like, “Oh! Oh wow! Oh my G-d!” And… well, I’m not sure if it’s the most unexpected thing, but meeting the people at the farms, knowing that this is what they do and this is what they love. When someone that actually grows the coffee gives you a cup, with that expectant look on their face. The experience around drinking coffee, the social aspect and enjoying a cup for what it is, we forget that. We forget to just enjoy the experience—not every coffee has to be an Esmeralda. You can enjoy a diner coffee for what it is. You can sit on the porch or enjoy a French press when you’re camping. Enjoy the coffee for who you’re with and the people who are growing it for you and serving it to you, not just so you can pick it apart or write cupping notes on it or, “Oh, we should have updosed this time” or whatever. Just enjoy drinking a cup of coffee. Stop being a hater, just enjoy it! [Laughs]

Barth Anderson and Gregg Charbonneau: Barrington Coffee Roasting Company

It was when he convinced college buddy Barth Anderson to go in on a roastery with him that Gregg Charbonneau started to see his future in coffee blossom twofold: with Barth the partnership behind Barrington Coffee Roasting Company, and as the captain of the ship at the Berkshire nook Lenox Coffee. Even now, after years of standing in front of a roaster or behind a commercial espresso machine at his café, Gregg is as wide-eyed about the whole thing as if he had just fired up that Diedrich for the first time: “I always think I sound like a dork,” he says. But don’t we all?

After the jump, Gregg talks about being a roaster who owns a coffeeshop, why roasting coffee sounded better than a career in art restoration, and the “Chicago chop.”

So, Barth told me a little about how you guys met and started Barrington, but I wanted to get the story of how you got into coffee, as well.
Well, I’ve been roasting coffee now for 20 years. I started in my last year in college, roasting for a small shop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I had always been interested in coffee, and Barth and I had always talked about coffee ever since we met at school. And then this opportunity sort of came up, and I thought that would be pretty cool to learn how to roast coffee. So I did that on nights and weekends while I was finishing school. Then I was doing an internship in art restoration, restoring works of art on paper, and I was preparing to go to grad school, but then there came a point when I realized that my career in art restoration was going to mean that I was pretty much going to be all by myself in a big laboratory 40 hours a week, and that might not be what I was really cut out to do. [Laughs] I started thinking about exploring the coffee thing further and in more detail, and I thought, Hey I’ll give this a try. I arranged to sort of buy-slash-barter for this little roaster that I had been working on and make it my own. Not too far after that I decided to open a shop as well, and it was at that point I was successful in talking Barth into being my partner so I could do both of these things, because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do both on my own.

What inspired you to open a coffee shop as well as exploring roasting?
At the time the roasting business started really small. It was just me at first, and then just Barth and myself. It was a very slow, organic growth, and I thought, We really need a coffeeshop here; there’s nothing great in the Northeast right now—that I could find after visiting New York and Boston and other places, anyway. So I found a location and thought I’d give it a go. I guess I really am a coffee roaster who owns a shop, and not so much a coffeeshop owner who roasts coffee, if you know what I mean. Over the years a lot of people have come to Barth and myself and said, “You guys should really open more shops because this is great and we really need this. New York really needs something like this, Boston really needs something like this—everybody needs this!” But we really knew that coffee roasting was our first love, and that we could do so much more out of that space without stretching ourselves really thin. I’m really glad that we did make that decision, because though it would be really satisfying to have shops all over the place, I feel like it was the right thing to concentrate on the roasting and let other people open the shops, and work on supplying them and really focus on great, great quality coffee and do it from that side.

Do you find, as a shop owner who also roasts the coffee that is used in his own coffeeshop, that you approach your wholesale coffee customers differently?
I guess I have a certain perspective that maybe a roaster who had no shop and retail experience or barista experience would be lacking. We do quite a bit of consulting with people who are opening shops, and in that respect that it is quite helpful, yes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time standing behind the counter and making espresso and texturizing milk and making lattes and washing the dishes—by hand, at first—so I hope I can steer our customers away from some of the mistakes that I might have made early on, or steer them toward most of the things that really worked.

Do you still have that first roaster that you guys bought?
Yes! We still use it almost every day. We roast our samples on it, and really small runs, things like J
Jamaican Blue Mountain and our new limited edition, the Esmeralda—all these great little coffees that we want to do extremely small quantities of. We’ve done some modifications to it and rebuilt certain parts over the years, but all in all it’s really hanging in there.

Am I remembering correctly that you guys have three roasters?
We do, we have the little one, which technically is a 12 kilo, although we don’t ever put that much coffee in it, we use it for much smaller things. And then we have a 30 kilo and a 60. It’s really great having three sizes because it allows us to tailor our batch size accordingly to what we need on a daily basis. Because we keep everything as the orders come in each day, that allows us to roast the big-batch coffees on the big machine and the medium ones on the medium one and the little ones on the little one. [Laughs] It means that we don’t end up sitting on a bunch of coffee that we don’t need that day. Keeps everything super, super fresh.

I am just starting to learn a little about the actual art of roasting, so I’m curious about how different roasters determine roast levels. Do you have any specific method or…?
We don’t use any quantitative or scientific method. We really do still do it by eye and by taste. The way we approach coffee is as an ever-changing organic identity. We’re constantly sampling and making adjustments. Coffee does lose some moisture over time, and it does change. Also depending on the day—is it hot, is it humid, is it dry, what’s the ambient temperature?—all these things affect the roasting and the roasting times, and we adjust accordingly. You know when you’re pulling shots and all of a sudden it gets really humid or someone turns on the air conditioning and your grind needs to be adjusted because things are speeding up or slowing down? It’s related, it’s the same in roasting.

About how long can you store a green coffee before it starts to fade?
In a lot of these countries they only have one harvest a year, so you’re kind of at the mercy of that cycle. Some are around the whole year, others might be aged for certain reasons, and then there are some coffees that really need to hang on to all of that moisture and acidity; we have been working to preserve those qualities a little longer.

I ask because it’s so interesting to me that now I feel like folks in the industry are talking about all these new and different storage and shipping methods, and sometimes it strikes me that, wow, all these hundreds of years after coffee was first discovered and we’re still sort of trying to figure it out.
Yeah, it’s true. It’s something that not a lot of people seem to have done much with over the years, and now a few people we know have been looking at it and seeing if we can do a better job of it, or, you know: How important is this?

Do you use your facilities at the roastery to train your wholesale customers, or do you sort of just let them fall out of the nest?
Some of the new customers and some of the existing customers have elected to come and do workshops, and we offer a few different things. It’s nice to have that relationship with people, and it’s always great when someone wants to learn and wants to learn it the way that you think they should do it. It’s wonderful. As you’ve probably seen, once coffee leaves your door it’s at the mercy of someone else, and they don’t always do the best thing with it. So when someone expresses an interest and when they’d really like to do it our way, we’re really happy to oblige. [Laughs]

How selective are you when you’re choosing wholesale customers?
We really try have a little bit of a relationship with somebody before we jump in. We can’t always do that because of distance and other things, but especially if it looks like they’re going to be a large customer, we really like to try to get to know them and have a relationship, because a lot of it is about the people. It’s about a certain connection and understanding and are we on the same plane and do we have similar goals for coffee…? People tend to stick with us for the long haul, and that’s really satisfying. We get to see them grow and they get to see us grow. We’re really surprised sometimes! [Laughs] Some of them have been with us since the beginning: We probably have a few who have been with us 15 years now!

Do you experiment with single-origin espressos?
Yes, absolutely. And when we do find one that lends itself to the espresso process, we’ll try to get it out there; we’ll release it as a limited edition and try to get the shop owners that we think might be inclined to put another grinder on the counter to come on board. I think there’s a lot to learn there, and I think it’s really inspiring when you find a good one. It’s just a matter of people having the space and the energy to devote to that, and having the customer base that would really appreciate it. I’m hoping that comes around and that there’ll be more of that in the future because that’s a lot of fun.

I want to ask you a bit about the baristas at Lenox Coffee and how you’ve developed techniques there over the years—specifically because it was the first coffeeshop where I saw baristas using the “Chicago chop,” and I wonder how you settle on certain techniques as a longtime shop owner.
Well, things have changed and we have changed those methods over the years, and it honestly depends on which grinder we’re using, too. It depends on the dosage and all that, but we’ve experimented with a lot of different methods. I’m not one that really says, “You have to do it this way or that way,” and I’m not super strict. It might be that in the moment we’ll train everyone to do something one way, but if we find another method that works just as well, I’m all about getting great results. It’s really about the quality of the coffee, it all comes down to that.

Well, it’s funny because when I saw a barista using the chop several years ago it was kind of a lightbulb moment, like, “Oh, I don’t necessarily have to be using this one method I read in a book a million years ago.” But then I was the only one using the technique and I felt kind of alien. [Laughs]
What did you discover that it did for your coffee?

It really improved the viscosity of my shots, and I found that especially when I am using a bottomless portafilter, it really eliminates that annoying spray from when you screw up or rush through a distribution. It also helps me manage my grounds waste incredibly, which was a major breakthrough.
Yeah! That is initially why we started doing it. I didn’t know that anyone else was necessarily doing it when we started. We’ve tried all sorts of different methods, I don’t know that everyone does that exactly that way up at Lenox, but I think I had a similar experience to you. We were looking for a way to quickly and evenly distribute the coffee. It really seemed to make sense at the time, and we basically stick with it.

Okay, the bombshell last question: What have you found to be one of the most interesting or unexpected things that you’ve learned about coffee?
Jeez! [Laughs] I guess one thing that surprises me is that it just keeps going and going, and I haven’t gotten bored with it. Things like, we can still find coffees that seem new and exciting, and we still do cuppings and go, “Wow, this is amazing! Check this out!” It’s incredible. You’d think after 20 years there wouldn’t be a lot of that, but there are coffees that come down the line that continue to feel fresh and exciting and new. Something that has also been a huge eye-opener is what a huge part coffee plays in the world. It’s everywhere; it’s ubiquitous; it’s a commodity; it’s a beverage; it’s a drug; it’s food. It means different things to different people. Some people go down to the gas station and drink coffee out of a styrofoam cup, and then there are people who approach it somewhat akin to tea ceremony and do really beautiful things with it. It’s amazing to realize the huge impact that coffee has on humanity around the world. I mean, it’s an amazing thing! One thing that is interesting there’s such a strong parallel between the way that we look at and approach coffee and historically the way we look at things like wine and food. Everyone that works here is very, very into tasting things. It’s nice to have this job that turns on the lightbulb on your taste buds and enables you to bring these parallel experiences. You tell people you’ve got this Ethiopian longberry Harar, and that it’s got this pretty undeniable blueberry flavor and aroma, and they kind of look at you like you’re crazy. And then they taste it and their eyes light up. That is just so much fun.

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.

Andy Schom… er, Andy Schecter

Andy Schecter is a familiar face—and a familiar avatar—on home-barista forums like CoffeeGeek and alt.coffee, and he regularly contributes (as much as anybody “regularly” contributes) to Portafilter.net. A kind, funny man with an easy laugh, Andy generously agreed to be among the first people to meet the new Press Pot: “I hear I’m right after Andrea Illy and just before the Pope.”

After the jump, Andy discusses how he discovered a love of coffee by not wanting to be killed in a Moka pot accident, what his ideal home-café setup is, and why crema is not gross.

Am I remembering correctly that you live in New York state?
Rochester, yes; I am in the great north wasteland.

Are you from around there?
Actually I grew up in New York City—in Queens, if that’s still considered the city. I left when I went to college, but I still have a lot of relatives in the city. I come down a few times a year to visit them, and when I do I try to sneak off and visit coffeeshops. For a while it wasn’t that hard keeping track, but now there are so many so-called third-wave coffeeshops that I am way, way behind, and I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up at this rate. They’re sprouting up like weeds.

What is it you do, Andy?
I am co-owner of a business called Northern Soy, and we make tofu. Our brand is SoyBoy.

Wow, how long have you been in the soy business?
Thirty years.

What got you interested in working with soy?
It’s something that I feel strongly about, and something I’ve been doing all these years. It’s very much a challenge still—a big challenge—but it’s been very good to me. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1971, and when you’re a vegetarian, tofu just naturally becomes one of the staples of your diet. So that’s how I started.

That’s interesting to me because I feel like soy is still kind of mysterious in a way—relatively little is known about it and new studies are constantly coming out. Kind of like coffee, in that regard.
Maybe. The general public’s perception is probably a lot different than the perception of the people who have studied it and are involved in it.

Well what got you interested in coffee?
I was never really much of a coffee drinker, but about eight years ago my girlfriend really liked coffee. She had one of those little Moka pot things, and we messed around with it occasionally. I was always afraid it would explode and kills us both! The release valve would clog, or something like that. [Laughs] So we tried to make espresso that way, and sometimes we’d to go to Starbucks and we would get one of those milky things—it seemed like a treat. For some reason, we decided to get our own espresso machine. So we went to a local place that did a lot of kitchen supply stuff, and we bought a $200 Krupps espresso machine. [Laughs] It was a total disaster. It was just a joke! It wouldn’t work—and it couldn’t work, because we were using preground coffee in it, and nobody told us that wasn’t going to work. So we went back to the shop where we had gotten it, and the owner was very anxious to help out, but he had no clue either because he wasn’t an espresso person. I called Krupps’s customer service, and they were absolutely no help. I was familiar with Usenet, and I searched and I found alt.coffee. I started posting, and very quickly I realized that this Krupps machine with preground coffee was a losing combination. I returned the Krupps, thank you very much, and I went out and bought a Rocky grinder and a Rancilio Silvia the next week. That’s how it started, and I got really fascinated with the whole process. That was all in late 2000.

You’re a regular on the big forums and message boards, and of course your David Schomer–inspired avatar is pretty recognizable. Do you know David at all?
I’ve met him twice, actually. I met him in Seattle both times. I met him at Vivace once, I was introduced to him there. And then I saw him at his booth at the Seattle SCAA show.

Did you get an impression of what he was like?
I don’t know what he’s like because I haven’t socialized with him, but I think he’s a pretty driven guy and I think he’s worked very hard on a lot of different skills. Obviously we know he’s worked hard on his coffee, and I think he’s worked very hard on his business skills to make his cafés as successful as they are. I suspect from things I’ve heard that he’s worked very hard on his personal skills. Like for many of us, myself included, a lot of the dealing with the public stuff didn’t come naturally to him. So he had to work at that. I have a lot of respect for David for all those things—and, of course, for the bolo ties.

Do you think that Professional Techniques is still one of the most relevant texts we have?
Well, there aren’t very many other texts. In many ways it’s very dated, his book. I think there’s a lot of good information in there, and I suspect that there’s a lot of misinformation in there—stuff that David thought was important, and over the years some of the information in that book has been superceded. Aside from that book, there’s Scott Rao’s book—and of course, I really like that book, having had some input in it. [Laughs] I think it’s an excellent book. And there’s Illy’s scientific almost-textbook. I don’t know, what else is there in book form about the technique of making espresso coffee? Aside from Scott.

Handbook was really in-depth in a way that I don’t think I was expecting.
[Laughs] Scott’s a pretty deep guy. I first met Scott in Atlanta and I didn’t know who he was—somehow we met at one of those after-party kind of things—and he had some just really interesting ideas and he had a lot of experience. We really hit it off. It’s always interesting and a pleasure for me to talk to Scott about coffee kinds of stuff.

A lot of that book is pretty scientific. Do you think that making great espresso is more of an art or more of a science, or a little bit of both?
I think you need both, or the espresso’s really going to suck. I think… I don’t know if you took any science courses in college, but you probably had some coffee out of a Mr. Coffee machine in some science lab and it was probably pretty bad. And I think I remember taking a drawing class in the art department and there was some pretty bad coffee there, too! [Laughs] I think you need both, I mean, I’m sure you need both: You need to have the artistic temperament to experiment with what is aesthetically pleasing to your palate, right? And you need to have imagination to get there. But at the same time, if you don’t understand some of the basic principles of how changing parameters—volumes and proportions and things like that—affect your coffee, I think you’re at a huge disadvantage and you’ll miss out and struggle unnecessarily. If you think of the Illys, they’re obviously very scientific in their approach, but they also have a heavy emphasis on the art of what they’re doing, and it seems like that’s what it takes. Especially with espresso. Espresso couldn’t have been created without the work of hundreds of engineers and scientists just to get the technology to the point that the beverage was even possible. Much more so than brewed coffee, espresso is a product of technology. To have espresso without technology is an impossibility. That’s the wimpy answer: You need both. It’s both! It’s Obama and McCain! [Laughs]

Speaking of espresso, a colleague of mine has said recently that she has a theory: “Crema is disgusting.” I wanted to hear what you think of that theory. How do you feel about crema?
“How do you feel about crema!” [Laughs] God, that’s so weird. How do I feel about crema? I feel great about crema! There are so many ways to answer that question. I mean, some people would say sex is disgusting! You know, crema is part of what makes espresso espresso. It helps deliver some of the fragrance to your nasal passages, and so much of what we know of as flavor is delivered through our sense of smell. Espresso without crema is not really espresso. I am baffled as to exactly what is disgusting about it.

Well, I think she’s exaggerating to prove a point, that crema is overpowering and strong, and can be quite different from the rest of the drink’s body, that maybe it detracts from what would otherwise be a more balanced taste experience. I mean, there are people who refuse to so much as jostle their cup, let alone stir a shot, but it’s true that that first crema-full sip can be quite pungent.
I started stirring my espresso sometime last year because there was a post by Pete Licata where he talked about blending it all together. I always stir now. I find that it does bring more of a balance. But I know some people like to do one layer at a time, they like the taste to evolve in that way. Mostly I like to stir it up and get the total taste, “What is this espresso like?”

Speaking of making espresso—stirred or not—what would your ideal home-café setup be like, if money, space, time, and practicality weren’t a consideration?
Not that different from what I have, actually. I still have that original Silvia; it’s been highly, highly modified, so it doesn’t make coffee anything like the original Silvia did. It’s extremely accurate temperature-wise. I believe it’s as accurate as any commercial machine out there. I’d like to be able to start out in a higher temperature and then ramp down to a lower one. Also, I think I’ve made one cappuccino in the past year because it’s such a pain to steam. My ideal espresso machine would also look better than mine does, because it’s just a little Silvia with wires and cables going all over the kitchen counter. I look at it every morning so I don’t even see all that crap, but most people who see it for the first time are kind of horrified. I’ve posted pictures of it on the Web, and quite a few people have thanked me for posting them because they have a story like, “I told my wife I wanted to spend $1,500 on an espresso machine and she said no way, and then I showed her the picture of your counter and my wife said spend the money so our counter doesn’t look like that.” [Laughs] Some people ask me when I’m going to get a real espresso machine, and I don’t think I ever will. I might break down and get one, but I enjoy the control and fiddling that I can do with my machine so much. Just about any machine out there is so full of compromises that it doesn’t seem worth it. There’s not many people as into the espresso thing as I am who bought a Silvia eight years ago and still use it every day.

Aside from what you’ve made at home, what was the single most incredible or unforgettable coffee you’ve ever had?
The single best brewed coffee I’ve ever had was pretty unexpected. I attended SCAA in Atlanta, and at the very end Don Schoenholt took amateur alt.coffee people around to introduce us. We went to the booth for coffees from Guatemala, where had a bunch of various regional coffees in air pots, and who knows how long ago they had been brewed. So a bunch of us took a few moments and we tried a sip of the coffees in their air pots—they must have had six or eight Guatemalan regions represented. I popped a couple squirts of a Cobán into a paper cup and I took a sip—it literally blew my mind. It was so intensely fruity, it was like a riot of fruit on my tongue. I was used to the intensity of espresso, and a lot of brewed coffee seems very subtle and a little bit obtuse to me, but this was every bit as intense as espresso. There was so much going on in that cup that I was flabbergasted. And I’ve had some Cobán since then and it hasn’t been in that league. And to think that this was just sitting around in an air pot and I drank it in a paper cup, it blew my mind.

And espresso?
The best espresso I’ve ever had was one I actually wrote about it on Portafilter about a year ago. I went into Gimme! Brooklyn and there was a barista there named Peter. I asked for a straight espresso. He worked it and worked it and threw out a couple of shots because they weren’t good enough. He pulled me this tiny little ristretto that was just amazing. It had incredible body, eat-it-with-a-spoon kind of body. It was really smoky, and it had this spicy kind of tang to it. It was just amazing. I don’t pull that style at home—20 grams in a triple basket, very restricted—and he just nailed it. It was just spectacular. I’ve never had anything quite as remarkable before or since then.