COFFEE TABLE: SOURCING/ROASTING
Finding and roasting
the best coffee
Coffeehouse owners talk about issues in sourcing
coffee���and why it���s better, once you find it,
to roast it yourself.
S
pecialty Coffee Retailer recruited three coffeehouse owners
from across the country to contribute to our latest Coffee
Table, a telephonic ���roundtable��� discussion of issues in coffee
retailing. The subject for this Coffee Table is issues in sourcing,
selling and properly roasting coffee.
Here are the players:
JACK GROOT (MODERATOR): Jack, a longtime
columnist for Specialty Coffee Retailer, is owner of JP���s
Coffee in Holland, Mich. and a barista school operator
and consultant.
JEFF LARAMIE: CEO of Beans & Brews, a 25-outlet chain
in Utah.
ANGIE BARBER: Co-owner with her husband of Cabin
Coffee, a seven-outlet chain in eastern Iowa.
JEREMY MOORE: Owner of Bonlife Coffee, with two
outlets in Cleveland, Tenn.
This is an edited transcript.
GROOT: The discussion today is on the relationship with
roasters, but seeing that you are all roasters, really the focus
then becomes one of relationships with yourselves, or maybe
even better put: As people who are both roasting and retailing
coffee, how do we address the issues we are going to speak
about?
So the first question is, how do you source a new type of
coffee and what do you look for in that coffee? Why don���t we
go ahead and start with Angie.
BARBER: A lot of times if we���re looking at a new coffee, it���s
because maybe we���ve had a question from a customer, so
somebody���s been interested in that. Or for instance, we were
using Kauai coffee and weren���t able to get that for a long time,
so we did try a Maui, and that sort of thing. So sometimes
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maybe it���s something to replace something that hasn���t been
available. A lot of times it���s been a request from a customer.
MOORE: How do we source a new coffee? Typically, ours is
from the ground up. We take the coffee-growing community,
look at all the countries that are growing coffee. We try to
work primarily in countries with an extremely low GDP
[gross domestic product]. Our focus really is on changing
the communities from the inside out, at origin. So first we���re
looking at where do we want to business, and then we go to
those places. So right now, Haiti is a hotspot for us. We���ve got
some great coffees from there; we���ve found that the market is
very receptive to it on the U.S. end.
GROOT: If I can expound on that real quickly, how does
trying to reach a community at source���does that conflict
with serving your customer base here?
���There are certain things that
you���re going to kind of cap out
on, [because] the customer isn���t
going to pay
more for that.���
���Angie Barber
(with husband Brad)
