Blue Bottle Coffee Company: Opening Night in Williamsburg

Stumptown Coffee Roasters: Red Hook

Roasted coffee beans don’t live long. One day of a bean’s post-roast life works out to about 7.5 human years. Oxygen takes over; carbon dioxide dissipates. By day fourteen or before, the bean flatlines. There’s what Blue Bottle owner James Freeman calls “a magic day for all coffees” between days three and six after which a kind of coffee bean dementia sets in. It becomes temperamental to work with and tastes flat, which is why the opening of Blue Bottle and Stumptown roasting spaces in Brooklyn is good news for New York coffee drinkers.

Freeman, who started Blue Bottle in San Francisco, joined Portland-roaster Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee in crossing the country to open roasting facilities and cafes in New York. On March 10^th, Freeman opened a roasting space in Williamsburg. There coffee drinkers can sip away at a wood counter while the coffee roasting spectacle unfolds like performance art a few feet away. Stumptown began its roasting operation in Red Hook last summer to serve not only its NY-based wholesale accounts but its own cafe in the Ace Hotel.

The eastward migration of West-coast roasters isn’t just a coup for NY coffee hounds who’ve been relegated to Joe’s and Grumpy’s for museum-grade cappuccino hearts and latte leaves. The move means happier beans, a lighter carbon footprint, and reprieve from the logistical nightmare of cross-country shipping.

After being roasted, coffee beans start out-gassing carbon dioxide in force, and according to Freeman, there’s a lot of flavor information in those gases. “Coffee is fragile,” he said. “We like it up to a week or so after it’s been roasted. You can clue in to what it’s doing.”

For Sorenson, the coffee is best to work with and has the freshest profile between day three and day eight. “We’ve always encouraged everyone to be able to roast our coffee within ten days. Fourteen max. If that time gets in the way, we recommend a closer roaster to purchase from.”

Local roasting also has environmental pluses. Not only can roasters avoid a fuel-guzzling avian shipment of coffee beans, packaging doesn’t have to be oxygen full proof. Blue Bottles coffee bags are compostable and don’t need plastic de-gassing valves.

Supplying roasted coffee to cafes and restaurants also presents logistical hurdles. Restaurants, in particular, can’t always predict how much coffee they will go through from week to week. Guests favor decaf over regular for a three day stretch. Training a new barista requires an extra five pounds of coffee. A ten-pound coffee rips in transit. I was a manager at Gramercy Tavern when it switched to Blue Bottle, and in the first weeks of the transition, I could dial the office number with eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Blue Bottle fielded constant calls for tracking numbers and assurances that reinforcements were coming, but when the roaster is ten states away, there are no quick fixes for running out of coffee.

Local roasting takes the focus off tracking numbers and one-way degassing valves. Life, especially the coffee bean’s, is just too short for all that.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 12:28 am and is filed under Coffee, Molly's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.