VOL. 36 | NO. 1 | Friday, January 6, 2012
That perfect cup of coffee
By Hollie Deese
Beer brought Lesa and Brad Wood together. It was love at first sight when the pair met at a home brewer’s class and they were married two months later. But after 15 years of marriage and two children, their tastes and interests have shifted.
“We did home brewing when we first got married but it just takes more space than you can do with two kids,” Lesa explains.
Lesa, who had been a nurse at Vanderbilt before deciding to stay home after the adoption of their second child in 2006, had a hard time adjusting to the lifestyle. She needed something else to do.
“I was a little bit stir crazy, and we had always talked about doing something in the food industry,” she says. A neighbor was roasting his own coffee at home with a small iRoast, and Brad thought it would be a great hobby.
“We would roast coffee on Saturday morning and have coffee for the week, drink it ourselves and thought it was brilliant,” she adds. “We would make Christmas presents and gifts for Sunday school teachers, ballet teachers, ministers.”
After much urging from friends to sell their roasts, they decided to sign up for Christmas Village at the fairgrounds just to see what happened. A success, they built up a small home-delivery business through word of mouth. And then it kept getting bigger and bigger, especially once they set up shop at area farmers markets.
“Eventually it got too much for my husband to do with his fulltime job, to roast on Saturday and deliver,” Lesa says.
They had gotten to the point of roasting about 50 pounds a week, one pound at a time, on their tiny roaster. Each pound takes about 12 minutes to roast and the same time to cool. So Lesa took over the roasting, doing the week’s orders on Fridays. Soon enough they needed to grow again and ended up renting a space near their home in Crieve Hall to accommodate a larger roaster.
The business, Roast, Inc., includes a tasting lab and serves coffee only
6:30 a.m.-3 p.m Monday-Friday and 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Satturdays. And you won’t find a carafe of previously-brewed coffee or bottles of syrups anywhere. They tout themselves as the only single-cup brewer in Nashville.
“Every cup is made for you,” she says. “You can tailor it to what you like.” That means choosing from among five different brew methods and six types of beans, all of which are carefully selected for their unique flavor characteristics. The Woods participate in several buying programs that pay FairTrade minimum, and sometimes as much as 100 percent over FairTrade. Even their milk is local, fresh from Hatcher Family Dairy in Franklin.
The Woods are members of a growing community of local roasters that has cropped up in the last decade, with most neighborhoods having a local roaster option nearby. The first and biggest is Bob Bernstein of Fido and Bongo Java, who opened his first spot in Hillsboro Village in 1993 and roasting his own in 1996, both before Starbucks came to town later that decade.
“The closest thing was Davis Kidd’s little café, and that wasn’t much of a true coffee house,” Bernstein says. “Now it is very different. There are a lot of local shops and every neighborhood has a place and it is great. When Starbucks came around in’97, they opened a bunch of stores, but it didn’t kill the market for local, independent stores either. We seem to be able to coexist.”
Bernstein has seen steady growth since those early days, moving the roasting operation from the original spot, now Fido in Hillsboro Village, to Bongo Java in East Nashville in 2000. He won’t give out exact number but says they started off roasting a few hundred pounds a week to several times that today. In 2012, he will be moving again to another warehouse, probably one he has owned in the Gulch for five years, in order to help facilitate his online sales growth.
“While we want to expand virtually and grow our online coffee sales to individuals across the country, we are still a small company,” Bernstein says. “I never plan on opening outside of Nashville. We are small, local, independent.”
Drew Park, owner of the 5-year-old Drew’s Brews, got his start working as the master roaster for Bernstein when he moved operations to Bongo in East Nashville.
“When they opened there, I was spending more money at the coffee shop than I was making, so I got a part-time job there, and one thing led to another,” he says. “At the time there was hardly anybody in the city doing it and now it is pretty popular.”
Park still works with the same bean broker he worked with while at Bongo, and over the past 11 years they know each other’s palette. This is important because Park depends on his broker to do the traveling so he can remain committed to roasting, bagging and hand-labeling the packaging of every single bean himself. And he has no plans of getting too big where that model can’t continue.
“I am definitely not in it to take over the world,” he says. “I like my downtime. I like to relax.”
Local restaurants have certainly fueled the need for local roasters, as more and more patrons pay attention to where their food comes from. Watermark carries Roast, Vanderbilt, Whole Foods and Bread and Co., carry Bongo Java, and frothy Monkey carries Drew’s Brews and Roast MST, another local operation that roasts an average of 1,100 pounds a week.
“When Frothy Monkey opened its doors in 2004, they served Lavazza Espresso from Italy and drip coffee roasted by Coffee Roasters of New Orleans,” Ryan Pruitt says. “When I took over operations in 2007, I wanted to switch to local Nashville roasters. You always know when the coffee was roasted and how the beans were handled before they hit your store. It also makes me feel a little better about coffee prices being higher than they ever have when I hand the check to another Nashville business.”
Even with all of the local options, some people still prefer to roast their own, some for the process and some for the price.
“I try to stay up on who is roasting locally, so the appeal to roasting my own is an easy sell because it is cheaper,” says home roaster Patrick Lafferty. “But it also takes it to the next level.”
Lafferty has cut his coffee costs in half, from $20 a pound to $10, just by roasting his own.
“Once you understand the basics of how the roast is done, it is very simple and relatively inexpensive. If people absolutely love coffee, they should jump in and do it.”