Moscow Cafe Crawl

This is the second installment of my interview with Brendan from Bucer’s Coffeehouse Pub. He talks about coffee varieties and flavors and also how he got started roasting. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of their new roaster from the shop. It was built in Turkey. Brendan informed me that even though the new roaster is comparable to a Hyundai (with a Probat roaster being a BMW and a Diedrich roaster being a Ferrari), that he has adjusted it and worked with it enough to get very nice results. This is a topic I want to explore more in the future. Continue reading for the interview…

Matt: Now, you’ve been working on the roasting for 4 or 5 months, something like that?

Brendan: Since May. It was May or June when I got the big roaster going. I’ve been roasting as a hobby for a year and a half at home.

M: What did you use at home for roasting?

B: I popcorn popper. A Poppery II for all those independent coffee roasters out there.

M: So you didn’t use the chicken rotisseri to start?

B: No. Then there’s the Whirly Pop which also works for some people. The West Bend is the least flavor intensive.

M: So did you do it outside in a shed or did you stink up the house?

B: Stink up the house!

M: What did you wife think of that?

B: She likes the smell. And the thing still makes popcorn. The popcorn doesn’t taste like coffee either. It’s a multi-use instrument.

…

B: Going back to coffee roasting. Every coffee roaster I’ve talked to says, “You know, I learned something really interesting today” or “I learned two new things the other day while I was roasting my espresso.” and so on and so forth. Coffee roasters, no matter how long they’ve been doing it are constantly learning new things. Coffee is as wide and varied and diverse and complex as wine. If you think of a wine spectator and all the words that they have, words like luscious berries and so on. I’ve heard almost every word used by a wine spectator used to describe coffee. Oaky finish, etc. The only word I haven’t seen used is tannins.

M: You know, sometimes I hear them say that certain wine tastes like coffee.

B: Yeah, and sometimes coffee is winey, like a good Kenyan coffee. Winey, grapey.

M: You were telling me earlier one of the batches of Ethiopian you had here was really light and tasted almost like tea.

B: Yeah, the Ethiopian I have out there now, I feel that if you chilled it and drank it black with maybe just a little honey, it has a enough acidity and citrus in the back of it that it would come across almost as iced tea. But the Kenyan coffee, if I roast it really light, it is like a thin, tart iced tea. It’s suprising. When you think coffee you think dark, smoky flavors, but I have had coffee, I’ve roasted coffee that is neither. Not dark, not smoky, not chocolaty, but fruity, citrusy, and floral. Nothing else in there. It’s like, “This doesn’t taste like coffee at all!”

M: I’ve always liked the Tanzanian Peaberry a lot. Especially the stuff you had in here a couple years ago.

B: It’s very seasonal. I’ll try to get some of that in here in April, I think that is when it will come in season again. They have two harvests every year. It goes really fast from all the suppliers.

M: Have you ever had any of that really expensive, like 100% Kona stuff?

B: Next time I go to Portland, Stumptown has coffee’s like their Panama Cup of Excellence that sell for $56 a pound. If I go down there with 20 bucks in my pocket, tell them who I am, and that I would like to taste this coffee, they have a cupping room at one of their storefronts where they have public cuppings. So, I will taste that stuff one day. As far as having it in here…Moscow just doesn’t have demand for that sort of thing.

This photo is of Stumptown’s cupping (tasting) room.

Photo credit

Filed under: Bucer's Coffeehouse Pub, Lore, Roasting on February 27th, 2008