Coffee Chronicles: Café Grumpy, From Green Beans to Coffee

Posted by Liz Clayton, August 25, 2010 at 8:00 AM

Editor's note: Please welcome SE:NY's spankin' new coffee columnist, Liz Clayton, who will be stopping by with a weekly look into the New York caffeine world. She blogs about coffee culture at Twitchy.org.

[Photos: Liz Clayton]

Okay. With the exception of tortilla factories, there is not, traditionally, a lot of romance associated with consuming your food in the same place in which it was produced. Goats get ornery, distilleries smell like the devil, and offal fetish culture or no, we're still a ways away from picnic tables outside all our sausage factories.

Coffee roasteries, however, are a whole 'nother story, and as the city's local roasteries multiply like we're friggin' Portland or something, our ability to be connected with the coffee process is in full bloom.

Though we won't ever be able to grow coffee in New York City, what we can do is trace its progress to our cup once it arrives. The nice folk at Café Grumpy let me look over their shoulders for the full journey of their latest coffee—the Paso Ancho from Carmen Estate farm, Panama—from delivery to them, to delivery to you.

The Auction

Paso Ancho is the first coffee the nearly one-year-old roastery has bought at online auction, a process more hands-on than the common method of buying coffee from importers. This particular coffee was won in the 2010 "Best of Panama" auction, a realtime online bidding war for twenty of the most acclaimed coffees of this year's Panamanian harvest—these coffees generally available only in very small lots, maybe a few hundred pounds. The beans themselves were previewed not only by Café Grumpy, who ordered samples of green that they roasted and tasted in order to determine what they might bid on, but by respected industry cuppers from around the world.

These cuppers' tasting notes offer a context and a set of guidelines to potential purchasers, who may already know whose internationally famous palates they align with, or don't. "It's a good exercise in tasting, and to see how people's opinions are so different in coffee," says Caroline Bell, Grumpy's co-owner. "From the #1s to number whatever, the people who are respected in coffee, their opinions are so different from each other—you have to decide what you like personally or what's best for your business, what your customers might like better, what's best for the menu."

"For us, just being so new as a roaster," Café Grumpy's green coffee buyer, Colleen Duhamel, explains of the auction process, "this is an awesome way to try coffees that we wouldn't necessarily have access to otherwise. Because lots are small, and have already reached a certain level of quality, they're all going to be specialty grade coffees and buying nine boxes for a small volume cafe like us makes a lot of sense," says Duhamel about Grumpy's constantly rotating selection of seasonal coffees.

The other buying philosophy is sort of keeping the same menu with the same profile all year long—which is totally valid, it's just a different approach. Like buying one Brazilian coffee, enough for a whole year, and having that coffee offered for the whole year, and allowing people to taste it through the age of the coffee. That's kind of interesting, but just not where we're going.

And so bid they did, winning Lot #16 at the reasonably steep price of $5.20/lb. Grumpy's first auction lot! Now all they had to do was get it from Panama to Greenpoint.

The Journey

"Because the auction for Best of Panama happens a little later in the season, a lot of the coffees that are coming to the States had already left Panama, so we had to find space on a container ship," said Duhamel. Working with other importers, Grumpy found room, and on a sunny day last week, up rolled the delivery truck.

"The coffee comes in vacuum sealed boxes, the value of which is there's no air interaction between it being packaged in Panama and it arriving here. So in a container, the coffee in a normal jute sack would have air coming in and air movement throughout the whole bag, and as the coffee is losing moisture, it's picking up the taste of whatever's around it, primarily the jute sack. Or if it was shipped in a container with bananas, you could get a coffee that arrives and tastes completely different from the profile that you had agreed upon previously," explained Duhamel in between hefting 50 lb boxes of coffee into the cafe with her co-workers.

Tasting and Testing

Once it's unpacked, Duhamel begins the process of sample roasting, roasting very small (100 gram) batches of coffee across widely varying heat and time specifications—in order to get a range of development out of the green bean.

Grumpy sample roasts on a custom-built machine that allows them to control airflow and temperature in order to precisely manipulate even this tiny roast batch, which gives them a better picture of what a roast on their full-sized vintage Probat roaster would produce.

After the first sample roasts rest overnight, they're cupped, or tasted, by Duhamel and Grumpy's two roasters, Cheryl Kingan and Liam Singer, who will decide which profile fits the coffee best. They will then roast full batches on the big roaster over the next few days, cupping each time to align the flavor profiles as they go.

Now that the coffee's been handed off to the roasters, it's time to make it perfect.

Ready, Set, Roast

"When we get a new coffee, Colleen will do three or four experiemental roasts on the sample roaster, just to see how it responds to various development, how quickly the acidity vanishes and that sort of thing," said Singer. "So we cupped those, and based on that we found the acidity is pretty fragile in this coffee and that needs to be the centerpiece of it. So it's a pretty gentle roast."

"Gentle" in this coffee's case means a lower application of heat after the beans reach "first crack" (exactly what it sounds like, a cracking noise made in each bean as it loses moisture and expands from heating), and a shorter than usual wait before Singer drops the roasted beans into the cooling chamber to complete the roast. The fragile acidity Singer likes so much in cupping he likens to a crisp white wine, "definitely lighter bodied, but incredibly pleasant and effervescent."

Once the full production roasts are completed, the coffee wants a day or two to rest, releasing gasses and allowing flavors to fully develop. After that, though, it's time to drink away while the coffee is still fresh!

And How's The Coffee?

And how's the coffee? Chocolatey and delicate, floral and beguiling—or in the Grumpy team's words, "red raspberry aroma with flavors like lime, ripe bing cherry and bittersweet chocolate". It's delicious, but would they buy it again?

"I think the coffee auction system is pretty rad; it opens a lot of doors to roasters that you wouldn't necessarily have access to without years of experience and tons of connections," says Duhamel, "but I also think that at some point companies should walk away from the auction system and build their own relationships that maybe stem from the auction. Ideally, just work with farms that they have visited and have bought from in years past. I think the auction system is a good discovery phase, if that makes sense."

And as for discovery, you can watch your coffee roasted in the back of Café Grumpy nearly every day—and it's a heck of a lot more aromatic than watching someone make law or sausage.

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Tags: Cafe Grumpy, coffee, roasting