Ten years ago Mike Ebert was hired as a carpenter. Since then, he has spent most of his time sitting around drinking coffee. And his bosses couldn’t be happier.
That’s because after a very short stint as a carpenter for gourmet coffee retailer Gloria Jean’s Coffee Bean, his former employer, he was promoted to coffee warehouse manager. That led to other responsibilities: chief roaster, operations manager, flavoring and packing wizard for the firm, before its sale to a Florida company in 1995.
Now chief operations manager for Coffee Masters Inc., a privately owned Barrington gourmet coffee supplier, Ebert has maintained his reputation as one of the most influential decision makers in the gourmet coffee industry, industry experts say.
Among his many contributions to the gourmet coffee industry are being the driving force behind flavored coffees, which are the most popular gourmet coffee type nationally, and developing six types of espresso.
“At conventions, Mike is the one who people seek out for his opinion on new coffee flavors and other new products,” said Guy Wood, a former Gloria Jean’s executive.
“He has been at the forefront of the flavored coffee trend,” said Ted Lingle, executive director of the California-based Specialty Coffee Association of America. “It has been a very successful way of attracting new and younger drinkers and of having confirmed coffee drinkers rethink their coffee experience.”
“There’s a mystique and a romance dealing with coffee that I love,” said the 32-year-old Ebert, seated in his glass-enclosed warehouse office, amid the tantalizing smell of freshly roasted coffee. “Coffee is the No. 2 commodity sold in the world (after oil) and reaches almost everyone. It is as complex as wine and is the most sophisticated beverage you can drink. A red Bordeaux wine has 70 to 75 chemical constituents that make flavor. Coffee has 200.”
Ebert’s entry into the coffee business came about by accident. When he was 20, after graduating from Arlington High School and having taken some classes at Harper College in Palatine, he answered an ad for a carpenter’s apprentice.
“I was worried that I wouldn’t get paid when it rained,” recalled Ebert of Elk Grove Village. “But the builder said he had a coffee warehouse and would keep me busy there when I couldn’t work outside.”
The builder, Ed Kovetko, had just founded Gloria Jean’s, destined to become one of the largest gourmet coffee marketers nationwide. He quickly decided that Ebert would make a better warehouse manager than the one there.
“I was dumbfounded when he put me in charge of the whole thing,” Ebert said.
“I expected that this was an interim position and that my only potential was to oversee the warehouse. Everytime Kovetko decided to interview for an experienced coffee roaster or a green coffee buyer, he’d call me into the office. By the end of the meeting, he’d have decided not to hire someone else. Maybe it’s because I’m a quick study and that impressed him. That’s the only thing I can figure.
“Because Gloria Jean’s was small, I’d spend half of my day in the warehouse, packaging and flavoring coffee by hand,” Ebert recalled. “The rest of the time, I’d read books about coffee and do tastings.”
“It was really tough for him,” said Dick Gorecki, a former Gloria Jean’s Lake County franchisee. “With a minimum of knowledge, he pursued answers to technical questions he wasn’t trained to answer and did a superb job.”
Kovetko’s decision to roast coffees in-house presented Ebert with more on-the-job training. “The first batches were fine, but my luck ran out on batch No. 11,” he said, “when there was a fire caused by a plastic bag in the roaster chute. Ed returned with four business cards advertising roasting school seminars. That was my turning point.”
“Mike absolutely amazed me at how quickly he spoke the coffee language and understood coffee both technically and physically,” said Roland Veit, a New York coffee importer and a longtime Ebert acquaintance. “Coffee is a fast-paced, high-tech game. . . . Mike picked it up quickly.”
Ebert has developed almost 400 coffee flavors and a successful flavored cocoa line. “It can take an hour or a month,” he said, “and inspiration comes from everywhere.”
His most popular flavors are vanilla nut, Coffee Masters’ No. 1 seller; hazelnut; white Russian; and a “Cinnful Nut” (cinnamon/hazelnut). Coffee Masters’ products are sold in specialty coffee and gift shops plus sizable retailers such as Marshall Field’s and Disney World. Annual revenue for the products, sold in 19 countries, is $13 million.
“Mike took a cinnamon-flavored coffee and decided to add hazelnut,” said Ed Jacobsen, president of St. Louis-based Gourmet Coffee Sellers of America, the trade association for Gloria Jean’s franchisees. “Cinnful Nut took off as our customers’ No. 1 choice. It is the fifth most popular flavor nationally” among all coffee sellers.
“Mike was one of the first to realize people are looking for a dessert that doesn’t have calories,” added Lingle, the specialty coffee association executive.
How Ebert decides what to buy, roast and flavor is as complex as the final product, particularly his use of cupping, a method used since the 1600s to evaluate coffee.
Cupping is a technique in which 7.5 grams of coffee are roasted, ground and placed into a 5-ounce cup with boiling water. After the brew steeps, Ebert inserts a tablespoon-sized cupping spoon into the grounds, which have floated to the surface, and smells the grounds.
Like a wine taster, he takes one sip into his mouth “so it hits all of the taste buds at the same time” and swishes it around once, before spitting it out. With this process, Ebert evaluates coffee beans on a five-point scale for acidity, body, floral or butter notes, and aftertaste and compares the results with other premium coffees.
“Basically you need a good sense of taste, a good sense of smell and lots of experience,” Ebert said.
Ebert, one of only 200 professional cuppers nationwide, is one of the best, said Coffee Masters’ President Jim Rich, also an experienced cupper. “Mike can identify different grades and characteristics of beans from the same region, which is very difficult,” Rich said.
“It’s hard,” added Ron Bianchi, a novice cupper and a Coffee Masters roaster. “You have to slurp the coffee into your mouth quickly. If you’re too fast, the coffee goes down before you can taste it. Mike’s taste buds are incredible. He is a black-coffee drinker and doesn’t smoke. That helps make his taste buds sensitive.”
According to Lingle, cuppers must distinguish in excess of 4,000 smells, compared with an untrained person, who can differentiate about 2,000.
Ebert, who cups 30 to 40 coffees daily, said the procedure exemplifies both the romance of the business and the science of tasting and evaluating coffee. “It helps me decide which beans to buy, when and from what farms; which beans to use for house blends of coffees for restaurants; to confirm what I ordered was delivered.”
Ebert also has considerable expertise in blending different types of beans that Coffee Masters purchases from 35 countries for new coffees, espressos and cappuccinos.
“Mike puts beans together that no one else would think of,” Bianchi said. “He is a pro at knowing different ways to roast the same bean to produce different types of coffee.”
At That Cook & Coffee Place in West Dundee, owner Terry Fewell reported that the most popular blend, developed by Ebert, is Royal House, a combination of Brazilian, Indonesian and Colombian beans.
Ebert’s expertise is demonstrated in two other products, experts said. Coffee Masters is the only company nationwide offering six espressos. According to Fewell, Coffee Masters was one of the first to introduce instant cappuccino mixes nationwide.
“I thought it would be a hard sell to get real cappuccino drinkers to switch, but it wasn’t,” he said. “It introduced a whole new group of people who didn’t like the bitterness of espresso-based coffee to something a lot lighter.” The West Dundee store sold 1,200 individual packages at Christmas.
Developing new products, roasting and flavoring coffees and managing Coffee Masters’ 40,000-square-foot warehouse are challenging because so much can go wrong.
Said Veit: “Buying coffee is a juggling act; Mike must buy enough coffee to ensure he never runs out but not so much to incur excessive financing and storage charges.”
“It can be frustrating,” Rich added. “I’ve seen him develop a certain blend that needs 500 bags of a certain Brazilian bean and find out that he can only get 50 bags worldwide.”
Veit and Rich and Ebert’s wife, Gina, who met him when she was an assistant manager at Gloria Jean’s Schaumburg store in 1992, cited Ebert’s attention to detail and calmness as reasons for his success with these challenges.
Jacobsen met Ebert in 1989 when Jacobsen had underestimated how popular some flavored coffees would be at his first Gloria Jean’s franchise. “I was out of Irish Cream and hazelnut, two of the biggest sellers,” he said.
“I called the warehouse and said I’d do anything for more. Mike said that if I could get to the warehouse in two hours, my order would be on the dock. I couldn’t believe that kind of service. When I asked about signing for them, he said, `Get back to the store and start selling them.’ “
Recalled Gina, who first talked with Ebert when he phoned her store to gauge customer reaction to new flavors, “He really wanted feedback on how the customers felt and what I thought. Not many individuals were concerned with what employees thought.”
“There aren’t more than a dozen people in the country who do what Mike does,” said Lingle, the California trade association executive. “To cup is a full-time job. But to cup, run plant operations and be the chief buyer and chief roaster is a real feat.”
