When Giuseppe Lollino came to Chicago from his native Italy, one of his biggest disappointments was the quality of the coffee he found.
“I tried to get good coffee here,” says Lollino, owner of Caffe Italia, “but nobody here knew how to do it, how it was in the old country.”
Taking things into his own hands, Lollino began roasting his own coffee.
Of course, Lollino’s distaste for American coffee dates to the year 1956, when cheap coffee was the norm and no one thought twice about putting a pot on first thing in the morning and then drinking it slowly, one cup at a time throughout the day as it gradually turned to sludge.
Today, things are quite different, and every indicator points to an American palate that is increasing in its sophistication and sensitivity with each passing year. Roasters like Lollino have helped raise this awareness.
“We do an annual survey and ask people 18 years old and over if they drank coffee yesterday and whether it was traditional or gourmet,” said Joseph DeRupo, director of communications for the National Coffee Association. Traditional coffees are name brands such as Folgers and Maxwell House, sold in large cans in grocery stores, as well as standard food service coffee. Gourmet coffees include coffee drinks such as espresso and cappuccino and premium brands such as Starbucks and other high-grade coffees produced by independent roasters.
What the surveys have uncovered is a steady decline over the past few years in the consumption of traditional coffee, coupled with a steady increase in the consumption of gourmet coffee.
“The biggest spike was between 2000 and 2001, when the percentage of respondents who said they had had gourmet coffee jumped from 9 to 14 percent,” DeRupo said.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has watched the steady encroachment of Starbucks into seemingly every town on the planet. But Starbucks’ success seems to have triggered a nationwide interest in high-quality, fresh-roasted coffee–and, consequently, coffeehouses.
Supplying these coffeehouses is an ever-increasing number of small, independently owned roasters.
“It’s not dissimilar to wineries or microbreweries,” says Doug Zell, founder and owner of Intelligentsia Coffee, one of Chicago’s larger roasters, “where we’re taking coffee to the culinary level in terms of how we’re buying it and how we’re roasting it.”
Roaster Adam Bezark of Casteel Coffee in Evanston agrees. “It’s the smaller guys like us who are able to add a lot more craft to it, and because it’s a much more labor intensive process, our customers tend to be high-end restaurants who are willing to pay a little bit more to get a better product.”
Corby Kummer, author of the recently revised “The Joy of Coffee” and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, believes that the care with which coffee is grown and processed is integral to the quality of the product when finally tasted.
“Because the individual beans don’t ripen at the same time, it is best when they are handpicked, and then they have to be dried and stored properly as well,” he says.
The roast itself is of paramount importance. “Roasting is like cooking,” Kummer says. “A batch-by-batch hand roaster can give a fuller, richer coffee than the shrill, one-note coffee you often get from bulk roasting.”
Smaller also is often better because roasters can take advantage of high-quality products from single farms whose output would not be enough for industry giants.
“The bigger companies have to buy a little lower on the chain because of the quantity they have to get,” says Joel Edwards of Freedom Coffee Roasters, a wholesale-only roaster whose products are available at Whole Foods Markets. “And they have to roast a little darker to get rid of some of the imperfections that naturally go along with that.”
Working with growers
But Kummer believes this argument is just a good marketing ploy. “If that’s the line the small roasters are using I’ll go along with it to help their business,” he says, “but what’s really important is whether the big companies have a conscience. Are they working with middlemen who are forging bonds with the small growers?”
Curiously, even with a Starbucks seemingly on every corner, most roasters don’t view the chain as a threat. In fact, many attribute the growing awareness of coffee’s possibilities directly to Starbucks’ success.
“They’re good promoters of coffee,” Lollino said. “They just don’t give people coffee the way it’s supposed to be, the way it’s made in the old country.”
“For years we’ve been trying to tell people that there is such a thing as good coffee,” said Robert C. Tomkins, a representative of Stewarts Private Blend Coffee, a Chicago roaster for more than 90 years. “So Starbucks has definitely helped us, because we could never afford to go out and spread the word because we’re a small, family-owned company.”
“Starbucks let people know that there’s a whole world of specialty coffees out there,” agrees Tony Dreyfuss, who, with his father Jeff, opened Metropolis Coffee, a coffeehouse and roaster in Chicago, late last year.
Not everyone, however, has been buoyed by the rising tide that is Starbucks.
“Sure, Starbucks has helped the whole gourmet coffee phenomenon, but they definitely hurt us,” says Chris Papanicholas of PapaNicholas Coffee, a Batavia-based roaster. In the Chicago area, the PapaNicholas brand is familiar to customers of Jewel-Osco, which has carried the brand for years and worked with the company to establish gourmet coffee sections at their stores.
“Jewel put us on the map but then Millstone and Starbucks came in, and the piece of the pie got a lot smaller, and it’s taken us a long while to get back to where we were in the ’90s,” Papanicholas says.
Regardless, he remains sanguine about the competition. “That’s what America is all about. Because if we didn’t have competition, we would all be drinking Folgers.”
Supporting the underdogs
According to Dreyfuss, Starbucks’ ubiquity has had a benefit beyond the education they have provided to the American coffee drinker. “A lot of our customers tell us that they’re rebelling against ‘Big Green’, as they call Starbucks, and they come into places like ours to support the underdog,” he says.
Metropolis has a very small operation with only one 12-kilo roaster, compared to Stewarts’ three 500-pound machines. Also, rather than relying on the machines to determine what happens during the roasting process, the elder Dreyfuss relies on the color and smell of the beans to tell him how to proceed with the process.
“Over the course of the roast, I’m constantly monitoring the heat and the air flow, making minor adjustments and speeding up or slowing down the roast to get exactly the profile I’m looking for,” he says.
Such flavor profiles include aroma, body, acidity and aftertaste, he says.
“Nothing substitutes for batch-by-batch careful supervision,” Kummer agrees, “because it’s not just learning how the machine works, but adjusting to the day-to-day humidity and how it relates to the moisture in the bean, and what that means for the roast, when to stop it, how to cool it, etc.”
Lollino says the secret is knowing how to put the beans together.
“You can’t just buy beans from anywhere and roast them. You have to know real espresso. You have to know what part of Colombia the good coffee comes from … and know how to balance them to maintain the flavor.”
This kind of hands-on approach to getting the perfect cup of coffee is now making its way into the home.
While this is especially true in small towns where people may not have access to freshly roasted coffee, there are home roasters in big cities as well.
Jim Schulman, a 50-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, has been roasting his own coffee for the past four years. “I like wine and I like to cook, and coffee is a natural extension of that,” he says.
One aspect of home roasting that Schulman enjoys is the ability to experiment with different roasts and different bean varieties. “Most roasters offer a particular bean or blend roasted a certain way, but what we can do at home is try different roasts on the beans to see what the different qualities are,” he says.
Schulman, like many home roasters, often gets his green, unroasted beans from Internet sources such as Hans Becker’s coffeemaria. com.
Becker, whose sales of green beans to home roasters has doubled nearly every year in the 41/2 years he’s been in business in Addison, says that “more and more people are getting into it, not only for the taste and freshness, but also just for the fun of the process.”
Becker, a native German, is yet another European immigrant who got into the business largely because of his dissatisfaction with American coffee.
“Europeans are very picky about their coffee, and they pay more for a better-quality bean,” Becker says.
Becker says that most of the best coffee on the world market gets shipped to Europe. “The beans sent to Europe, each bean is the same size,” he says. “Whereas here, I can see variations in the beans, which tells me they’re not quite as high a quality.”
Still, compared to the state of American coffee 30 years ago, a little cup of joe has come a long way.
“Once people taste a really good cup of coffee they won’t go back,” Casteel’s Bezark says. “And if you know how to do it right, it’s just one little piece of your day that can be so much more enjoyable.”
Chicago’s roasters
Here is a partial list of the area’s coffee roasters.
Caffe Italia, 2625 N. Harlem Ave., 773-889-0455
Casteel Coffee, 2924 Central St., Evanston, 847-733-1187, casteelcoffee.com
Coffeemaria.com, Addison, 630-768-2043 (mail-order only)
Freedom Coffee Roasters, 2950 W. Carroll Ave., 773-826-3472 and freedomcoffee.com. Sold by mail-order and at Whole Foods Markets and Atomix Cafe, 1957 W. Chicago Ave., 312-666-2649.
Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, 3123 N. Broadway, 773-348-8058; 53 W. Jackson St., 312-253-0594; intelligentsiacoffee.com
Metropolis Coffee Co., 1039 W. Granville Ave., 773-764-0400
Newport Coffee House, 1121 Half Day Rd., Bannockburn, 847-940-7134
PapaNicholas Coffee, 1211 Lyon Rd., Batavia, 630-406-1100, papanicholas.com. Sold by mail-order, available in many area supermarkets.
Stewarts Private Blend Coffee, 4110 W. Wrightwood Ave., 773-489-2500 and stewarts.com and sold in many area supermarkets.
–J.D.
From green to dark brown: How the roasters do it
How exactly does a green coffee bean become that dark brown bearer of jittery goodness? Tony Dreyfuss of Metropolis Coffee leads us through the process:
“There are two types of coffee roasters: air-bed and drum. An air-bed roaster works like a popcorn popper, using hot air to roast the beans. A drum roaster uses a rotating steel drum heated either by gas burners or by ceramic plates heated by gas burners. Metropolis uses a drum roaster.
“Roasting is simply the addition of heat and air to the drum over time. The amount of heat and air and the point at which they are introduced can alter the taste of the coffee dramatically. While a computerized machine can be programmed to add heat and air, a good artisan roaster does it by hand, based on the smell and appearance of the beans.
“The process begins by heating the drum for half an hour and normalizing the air flow through the ducts. When the drum has reached an appropriate temperature, generally between 370 degrees and 410 degrees, the beans are added. This is called `charging the drum.’ Charging causes the drum temperature to fall rapidly until it bottoms out, usually around 1 1/2 minutes into the roast, after which it begins to climb again.
“As the coffee takes on heat, the water in the bean turns to steam, heating it from the inside. At this stage in the roast the coffee smells like fresh-cut hay.
“The color of the bean begins to change from jade green to cinnamon. The smell becomes increasingly sweeter due to the rapid caramelization of sugars. The bean swells, causing it to shed the thin coating known as the ‘chaff.’
“Shortly after the ‘cinnamon’ stage the coffee pops audibly like popcorn. This stage is called ‘first crack.’ The bean doubles in size, the wrinkles on the surface smooth out, and the color changes to light brown.
“The popping ceases and the bean gets browner and browner until it pops a second time (‘second crack’). At this point, the chemical and color changes in the bean happen so fast that the roaster needs to see and smell the coffee constantly to make sure that it is not being overcooked.
“While each roaster has personal criteria for doneness, as a general rule, the longer the roast, the more the body increases and the acidity decreases. A full-batch roast takes between 15 and 20 minutes depending on the hardness of the bean, the desired final color, and flavor profile the roaster is seeking.
“When the roast is complete, the beans are dropped into a cooling tray with a moving arm called an agitator. The air flow is directed onto the beans, cooling them to room temperature in about three minutes, during which time they continue to roast. Finally, the beans are run through a machine called a destoner to remove any non-coffee particles.”
–J.D.
The roasters’ tips for making coffee
We asked some local roasters for advice on purchasing, brewing and storing coffee. Even after decades of drinking coffee, we still were surprised by some of their tips:
– Once roasted, coffee beans go stale after about 10 days, so buy directly from a roaster or from a retailer who knows when the coffee was roasted. Then, buy no more than what you’ll use in one or two weeks.
– If at all possible, buy whole beans and grind them just before using. Freshness disappears much more quickly once the coffee has been ground.
– Different brewing methods require different amounts of grinding. A French press requires a coarser grind than a flat-bottomed filter, and a cone filter requires a relatively fine grind.
– If you use a French press or a cone filter, never pour boiling water directly on the grounds. The optimal temperature for the water is 194 to 204 degrees. When the water comes to a boil, take it off the heat for 30 seconds before pouring.
– With a French press, after the boiled water has cooled slightly, pour just enough on the grounds to wet them thoroughly, and let sit for 30 seconds. Pour in the remaining water and let sit another 2 1/2 minutes before plunging.
– If you use a cone filter, purchase a reusable gold mesh filter. Paper filters absorb some of the coffee’s oils, resulting in a loss of flavor.
– Figure on 2 tablespoons of freshly ground coffee per 6 ounces of water.
– Don’t store your coffee in the freezer. Keep it in an airtight container (such as the bag in which it was purchased) and keep it out of direct sunlight.
–James P. DeWan
Red-eye gravy with grits
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
– Coffee is the integral ingredient for this classic gravy. The Tribune test kitchen staff came up with this upscale variation and served it with grits.
2 strips bacon
1/2 pound kielbasa sausage, cut in 1/4-inch slices
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried sage
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup each: brewed coffee, water
Quick grits, prepared according to package instructions
1 green onion, thinly sliced
1. Cook bacon in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until crispy; transfer to a plate lined with paper towel to drain. Crumble; set aside.
2. Add sausage to bacon fat; cook, turning once, until starting to brown, about 8 minutes. Stir in shallot, garlic and sage. Cook until shallots are soft, about 30 seconds. Stir in flour; cook, stirring constantly, until very thick and dark brown, about 2 minutes. Add coffee and water; cook, stirring constantly, until thick, about 2 minutes.
3. Pour gravy over grits. Garnish with crumbled bacon and green onion.
Nutrition information per serving:
213 calories, 73% of calories from fat, 17 g fat, 6 g saturated fat, 41 mg cholesterol, 5 g carbohydrates, 9 g protein, 663 mg sodium, 0.4 g fiber
Mocha devil’s-food cupcakes
Preparation time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Yield: 18 cupcakes
– These adult cupcakes were based on a recipe from “Chocolate Cake,” by Michele Urvater.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon instant espresso coffee powder
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
1 egg yolk, beaten, plus 2 whole eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, at room temperature
Mocha frosting:
1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup) butter, at room temperature
5 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons prepared espresso, made from instant espresso powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-6 tablespoons whipping cream
1. Combine 1/2 cup of the sugar, 1/2 cup of the milk and espresso powder in small saucepan; heat to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly. Add chocolate; heat to a simmer, stirring. Remove saucepan from heat; stir until chocolate is melted. Whisk in egg yolk, whisking until mixture thickens to custard consistency, about 20 seconds. Stir in vanilla. Set aside.
2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Sift flour with baking powder, baking soda and salt; set aside. Beat butter in bowl of electric mixer on low speed until light, about 1 minute. Gradually beat in remaining 1 cup of the sugar. Beat on medium speed, scraping down beater and sides of the bowl as needed, until mixture is thick and smooth, about 4 minutes.
3. Beat in whole eggs, one at time, until batter is smooth. Add cooled chocolate custard; beat on low speed until mixture is smooth and blended, about 1 minute. Fold dry ingredients into the batter in 3 additions, alternating each with remaining 1/2 cup of the milk. Beat with electric mixer on low speed until smooth, 1 minute.
4. Transfer batter to paper-lined cupcake pans, filling each cup two-thirds full. Bake until an inserted tester comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool 5 minutes. Remove from pan; cool completely on wire rack, about 25 minutes.
5. Meanwhile, for frosting, place butter in the bowl of an electric mixer; beat on medium speed until soft, about 1 minute. Sift sugar and cocoa into butter; beat until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add espresso, vanilla and 2 tablespoons of the whipping cream. Beat until well blended, about 5 minutes, adding more cream if necessary to reach spreading consistency. Spread frosting on cupcakes.
Nutrition information per cupcake:
428 calories, 38% of calories from fat, 19 g fat, 11 g saturated fat, 75 mg cholesterol, 65 g carbohydrates, 4 g protein, 114 mg sodium, 1.6 g fiber
