“Oh Coffee, you dispel the worries of the great, you point the way to those who have wandered from the path of knowledge…. Thy purity brings to humanity only well being and nobility.”
—From “In Praise of Coffee” by Sheik Ansari Djezeri Hanball Abd-al-Kadir

“How about coffee? Do you like coffee?”
“Only with my oxygen.”
—Gilmore Girls, Season 1, Episode 4

Coffee is awesome. No wonder it is, as noted in last January’s National Geographic, “second only to petroleum in terms of dollars traded worldwide.” But, tragically, there can be such a thing as too much coffee. It took me a while to learn this lesson. Back in high school, my morning routine began with a pot of Carpe Diem’s Thunderbolt Blend, brewed using Krank2O (a caffeinated bottled water) instead of tap water. Once it had brewed, I’d pour the coffee back into the coffee machine and run it through again, lest I should lose a single molecule of my precious caffeine. I would then pour the entire pot into a gigantic travel mug, which—on a good day—would suffice to keep me awake for a whole day’s worth of classes. On weekends and in evenings, the Elvis Room’s espresso-laden specialties would keep me going. It was a pleasant way to make my head implode.

I’ve mellowed out a bit. Quantity has given way to quality, and these days, I’d rather savor a bit of gourmet coffee than chug a pot of liquid crack. Coffee is a unique drug that way. News of the Weird recently reported on a methamphetamine addict who burned himself in a crude attempt at bathtub alchemy while trying to transmute his own urine into meth. Whatever may be said about caffeine junkies, especially when we’re in need of a cup, I guarantee that you will never find one of us plunging into our own bladders to get a fix. In fact, over time, we often come to care almost as much about the delivery method as the drug.

And here are delivery methods aplenty. Caffeine-infused gum, mints and alcoholic beverages were great novelties in their time, but for the early adaptors of the caffeine world things get even more esoteric. Thinkgeek.com, for example, carries a wide variety of eye-opening products, including caffeinated lip balm and soap. For those purists who stick with coffee, it is a small step from bug-eyed Folgers fan to gourmet Arabica connoisseur.

The Seacoast area is a great place to get wired in style. Green Mountain coffee, regarded by local gourmets as mediocre gas station coffee, is in many other places served in the finest local cafes. And our finest cafes? Many are supplied by the local roasteries that provide the region with some of the best coffee beans in the world.

But what goes into the creation of the caffeinated masterpieces we take for granted? Why are there so many roasters in the area? What makes each one unique? To find out, I visited three New Hampshire roasteries: the Black Bear Micro Roastery in Center Tuftonboro, which formerly operated a retail outlet at The Den in Portsmouth and still supplies area locals with beans; Portsmouth’s own Breaking New Grounds in Market Square; and Port City Coffee Roasters on Islington Street. I also spoke by telephone to Jane McLaughlin and Gussie von Wellsheim from Carpe Diem Coffee, located in South Berwick, Maine. (Unfortunately, no one from Piscataqua Coffee in Dover returned my calls.)

finding the best of beans

A coffee bean is the martyr of alertness. We burn it, grind it and then drench it in scalding water to create the luscious black liquid that saves us from the sin of sleep. Not just any bean, however, deserves this torment.

Great coffee, like any gourmet creation, depends essentially on two factors: the quality of the ingredients—the unroasted green beans—and the way the roaster turns them into the final product. Bad beans cannot be improved by roasting or brewing them well, and a good bean can easily be destroyed if it is stored or roasted improperly. A flaw in either makes the other irrelevant.

Starting with the highest quality beans is a sine qua non. Since small roasters don’t have the time to try samples from every crop, they often rely on experts to tell them which beans are worthy of consideration. Though such experts are sometimes merely experienced bon vivants, others are academically trained taste detectives, capable of identifying which specific chemical compounds are too weak or strong in a particular bean. The stakes here can be high: one bean in the Cup of Excellence program, to which Breaking New Grounds belongs, recently broke records in a COE Internet auction by selling for about $50 per pound. Even at a fraction of that price, a bean can’t just be great: it has to be mind-blowing.

Some roasters, like Breaking New Grounds, double-check the quality of beans by “cupping” samples before buying. Cupping is the café equivalent of a wine tasting: roast a small batch, brew it, sip and spit. While the coffee roasting machines used by most local roasteries can roast many pounds of coffee at a time, dedicated cuppers often use separate small-batch roasters for such sampling.

Others prefer to rely solely on the expertise of brokers they have worked with in the past.

“We don’t have a sample roaster,” says Jim Clark, co-owner (with his wife Annie) of Black Bear Micro Roastery. “That’s a special kind of expertise, and I’m way too subjective…. I don’t think anyone should evaluate their own product.” According to Clark, people are apt to reject new tastes, which is why most cafés do not give out coffee samples. “If someone buys a half pound of coffee and drinks it for a period of days, gives their sensory system a chance to adjust to it, then they’re able to determine whether they really like it or not.” At Carpe Diem, owners Jane McLaughlin and Gussie von Wellsheim order beans based on recommendations, but they reserve the right to return beans that are not up to par.

putting the best of beans in the dungeon

Improper moisture, heat and light are the enemies of coffee beans, yet the area in which there was least consensus among the roasters was storage of the unroasted green beans. This is due at least in part to the relationship between acquisition and storage: the more beans a roaster orders, the better storage he needs; conversely, the better storage he has, the more beans he is able to order at once without worrying that they may be damaged.

The range of concern about storage conditions among the roasters was vast. On the more casual end, Port City Coffee Roasters just keeps the green beans in open bags on the floor of its room-temperature upstairs storage area. As roaster Joe Rillo put it, “some places just leave the actual burlap beans next to the roaster, but we don’t have much room.” Port City can afford to be casual, since they constantly receive fresh shipments of beans. Other roasters prefer a more elaborate approach to the problem. Clark, who buys beans in large quantities, has spent years developing Black Bear’s unique storage procedure, which he believes is key to preserving quality.

While roasted coffee has over 800 chemical compounds, he says, unroasted beans only have around 60. The compounds in unroasted coffee are the building blocks for the coffee’s final taste: once the beans are roasted, they create the bitterness, sweetness, acidity, and texture which determine the flavor characteristics of the final brew.

All the desired compounds must be present and well balanced in order to create a great cup of coffee. Unfortunately, these compounds are somewhat unstable, and are subject to degradation in anything less than the ideal conditions. In particularly damaging conditions, great beans can turn bad very quickly. The consultant who inspired Clark’s storage method told him about a test she had performed on a batch of beans left in a New Jersey warehouse during a heat wave. In no more than two and a half days, they had lost 10 percent of some significant compounds, enough to substantially change and probably ruin their flavor.

Storage is particularly important if a roaster wants to have high-quality beans on hand throughout the year. Though mass-produced “supermarket” grinds generally use the highly-caffeinated Robusto strain, which can be grown at relatively low altitudes, gourmet coffee is invariably made with tastier Arabica beans, which are grown between one and two thousand meters above sea level. Each type of bean, from Guatamalan to Tanzanian Peaberry, peaks in quality during a certain season. Since customers expect their favorite brews to be available on demand, many roasters resort to buying from brokers who store these beans in warehouses year round, which often means ordering beans that have been sitting in someone else’s storage facility for months.

Clark’s storage area, a well-sealed room in the basement of the Black Bear Roastery, is an apt summation of his substance-over-style approach: even after he has spent years perfecting the room’s function, it smelled vaguely but noticeably like the chicken coop it had been many years before. Nevertheless,     a glance was enough to tell me that the beans were in fine hands. Large sealed burlap sacks were stacked as many as six or seven high throughout the center and sides of the room, while open bags, marked by cardboard signs taped to sticks, were lined carefully to the left of the heavy, almost barn-sized door. Clark has a number of air conditioners and refrigeration units to combat fluctuations in the climate. “My first idea was that I wanted to freeze the beans,” Clark says, “and (our consultant) said not to do that. The green beans are actually alive, they’re called ‘viable,’ and when you freeze them you kill them. But not only do you kill them, you actually affect some of the compounds and affect the quality. So you have to keep them in perfect condition, you can’t let them freeze.” Now Clark keeps the beans at an even 49 degrees, allowing him to place large orders when the best beans become available and still keep them consistently in stock. Developing the storage area, Clark says, was the most difficult process he has gone through as a roaster, largely because of the need to continually tweak the system in order to keep a perfect balance of moisture.

Breaking New Grounds keeps their beans in a warehouse separated from their Portsmouth and Durham retail locations, allowing them, like the Black Bear Roastery, to order particular beans only once a year. Though Govoni is confident that his warehouse thoroughly protects the beans from damage, he characterizes it as an evolving element of his system and prefers to keep details under wraps as he experiments with his temperature-and-humidity-controlled storage methods.

torturing the best of beans mercilessly & without remorse

Karl LaBorie, manager of the Port City Coffee Roasters retail store, attributes much of their success to their three-to-four times weekly roasting schedule.

“The more coffee ages, it begins to get bitter,” he says. “If you take a Green Mountain or Dunkin Donuts, when they ship, they’re already probably a week old. When my customer calls, we roast the next day. It’s not already ready and we scoop it out. It’s roasted by demand, and I think that’s one of the qualities we have.”

The owners of Carpe Diem concur. “We only do up to 25 pounds per batch. We pack them fresh, then we get them to the accounts the next day. We try to really distinguish ourselves from other companies by keeping it fresh.”

If you’ve been in Breaking New Grounds in Market Square in Portsmouth, you’ve seen a coffee roaster. It’s that big metal contraption to your left when you come in the door, right before you get to the pastry counter. The general roasting process is fairly simple: the operator pours the beans into the funnel on top of the machine, which dumps them into the drum. The metal burner heats up, and the drum turns to keep the beans from sticking to the burner and to roast them evenly. When they are fully roasted, the beans slide into a circular cooling tray, which sifts the beans and allows ambient air to cool them off. Most roasters are equipped with a wall vent to push the thick, sweet-but-acrid smoke outside.

For the detail-oriented roaster, the trick is in the timing. Each type of green bean has particular characteristics that should be emphasized or muted in the final product, and the roaster does this by adjusting the total length of the roasting time and the heat used at various parts of the roasting cycle. Thought of as a graph, the sum of the timing and heating patterns used on a given bean is its roasting “profile.” Roasting is not an easy process, and it is often not precise. As Govoni puts it in a document on the history of coffee, “It is a science and an art that requires split second timing and takes great experience and concentration.”

Over time, roasters have discovered general principles about how beans are affected by certain heat levels during certain parts of the roasting cycle, but applying these principles to bring out the best in a particular bean is largely a matter of trial and error. Worse, because beans change from season to season, the profiles must be adjusted to reflect the differences between each harvest.

Jim Clark, a mad scientist among roasters, has made major modifications to his roasting system in order to achieve a greater degree of control and consistency than is possible with a standard machine. He noticed that the same beans roasted with the same profile did not always come out tasting quite the same. After installing a number of sensors throughout the roaster, he discovered, according to his Web site, “that there is no direct relationship between the output of the burner and the resulting temperature of the air being delivered to the beans.” The solution was twofold: he rigged an air temperature controller to the roaster, and he delegated control of the entire apparatus to a computer-based system. Now, he makes all the changes to roasting profiles in a spreadsheet. To his knowledge, no other roastery in the world uses a similar system. The results, he says, have been greater than he had expected. “You can roast coffee with a computer program in a way that human beings just can’t do…. The joy of this is, this is relatively consistent, every batch that we do.”

The quest for consistency, as Emerson never said, is the hobgoblin of little roasters. Because larger companies like Folgers or Maxwell House roast massive amounts of coffee at a once, it is easier for them to create the same product time after time. While Clark has put a lot of effort into achieving consistency, he appreciates the flexibility of being a small roaster. Past a point, he believes, consistency comes with a price.

With agricultural products like coffee, he says, “It’s a law: as your volume goes up you have to lower quality in order to maintain consistency. When you’re a big company like Starbucks or General Foods, consistency is number one. When a customer opens up a Twinkie, it damned well better taste like a Twinkie, or they start looking around. Big companies can’t afford that. … Smaller companies, people don’t expect that sort of consistency, so they have more latitude.” Nevertheless, he is pleased with the positive feedback from his customers regarding the consistency of his beans.

Other roasters seem to think that consistency is almost undesirable. Joe Rillo of Port City, describing roasting as an art, says “You don’t want it to be exactly like Maxwell house, where everything is just the same.”

There’s something to this. Part of the charm of the Seacoast coffee houses is that they are not just the same: each has its own methods and its own values, and it shows in the quality and diversity of their products.

I asked each of the roasters what they thought most distinguished their approach to coffee from other the local roasters.

Jim Clark says the Black Bear Roastery is distinguished by his computer system, which allows him to have separate profiles for each bean while still ensuring that particular beans are roasted exactly the same way each time.

For Matt Govoni it’s the “detail in coffee selection” that distinguishes Breaking New Grounds. “We like to be able to tell a story behind each coffee we have,” he says, citing a particular bean that he bought from a Columbian farm whose owner started running it after her ex-husband, the former farm manager, mysteriously disappeared—not an unusual occurrence in that part of the world, where coca cartels battle coffee plantations for land space.

Karl LaBorie says the quality and variety of their beans distinguish Port City Coffee Roasters, and particularly the number of unique flavored coffees they offer.

Jane McLaughlin of Carpe Diem gives the most ecumenical answer: “It depends who you think are competitors,” she says. “If you’re talking about other small roasteries, it’s really a matter of the customer’s personal taste and what they really like. Other companies out there are doing a good job. … Some people prefer us, some don’t, and it’s just a matter of taste. But when you get to the larger roasters it’s night and day. Once you’ve gone to a smaller roaster you’ll never go back.”

taster types
The Seacoast has great coffee widely available at a reasonable price. Why, then, doesn’t everybody drink it?

The gourmet coffee industry often focuses on class differences: generally, the industry gears its advertisements toward people of higher income and education, believing that such people are more likely to have well-developed palates for fine beverages, as well as the expendable income to afford them. While this may be true, Black Bear’s Jim Clark thinks there is a more important factor in who will buy specialty coffee. “I have discovered since being in the roasting business,” he says, “that it has nothing to do with education, money, any of that—it has to do with genetics.”

Scientists agree. They’ve discovered that people fall within a genetically determined range of sensitivity to certain tastes, which is divided, roughly, into three categories: supertasters, tasters (or medium tasters) and non-tasters. The division, technically based on how bitter a person experiences the taste of a compound called propylthiouracil, identifies roughly how sensitive each of us is to a wide variety of tastes.

In a Yale Scientific Magazine article, Linda Bartoshuk, a Yale professor who has researched these differences, describes supertasters as living “in a ‘neon world’ of taste, while non-tasters are in a ‘pastel world.’” The division has substantial correlations to a person’s taste in foods and drinks: because supertasters tend to avoid some tastes they are particularly sensitive to, they are less likely to smoke, drink liquor, or even to eat certain vegetables that contain compounds that they find unusually repugnant. Bartoshuk’s research indicates that half of the U.S. population is composed of medium tasters, while the remainder divides nearly evenly into non-tasters and supertasters.

One of the flavors supertasters tend to be especially sensitive to is bitterness, a taste that is particular strong in many mass-market Robusto-based coffees. According to Clark, this also accounts for the popularity of the almost charred flavor of Starbucks coffee. “At least three quarters of the population is genetically receptive to what they produce,” he explains. “It appeals to non-tasters and tasters.”

Curious about your own taste buds? A newsletter on coffeeresearch.org describes an easy way to find out what kind of taster you are. Use a cotton swab to apply blue food coloring to the tip of your tongue, then, using a magnifying glass, count the number of taste buds in a quarter-inch diameter circle. (The dye will make them stand out.) If you have over 50, you are a supertaster; less than 10, you are a taster; and if you fall in the middle, you are a medium taster.

If you turn out to be a supertaster, don’t start patting yourself on the back too quickly: healthwise, it’s a mixed blessing. The vegetables that supertasters tend to shun offer protection from some types of cancer, which may be why the preliminary results of a study by Bartoshuk suggest that non-tasters have less risk factors for colon cancer than their more sensitive brethren. On the upside, according to a Smithsonian Magazine report, supertasters are likely to be slimmer than tasters or non-tasters because they have less desire for sugary and fatty foods.

caffeine and the brain
When nature is allowed to run its course, the human body sleeps when the sun goes down and wakes when the rooster crows. But most of us prefer to set our own schedules. Luckily, when sleep’s unwanted intrusions interfere with your chosen schedule, you can always count on a cup of coffee, tea, or soda to provide you with a quick jolt of caffeine.

According to a Society for Neuroscience briefing, caffeine is able to work its magic because of its similarity to a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine. Active brain cells produce adenosine as a byproduct of their work; as the chemical builds up, it attaches like a jigsaw piece to certain receptors, triggering a calming reaction in the overworked areas of the brain. The caffeine molecule, which is structurally similar to adenosine, attaches to the same receptors; it is just close enough to fit, but it is different enough to not trigger adenosine’s sleep-inducing effects. If a caffeine molecule is attached to a receptor, there’s no space for adenosine. This explains how caffeine wakes us up—it stops adenosine from calming us down—and it also explains, in part, why we experience a “crash” after it wears off. If adenosine is blocked by caffeine, it has nowhere to go, so it just continues to build up. When the caffeine wears off, we have more adenosine than before bouncing around in our brains  and a lot of free receptors. The result? We’re over-calmed—we get groggy and maybe even a bit depressed.

Though it can make you irritable and shaky, caffeine has few serious side effects—though researchers continue to study temporarily elevated body temperature and blood pressure. Contrary to received wisdom, coffee does not cause dehydration, at least in small doses. It does, however, appear to increase production of adrenaline, which may explain its reputed benefits for memory retention: we naturally produce adrenaline in stressful situations, and the brain is wired to put such situations into long-term storage.

Many criticisms of caffeine refer not to its side effects, but to its actual function. Sleep researcher Charles Czeisler, quoted in a January 2005 National Geographic article, points out the irony in its use: “We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine.”