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Do-It-Yourselfers

Coffee for the Committed

Sweet Maria’s Knows Beans and Sells Them to Roast at Home

    Around 21st Street in West Oakland, where cyclone fencing circles homes and plywood patches up windows, you can buy a 40-ounce beer but not a decent cup of coffee. Some coffee connoisseurs do, however, make pilgrimages to a warehouse here whose spiffy retro lighting fixtures and corrugated steel planters give the stretch its only hint of industrial chic.
    This is the home of Sweet Maria’s, the East Bay’s organic green coffee bean supplier for home roasters that’s creating a buzz in the coffee-conscious Bay Area and beyond.
    Inside the 7,500-square-foot building that used to house a tire service, hundreds of 100-pound burlap sacks rest on pallets, filled with green coffee beans and labeled from parts of Latin America, East Africa and Indonesia. Compact coffee roasters and grinders are shelved along the walls. Within a maze of stacked sacks and machinery, half a dozen workers pour beans into zip-top plastic bags and ready them for shipment.
    The artists-turned-entrepreneurs behind Sweet Maria’s, Thompson Owen and his wife, Maria Troy, live as well as work at this spot near Adeline Street and West Grand Avenue. By nurturing their passion for coffee—not just the stuff you drink but also the cultivation and roasting of the bean itself—they’ve carved a niche in the coffee trade that amounts to much more than a hill of beans. They’ve also spread the art and science of home roasting, drawing foodies and tinkerers who like to experiment with roasting in their pursuit of a remarkably distinct cup of coffee, unparalleled in freshness.
    Roasting coffee, at home? “It’s just a funny thing that some people like to do,” says Owen, 42, wearing a plain T-shirt, jeans and stubble that make him look more artisan than businessman. “There’s a certain percentage of the population who would be into this, and then others who are like, ‘You’re all crazy.’  ”
    You might call it the “slow-brewed movement,” as home roasting reflects the slow-food movement’s values: a respect for traditional and environmentally friendly practices; an appreciation for the origin and seasonality of ingredients; and a celebration of the process itself, not just the consumption of the end result.
    Though home roasting remains a fringe pursuit, Sweet Maria’s has enjoyed steady growth to become one of the largest green coffee suppliers for home use nationwide, and the only one here in the East Bay. The company’s nine employees fill 700 to 800 mail orders weekly, with the typical customer ordering five to six pounds.
    When he’s not traveling to coffee farms, Owen spends much of his time in a second-floor kitchen that overlooks the warehouse operations. This area is called the cupping room, as it’s where he evaluates beans, a process known as “cupping” in coffee lingo. The room, perpetually dusted with chaff from roasting, is cluttered with baggies of bean samples sent to him to review.
    On a recent day, Owen had before him 35 samples to roast, grind, brew, taste and rate. He won’t actually drink 35 cups of coffee. Rather, he ritualistically bends over each cup to inhale its aroma before slurping a mouthful rapidly and noisily so the coffee sprays the roof of his mouth and infuses his olfactory senses. He forcefully spits it out, not swallowing because he doesn’t like to be over-caffeinated.
    “I can’t believe how much coffee people drink,” he says with a straight face, surrounded by many miniature mountains of coffee. “Honestly, when I see a big Starbucks cup, I can’t believe it. I could never drink that much coffee! But I’m really drinking coffee for flavor.”
    Owen’s meticulous and often irreverent reviews, combined with his direct trade with small coffee farms and his concern for the condition of the farms’ land and workers, help set Sweet Maria’s apart from its competitors on the Internet. The cupping reviews are published on Sweet Maria’s Web site (www.sweetmarias.com), creating a voluminous “virtual coffee university” that includes information on coffee regions and the how-tos of home roasting.
    Owen and Troy (or Tom and Maria, as they’re more widely known) met in art school and started their business in Columbus, Ohio, in 1997. Then the East Bay beckoned—in part because the port of Oakland is one of the largest specialty coffee ports in the United States. They moved to Emeryville and expanded to West Oakland in 2005, converting a second warehouse, adjacent to their workspace, into a modern loft where they live with their new baby.
    Troy, who manages Sweet Maria’s business end, has an office directly below the cupping room. Decorative porcelain coffee grinders from the 1930s hang on her wall, evoking an era before home roasting virtually disappeared during the mid-century shift to pre-roasted and pre-ground canned coffee.
    Troy compares the rise in ready-to-serve coffee such as Folgers to the postwar rise in cake mixes. “A generation of women was taught to just buy the mix; there was this mentality that ‘you can’t do it on your own; it’s way too complicated,’ and that’s what happened with coffee roasting. But home roasting is as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.” All it takes to get started is a hot-air popper or a skillet (see the sidebar on how to home roast).
    So who are these folks who care so much about their coffee that pre-roasted whole beans just won’t satisfy their senses? Like wine aficionados who stock a cellar and expand their knowledge of viticulture, home roasters appreciate the varietal character of different beans. Coffee carries with it certain characteristics derived from its place of origin and the process by which it’s harvested and stored. Roasting to varying degrees of darkness adds another layer of complexity.
    “The kind of customers we have understand that if you want Brazil in August, it’s not going to be good,” says Owen, whose motto is “coffee is a crop, not a can of pop.” “The idea that it’s a can of pop—always on the shelf, and you always can get the same thing—well, it doesn’t work that way, and we like that about coffee.”
    Aside from unique flavor, those who roast their own do it for freshness. Coffee is best four to 24 hours after roasting. The beans sold at grocery stores and chain cafes were roasted days or weeks ago at a centralized location and can’t escape some degree of staleness. Home roasting also can save money; much of the green coffee from Sweet Maria’s sells for $5 to $7 per pound, about half of what roasted whole-bean specialty coffee costs.
    Along with the beans, Sweet Maria’s provides clients with knowledge about the coffee, which gives them “a real connection to where it comes from,” says Troy. “It’s not just Rwanda coffee; it’s Rwanda coffee that comes from a convent where the nuns own the place where the coffee is grown.” 
    It would be in Owen and Troy’s interest to talk up home roasting as the next big thing, but they say quite the opposite. Even with more home-roasting appliances available, they doubt it will ever go mainstream.
    Perhaps home roasting will catch on, however, if the slow-food movement gains steam, and if more people yearn for bragging rights to a truly unique and fresh cup of coffee. Or perhaps a backlash will grow against the proliferation of cafes pedaling Frappuccino knockoffs. In the meantime, Sweet Maria’s will keep passing green coffee beans through West Oakland to promote a hobby and satisfy a craving that many home-roasting coffee addicts just can’t shake.
    “We have a certain amount of customers who have a joking but somewhat sincere hostility about the fact they got hooked on home roasting and now they have to do it,” says Owen, somewhat sheepishly. “They say, ‘I’m not into this; it’s just that I tried it and tasted it, and now I can’t go back.’ ”

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Getting Started in Home Roasting

    Home roasting isn’t rocket science, but it takes a certain amount of experimentation, patience and do-it-yourself moxie. The East Bay is home to two top resources on how to choose and roast green coffee beans. Sweet Maria’s Web site (www.sweetmarias.com), published by Thompson Owen and Maria Troy of West Oakland, contains a wealth of information on buying and roasting beans. They also review and sell appliances for home roasting. Kenneth Davids’ book Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival (St. Martin’s) covers the history, alchemy and all the whys and how-tos of home roasting. An Alameda resident who brews and writes in Oakland, Davids also publishes an online coffee buying guide (www.coffeereview.com).
    “Once you know what you’re doing,” Davids writes, “basic home coffee roasting ranks in difficulty somewhere between boiling an egg and making a good white sauce.”
    Read his book or log onto Sweet Maria’s for details on how to home roast. Here are tips to get you started:
    Prepare Your Palette: To begin to appreciate the complexity of coffee flavors, hold the cream and sugar. Try drinking your coffee black and tasting lighter-roasted coffee from a single origin (such as Costa Rican or Kenyan) as opposed to dark-roast blends.
    Try It Cheap: Dust off that hot-air popcorn popper left over from college dorm days, or buy one from a thrift store. It’s the best appliance to try home coffee roasting. The drawback: You can only roast small batches at a time, and there’s nothing to catch the chaff (though a big bowl will do). You also can use a skillet and agitate the beans as they heat by shaking the pan as you would a sauté.
    If you want to buy a real roaster, compact home units for small batches range approximately from $80 to $200. Buy a sampler pack of green beans for 9 bucks from Sweet Maria’s, and you’re ready to roast.
    Don’t Be too Fussy About the Mess: Home roasting creates a wonderful, heady aroma. It also creates smoke and chaff (the thin skin that comes off the bean when it roasts). If you roast large batches and the smoke becomes too intense, turn on a stove hood fan or open a window. Most roasting appliances have a chaff collector, but keep a dustpan handy just in case.

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