You’re probably familiar with “Relax, It’s Just Coffee,” the independent downtown coffee shop.
What you may not know is that for the last year the North Main Street business has been roasting its own coffee beans.
“We’re a double-secret micro-roaster,” said owner Paul Kemerling, explaining that they don’t (yet) sell their roasted coffee to other outlets.
“It’s limited batches for our customers,” he continued. “At the beginning, we knew we wanted to start small. Our initial batches were a few hundred pounds. But it’s grown – now we’re up to 2,000 pounds.”
I was talking with Paul and his ‘Roastmaster’ Bill Wells.
“Bill has a mechanical engineering background,” Paul explained, “and that’s really helped us, because neither of us had any prior roasting experience.”
“We did a lot of reading,” Bill said. “Then we tried it out in my living room.”
“We wanted to try out different things and play around,” said Paul. “We still do.”
“If you want to,” said Bill, “you can get software that controls the whole roast …”
“Right!” said Paul. “I mean you can actually upload it through a USB port on the side of the roaster.”
“But we wanted to get it in there and experiment,” said Bill. “We wanted to control it ourselves.”
The operation was soon transferred to the coffee shop itself, but you won’t see the process in action when you drop by. At least for now, the roasting is done out of hours.
“Here’s the thing,” Paul told me. “The smell of roasted coffee is really good. Roasting coffee, not so much.”
Having now witnessed the roasting process myself, I protested that it really wasn’t that bad.
“No,” Paul said, “it’s not bad so much as different. I kind of like it. It reminds me of burnt toast or burnt marshmallows.
“It’s the same with brewing beer. Does the smell of the brewing process make me want to drink beer? No. But I don’t find it a bad smell.”
So what are the advantages of freshly-roasted coffee?
“We consider coffee to be a real, living product,” said Bill, “like fruit or vegetables. It loses flavor two weeks after the roast. After four weeks it’s just Maxwell House.”
“Even the sealed stuff is stale,” said Paul. “Coffee oil continues to evaporate out of the bean. A lot of the famous brands in the grocery store, those whole beans – they’re flavored and perfumed.
“That ‘fresh coffee’ aroma that hits you when you crack open the packet? That’s injected. Because those beans will have been roasted six months to a year earlier.
“We won’t sell our coffee after 10 days. I’ll tell you, we may be a bunch of goofballs here but we really appreciate quality,” said Paul.
When it comes to coffee appreciation, one of their missions is to get the diehard dark-roast drinkers to try a lighter roast.
“We don’t push it too hard,” said Paul. “We’ll serve the dark roast and then follow up with ‘maybe you’d like to try …’
“It’s worth remembering,” he continued, “that with the darker roasts you’re tasting more of the roast, not the bean itself. At a certain point with the really dark roasts you’re getting the flavor of smoke.
“And also, what many people don’t realize is the lighter the roast, the more the caffeine.”
This was a revelation to me. Like many I have a natural inclination to opt for “strong” or “bold” flavors and miss out on more subtle varieties.
This is partly because I assume my palate has been permanently damaged by the sledgehammer effect of years of cigarettes, fast food and cheap beer.
“Well, yeah,” said Paul, “we find that smokers want to stick with the dark roast. I mean there’s something orgasmic about coffee and a smoke together. All the intellectual giants I revered had coffee that way, you always saw Camus with a coffee and a cigarette. But there’s no doubt smoking weakens the palate.”
“Now, remember, it’s not just the roast,” Paul continued. “The quality of the bean itself makes such a difference.
“At the low end you’ve got what’s known as ‘Commodity Grade.’ That gets ground-up and flavored. Then you’ve got ‘Commercial Grade’ used by the big producers, a lot of the grocery store product.
“Then at the high-end there’s ‘Specialty Grade,’ and that’s what we use. In fact we go for ‘Specialty Grade Plus,’ so we’re we’re talking the top 3-5 percent in terms of quality.
“Some of these varieties, you might only be able to get a 500-pound batch. That works for us, but it’s no good to the big guys like Starbucks. 500 pounds of coffee is useless to them.
“But it’s what enables us to play around and experiment.”
“And with each new bean,” said Bill, “you never know what’s going to happen.”
Is there one “right” way to roast each variety, I asked?
“Think of it like a good steak,” said Paul. “You can take that steak and prepare it rare, and that’s great. But it may not be for everybody.
“You have coffee snobs, just like you have beer snobs or whiskey snobs, and they might tell you it has to be a certain way. But we try to be coffee geeks, not coffee snobs.
“There’s a fine line between what we do and douchebaggery.”
I asked Paul if he was a coffee geek before he owned the store.
“Well, I started drinking coffee at 12 and hated it,” he told me. “But later I discovered espresso, which was not common in central Ohio in the ‘70s.
“I grew up in Bexley (a suburb of Columbus), and as an adolescent I went to the Top Steakhouse. They had a 1920s-era espresso machine. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
“This guy, he pulled levers, he spoke with a foreign accent – I thought it was so sophisticated. So I got a home espresso machine at 15, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”
“Now, I feel like I’ve achieved what I always wanted to do here: selling high-end product, with lawyers, students and punk rockers hanging out and having meetings next to each other.”
So what’s next?
“We’d love to do a regular ‘meet-the-roaster’ event on Saturday mornings, really get people involved and informed. And at some point we might even sell our roasts to campuses, small shops, that sort of thing.
“Oh and if you like, you can tell people we’ll be roasting backyard chickens.”
Relax, It’s Just Coffee, is located at 105 N. Main St., Mansfield. It’s open Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
