Doug Zell makes his living roasting coffee for most of the city’s high-end retailers and restaurants as well as many of its citizens, but you won’t hurt his feelings if you ask to buy the beans green. Roasting your own “can be fun, and I think people are looking for sensual kinds of things, things that they can put their hands on,” he says. Customers at his shop, Intelligentsia–arguably Chicago’s finest coffee-roasting operation–started asking him about it a few years ago. “There was a lot of discussion on the aficionado Web sites like CoffeeGeek, and we were getting more calls from people that wanted to buy green coffee from us,” he says. So in February he started selling raw beans through the company’s Web site (intelligentsiacoffee.com). Sales have been increasing steadily since then, but they’re only a minor part of Zell’s business–he’s not thinking of expanding them to Intelligentsia’s two retail stores anytime soon. Like most green coffee sellers, he caters to what’s still a niche market, and, also like most, he keeps it virtual.
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One of the biggest online retailers is Sweet Maria’s (sweetmarias.com), an Oakland-based operation that sells green coffee from around the world as well as roasting equipment. In 1997 Thompson Owen, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, started the company in Columbus, Ohio, where he’d followed his wife, Maria Troy, a curator. Owen, who’d worked as a coffee roaster in California and New Orleans, hated the coffee in Columbus. “I thought, The coffee here is horrible–I’m just going to roast my own,” he says. “But I couldn’t find any green coffee.” He finally found a New York company, Dallas Brothers, that would sell him raw beans, but only in larger amounts than he needed. “I thought, Oh my god, I have to sell some of this,” he says. “There’s too much.” He didn’t know anyone he could sell to (“I don’t have any friends, especially not in Ohio”), so he put a notice on the Web and sold the beans out of his basement. He opened a retail shop in Columbus in 1998, and over the years the business has grown enough that he’s had to move to bigger quarters, in various parts of the country, twice. The company now employs seven full-timers, including Troy, who quit her curating gig a few years ago to run the Sweet Maria’s office.
I love coffee and drink it every day, though I’m hardly an aficionado. But when Intelligentsia started offering raw beans I decided to give home roasting a try. After some online research I decided that stove-top roasting–which typically uses a hand-cranked popcorn popper–would produce too much smoke for my ventilation-free kitchen. So I purchased a $140 Zach & Dani’s roasting machine with a catalytic converter that eliminates most of the smoke.
“Ever since Tom started the business, people have said, ‘This is going to be the next big thing,’” says Troy. “But we hope not, because it’s not for everyone. Home roasting appeals to people who are really into doing things themselves, and to people who cannot find what they like in a store: a lot of different flavors, a lot of variety, a lot more freshness.”
