Walking in to Shamballa Café, customers are greeted by a stack of containers filled with coffee. Beans from Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil and Tanzania are all roasted and ready to go, thanks to owner Emmet Simpson.

“Pretty much by the time they walk through the door, I know what their drink is and I have it ready for them,” Simpson said. “No one else is responsible for things around here but me — it keeps me busy.”

Simpson is the sole employee of the small coffee shop, located on 7 W. Genesee St. in Baldwinsville. His customers make Shamballa a part of their daily routine, which in turn keeps Simpson on his toes.

 

Like several others in the local coffee business, Simpson roasts his own coffee. With National Coffee Day on Sept. 29, Recess Coffee, Simple Roast, Cafe Kubal, Freedom of Espresso and several others have joined Shamballa Café in making coffee appreciation a daily ritual by sourcing, roasting and serving up their own brews in Syracuse.

Matt Peirson, owner of Simple Roast, got started four years ago when his fiancé gave him a home roaster for his birthday. While he doesn’t yet have a storefront, Peirson’s blends are available wholesale in a handful of locations, including the Cazenovia Farmers’ Market and Green Planet Grocery in Fairmount.

His company’s namesake is cognizant of his mission — to keep coffee simply enjoyable.

“I didn’t want it to be all the snobbery and I didn’t want it to seem daunting to someone who wants a regular cup of coffee every day,” Peirson said.

Peirson said he started out roasting coffee for friends and family, but got better and better at it and decided to expand his operation.

“I just decided to set up a table at the farmers market in Cazenovia one day — literally just a table with a couple of bags of coffee on it. It sold out in like an hour,” he said.

The roasting process is important, Peirson said. Not all coffee is the same.

 

“Picking the coffee is the most important part — roasting it and selling it afterwards is all based on the effort that you put into picking the right one and profiling it,” Peirson said.

Peirson orders different coffees from his distributor, and depending on what he’s looking for — light roast, dark roast, natural processed, fair-trade organic — the company will source beans that fit the bill.

The distributor then recommends four or five coffees and sends a handful of half-pound bags of each of them. Peirson will then use his “baby roaster” to sample roast those coffees for cupping — the process of having several people try different coffees to see which everyone likes best.

When it comes down to roasting for production, Peirson uses a 2-kilo Ambex coffee roaster. It roasts roughly five pounds of coffee in 12–15 minutes. Green (raw) beans are poured into a funnel at the top and dropped into the drum that makes up the body of the machine. Agitators inside the drum spin the beans, and open flames put direct heat on them at the same time.

Once the coffee is done, it’s poured into a cooling tray where a fan blows cool air on the beans to drop the temperature, Peirson said. Roasted coffee beans are then kept in an airtight container until they’re ready to be ground.

Peirson said he started out roasting coffee for friends and family, but got better and better at it with positive public response and decided to expand his operation.

 

Recess Coffee is another of several local roasters that has expanded largely over the last decade. Owners Jesse Daino and Adam Williams ran the coffee shop by themselves since its opening four years ago out of 110 Harvard Place in the Westcott neighborhood.

Recess now uses three different importers to bring in 1,000–1,200 pounds of coffee each week. The shop has about 30 wholesale accounts, 15 of which are in central New York, and its opening a second location on Montgomery Street in the Courier Building in October.

Roasting is a huge part of what Recess is, Daino said. Profile roasting focuses on the minute details and the direct science behind the beans. Different profiles are heated at different temperatures at different times, Daino said, to get the desired effect.

“We change those profiles constantly,” he said. “Right now, the one that we have that’s my favorite is Tanzanian Peaberry. We roast it super light and it keeps really sweet. Most African coffees are acidic, and if you roast them the proper way, the acidity makes it taste sweet.”

Daino said further expansion across the state could definitely be in the future. Rochester is full of roasters at this point in time, but Buffalo is an “untapped market.” Syracuse, though, and all of its coffee lovers, will always be home, he added.

“We love the location — Syracuse is really close to every big city.” Daino said. “We love it here. We grew up here — we love this city.”

Published on September 28, 2015 at 10:40 pm