Roasting is dangerous business

Green coffee beans are not spectacular.  They have a bland, faded green color and are small and dense.  It amazes me that people discovered how to unlock their potential.  The roasting process is very delicate.  If the roaster cooks the beans for too long, they burn and if he removes them too quickly, they end up mild  and flat.  But there is a range of roasting that taps into a variety of tastes.  The beans themselves have their own character based on the various regions they come from;  Ethiopian beans will taste different from Colombian beans even if they are roasted the exact same way because the soil and climate play such a big roll in flavor. The roasting process itself brings out flavor too, especially caramel.

All this is to say that coffee roasting is pretty neat.  But it also can be dangerous.  The roasting process sets off a chemical reaction within the bean itself.  The fats and sugars in the green bean caramelize, changing their weight, taste, and color. This chemical reaction creates a lot of heat and if the beans are allowed to cook for too long, they will combust.

I learned this by experience last week when I barista-ed on a roasting day.  I was just starting a large skim mocha when I heard Kitaro, our roasting master, run toward the back room yelling for Jason, the owner.  Kitaro is the laid back, vegitarian-since-1995, exemplar of barista-ness I told you about in my last post.  He’s a relaxed guy and to hear him yelling and hustling around was unsettling.

I turned around and saw thick, gray smoke rise from the roaster and begin to fill the small shop.  Michael, the general manager who often comes in to help with roasting, opened up the door to the roaster and let the black beans spill out onto the cooling bin, which has an apparatus that spins around to keep the beans moving and a fan underneath that pulls cool air over the beans – all to cool them quickly to stop the roasting process.  But this wasn’t enough to prevent a fire; the beans in the cooling bin and those still in the roaster lit up with red-orange flames.  Michael grabbed a hose, (which I had never seen before, but I suppose it sits coiled near the plastic bins of coffee for just such an emergency), and sprayed everything down.  Michael is a tall, lanky man in his mid-twenties.  He is very boyish and likes to tell mildly offensive jokes and jump around the store.  One of his favorite activities is to run and jump as high as he can and slap the support beams in the ceiling.  It’s an impressive move.  None of the boyish joviality remained as he hurriedly doused the beans and entire roaster.

Meanwhile, Jason hurried out of the back room, calling back over his should for Passion, the woman who works in the back office, to call 911. The coffee shop is located in an adapted autobody garage and it still has two garage doors, one on opposite sides of the small space.  Jason opened the one on the customer side of the shop and Kitaro sped past the smoking roaster and threw open the garage door in the back of the store.  Most of the customers spilled out into the large, rock-covered patio area.  No one seemed scared, but no one was eager to stay, either.  Smoke filled the room and made breathing uncomfortable, though not impossible.  I watched for a while, until the visible flames disappeared, then finished my mocha.

One customer (a skim latte in a mug) was sitting at a table very close to the roaster, with her back to it.  She had ear buds in and sat hunched over her laptop.  When the excitement began, she turned to look at the activity, but instead of filing out with the rest of the customers, she turned back to her laptop and continued typing.  This woman was most at risk of injury, yet also the least disturbed.

In her defense, it didn’t seem like a big deal.  Jason did a good job of playing it down. He is usually a boisterous, friendly sort of guy; there are times when he is intimidating, but around customers, he always puts on a cool air.  Plus, he’s tall and commanding with a blindingly white smile that he is quick to flash.  So even as he aired smoke out of his establishment while his general manager hosed down a flaming piece of expensive machinery, he laughed it off and made jokes with customers.  (Of course, he’s not actually that laid back; behind the scenes, he was pissed and mumbled angrily about the unpredictable factor of human error when running a business).  It makes sense that people were unperturbed.  I went back to making my mocha, thinking it was no big deal.

But the people who know about these things were freaked.  Michael explained that fires are one of the biggest dangers that roasteries face.   That fire could have burned down the whole shop because when coffee beans burn, it’s not your basic fire.  The beans are often so hot that they can’t be put out with water.

To make the situation even scarier,  it turns out the police in St. Louis City aren’t quick to answer 911 calls.  Passion dialed 911 as soon as the fire started.  She was put on hold.  That’s right, she didn’t speak to a human.  A voice recording coolly informed her that a human would be with her shortly to handle her emergency.  She hung up.  Fifteen minutes later, someone called back to ask if she need a policeman or an ambulance.  That’s OK; we’re already dead!

So now I know I should be wary on roasting days and if something goes wrong, no one is coming to help. Little things that make my job more exciting.