First by way of a story let me paint a picture

This is a true story of a coffee shop that opened a year or so back.  They were not too far away, but far enough that neither of us were much competition to each other.  A month or so after they opened several of our regular clients (college professors, students, etc) said we should make a sales call and see if they could be persuaded to purchase our coffee wholesale.  So we did.

The gentleman was nice enough, and said, “Well if you can compete on wholesale pricing with XXX company we’d consider it.”

Obviously my next question was, “Could you give me some idea of where we need to be?”

I couldn’t believe it.  His shipped price (and he got out the invoice) was cheaper than what I pay for green beans.

Now my next statement may sound very subjective, but we bought a cup to try and it wasn’t all that great [and I'm being kind].

Bottom line, he never got any traction because of the coffee quality issue (despite free internet, being on a main student walkway to the local university campus, and having great hours).  People told us they just didn’t like the coffee and quit going.  They were out of business within 6 months.

The day when you can simply open a coffee shop and draw a crowd are gone.  People today have been exposed to some great coffees and generally know when they are drinking bad coffee and they won’t pay for it.

That’s tough.  But we see it a lot.  Read on…

There was another shop we called on in another city and the owner said he was just interested in price. Going further he went on to explain the he didn’t even drink coffee or like it!  I kid you not.  That’s what he said.

They’re out of business also I might add.

You see wholesale pricing is relative: You wanna Maserati or you wanna Yugo?

I have a lot of options as a roaster when it comes to the green beans I buy to roast.  I get calls and emails weekly from importers and specialty coffee businesses pitching their coffees.  We usually ask for samples and then test roast them.  Sometimes the coffee is good, occasionally great but all too often, average.

Next I check the pricing.  That’s where the rubber hits the road.

With recent climatic events the coffee world has been turned upside down with astronomical price increases of 40-70% for green beans.  But even taking that into consideration the numbers quite often are crazy.

Expensive and Better are not always the same

What we have found is that just because someone believes their coffee is worth $x, my palette may not agree.  However in fairness, sometimes their coffees are priced as they are for other reasons out of their control:

• The quantities they purchase in
• Shipping costs
• Import/export costs
• Origin processing costs

That said, we have a standard we look for in our coffees and it’s very high.  We buy only the top grade beans a particular country exports.  We then find the best source for that grade in each country.  We currently work with 2-3 importers who are meeting our needs well.

We know we are competitive

For the quality we sell we know we are VERY competitive.  That’s it. We sell a lot of our custom roasted coffee through fund-raisers for organizations and know that people like it due to the repeat sales we get from their clients quite often.

But when it comes to price, it is what it is.  We start with a high quality raw product and process it in state of the art roasting equipment using our own proven, peerless roasting profiles.  The result is a range of coffees that developed a brand recognition in our area.  That translates into thousands of pounds of coffee sold and thousands of satisfied customers that return to our shop day after day, week after week, year after year.

In conclusion…Quality Counts Today

So if your looking to develop a coffee shop business that sustains itself from providing a product that generates repeat business based on it’s quality we are very likely  the source you should consider.

However if you only care about price and you are comparing apples to apples we’re very competitive there also.  Remember we use an infrared roaster, not a more typical flame based commercial roaster. (Read more on why our coffee is better because of this difference here)

Finally remember, wholesale pricing is also relative to purchased quantities, whole bean or ground, and your purchasing cycle or frequency.

Just remember, your customers know good coffee these days and will return if you provide what they want.

Here's a grainy photo from one of my flights into the Ecuadorian rainforest to pick up coffee, 1997 (Click to enlarge)

As many of our locals know, before we came to Auburn, we were missionaries living in Central and South America.  I worked  as a bush pilot with Mission Aviation Fellowship where I supported the work of missionaries to some degree, but to a greater degree my flying was in support of the indigenous tribes that inhabited the eastern rain-forested jungles of Ecuador.  The tribes includes the Waorani, Shuar, Atshuar and Quichua Indians.

In the northern Ecuadorian  jungle lived several communities of Quichuas (the descendants of the Incas) who grew Arabica coffee. In one community, Arajuno (ah-dah-hun-no), each year they began picking the coffee in November and the picking lasted through the holidays and finished in January.

They processed their coffee the best they could easily in the jungle by laying out plastic sheets on the main street of their community and situating the picked beans onto the black plastic in the sun.  As it baked in the sun and they raked it back and forth throughout the day, the outer layer (pulp) would split, dry out the four layers surrounding the coffee bean and pull away from the inner fruit which is the coffee bean.  This is an example of dry processing.

Dry Processing

The dry-process is often used in countries where rainfall is scarce and long periods of sunshine are available to dry the coffee properly.  Most coffees from Indonesia, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Yemen are dry-processed.

Dry processed coffee. These are the actual cherries with beans still inside after dry processing. Next step is hulling.

The entire cherry ( the red fruit of the coffee plant ) after harvest is placed in the sun to dry on tables, in thin layers on patios or in the case I witnessed in Ecuador, a plastic covered street. It will take between ten days and two weeks for the cherries to completely dry. The cherries need to be raked regularly to prevent mildew while they dry.

Once the skin of the cherry is dry, the pulp and parchment are removed by a hulling process.  This is commonly done by sending the dried cherries off to a mill with machinery to do the hulling.  There also, the sorting and grading occur. While coffee was once all dry processed it is now limited to regions where water or infrastructure for machinery is scarce.

My experience in Ecuador was unique in that this was the rain forest, but somehow they managed to get the coffee dried out enough. When I picked it up, I can remember looking at the dried knurly beans and what I was seeing was the actual bean still encased in the dried out pulp.

Characteristics of Dry Processed Coffee

The dry-process  produces coffee that is heavy in body, sweet, smooth, and complex. They are also lower in acidity (not pH), a flavor characteristic some call “brightness” or other refer to as the dry characteristics of a good red wine.

Probably the best example of a dry processed coffee we have in our inventory would be our Sumatra.  Of course there are slight variations on the dry process and my experience has been that Sumatra while often a dry processes can have a slight mildewy taint.  That’s not a negative but an actual characteristic common to many Sumatrans.

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In our next article, we will talk about the more common processing method known as wet processing.

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Sandy Toomer is Roast Master and part owner of Toomer’s Coffee Roasters, a premium specialty coffee roaster located in Auburn, Alabama.

We only provide Bunn Airpot brewers to our corporate clientele. It's the most efficient system for brewing our fine coffees!

Toomer’s Coffee Roasters can provide all your coffee needs for your business or office.

We provide industry standard,  Bunn equipment along with our famous custom roasted coffee.  We encourage the use of airports as they are more efficient at brewing the best cup of coffee and keeping it fresh and hot for many hours.

Why do we use Airport Brewing Systems only?

AB&T Bank President Bill Perry, "We love having Toomer's Coffee everyday!"

Typical glass or stainless steel brew stations are not good for office environments as they allow coffee to “over-cook” (burn) on the hot eyes, enabling the flavor rich oils to separate out as the water evaporates, killing the flavor characteristics of fine coffee.  This makes the coffee bitter.  Yuk!

Not so with a Toomer’s Office Coffee system in place.  The coffee will taste the same at 10 o’clock as it did when you made it at 8.  That’s the Toomer’s Office Coffee difference. Plus you’ll never have to worry about coming in the next day to find a pot full of sludge after it cooked on the eye all night.  Double yuk!

First test cup! New system installed at First Baptist Church Opelika.

Call us today!

Call us today  at 334-329-9852 [or use our Contact form] and let’s build a plan to suit your needs.

Remember, “Life’s short, drink great coffee!”

First, there are two types of coffee beans

Coffee beans come from two basic versins of coffee plants: either the Robusta ( aka Coffea robusta, or Coffea canephora) or Arabica (aka Coffea arabica) version.

At Toomer’s Coffee Roasters we do not roast or sell Robusta beans. I once asked our coffee broker how much Robusta they sell and she said less that 5% of their total volume is Robusta. While it is higher in caffeine content (the main reason I guess a dubious roaster might add it..to jack up the “vibrancy” of their blends), the overall taste issues and roasting peculiarities she said make it a less than desirable option.

Arabica beans on the other hand, while lower in caffeine content have a number of factors that make them the number #1 preference amongst 99% of roasters today, taste being the main factor.  But we will cover that in a later articel specifically on Arabica beans.

They start life as a fruit

Coffee beans start out "Cherries" (Click to enlarge)

Arabica beans are grown on low (3-6 feet) shrubby plants that bear white blossoms that produce the coffee fruit called “cherries” (about the size and color of cranberries).

These coffee cherries are clustered along the limbs of the plant ( See image).  The cherries are harvested from approximately October through January each year.  Since the coffee cherries do not ripen together, several pickings of the the same plant may be required until all of the cherries have been harvested at the peak of ripenness.

This is the first step in the chain of factors that seperates fair coffee from truly exceptional coffee: only picking the red cherries.  Mixing in under-ripe/ greenish cherries with red cherries will result in bitter coffee no matter how well it is roasted.

In our next article we will talk about the regions beans are grown in and how that affects flavor.

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Today our relationship has grown to the point where we now supply all of the coffee for First Baptist Church.  First Baptist serves over 1000 cups a week to their staff, congregation and visitors.

Most recently First Baptist purchased a Bunn double station airport brewing system from Toomers Coffee Roasters making the process of serving Alabama’s best locally roasted coffee easier and faster.

We really appreciate the folks at First Baptist and their support of another local business and Auburn’s only custom coffee roaster!

Thank you First Baptist!

Today we provide all of their coffee needs from day to day office coffee to their mid-week dinners and special events as well as their coffee service for Sunday mornings!

In addition we were able to provide a commercial Bunn Coffee maker from Toomer’s Coffee for brewing airpots.

Thanks Cornerstone!

Roast Master, Sandy Toomer checks the progress of each roast step by step to perfection!

From the beginning we felt the only way we could keep our product consistent with our own expectations would be  by roasting our own coffee.  We like to think of ourselves as a coffee roaster first and a coffee shop second.  The shop is where we display our craft, much as first class art gallery is a show place for fine art.

That said here is a short FAQ about our coffee roasting operation:

What exactly do you mean by “custom roasted”?

Just that; we roast using customized roast profiles for each coffee depending on where it was grown, the altitude and process used to process the bean (i.e wet or dry process) .  Profiles are similar to recipes, except there is only one ingredient, high grade Arabica coffee beans.  The customization is the way each bean is roasted by varying several factors such as time, temperature, length of roast.

Where do you get your beans?

We primarily work through a coffee brokerage firm who imports coffee from all over the world for us.  They buy various grades from each country and we in turn choose which beans we buy based on their offering.

However this year we are working on several import arrangements with a number of small family, tribal and community coop coffee farms in Central America and the Asiatic region to purchase their coffees direct.  This is what we call Friendship Coffee.  Our goal is develop a personal relationship with our farms in these regions.

If all goes well, someday we hope to offer tours to visit these new friends!

Currently we are test roasting and cupping to validate sample batches of these coffees.

How do you roast coffee?

First, someone has to teach you.  It’s a craft. A craft is a passionate enterprise and we are passionate about good coffee.

Sandy was taught by Mr. Stephen Diedrich at Diedrich Manufacturing in Sandpoint, Idaho.  In the beginning Diedrich Coffee Roasters was a Southern, California icon of custom roasted coffee for decades (read more).  They built their own coffee roasters and eventually branched their coffee roaster manufacturing off as a separate enterprise. Hence, today we have Diedrich Manufacturing; considered the Rolls Royce of roasters.  We use a Diedrich 7 kilo IR Roaster.

Next, you buy the best green Arbica coffee beans.  We currently work through an acclaimed broker in New York and import coffees from:

Sumatra and Papua New Guinea (Indonesia)
Tanzania, Kenya ,and Ethiopia (Africa)
Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Columbia and Brazil (Central & So. America)
India

We also have our own house blends, such as top seller, our Auburn City Blend, Christmas Morning (seasonal), Harvest Morning (seasonal) and of course our proprietary Espresso Blend (for espresso based drinks).

In addition we offer a half dozen flavored coffees: Vermont Maple Nut, Snickeroo, Southern Pecan, Kahlua & Creme, Vanilla Butter Cream, and our own blend called Caribbean Cruise

Give us a try and you will taste the 14 day difference

The primary variation between our coffees and what you typically buy in the store has to do with the 14 day window.

When you roast coffee the heating initiates a chemical reaction that generally lasts for 14 days.  This is why so many coffees are packages with those valves you see.  Because for the first 14 days or so after roasting the coffee produces it’s trademark aroma.  Without the valve the bag would rupture.  After 14 days, that stops.

The trademark aromas range from chocolate, fruity, winy, floral notes, and so on.  Actually each coffee will normally produce a range of aromatic values in each cup.

You don’t get this in mass produced coffees.

We ship anywhere anywhere!

Want to share some of this unique taste from the “loveliest village on the plains”?    However if you are looking for another not listed, just call us.  We’re a family owned operation and thus you are dealing directly with the owners!

VISIT OUR ON-LINE STORE HERE>>>

Call us today!  334-329-9852