Artisan profile: the coffee roaster

A roastery at seven in the morning is loud, hot and smells like toast. The drum turns, the beans rattle, and every ninety seconds a small sample is pulled out, sniffed, and dropped back in. The whole job is paying attention for eleven minutes at a time.

It starts a year earlier

Green coffee is bought long before anyone drinks it, often from the same farms year after year. That relationship is most of the quality. The roast can protect what is in the bean, or destroy it, but it cannot invent it.

Roasting badly is easy and takes eleven minutes. Roasting well is the same eleven minutes with nothing else on your mind.

Why your home coffee tastes worse

• The beans are old. Coffee is produce, not pantry stock; three weeks off roast is the window.
• The grind is wrong, and it is almost always too fine for filter and too coarse for espresso.
• The water. Amsterdam water is hard, and hard water flattens everything that made the coffee worth buying.

The thing worth learning

Tasting. Not the vocabulary, the actual act of tasting two cups side by side and noticing which one you prefer. Once you can do that reliably you stop buying by label and start buying by taste, and the whole thing becomes cheaper as well as better.

Where to try it

Our coffee workshops in Amsterdam run in the roastery itself, which means you brew the same coffee three ways within an hour and finally hear the difference rather than reading about it.