Roasted: Heat up and grind with Java Pura

By Amanda Gutierrez     3/13/12 7:00pm

When the owner of Java Pura, Richard Colt, suggested that I take a tour of Java Pura's local roasting factory, I jumped at the opportunity to see  coffee-roasting and packaging process for the first time. Upon arriving, I realized I had expected a much larger operation than the one I found: a room containing two large machines and walls aligned with large bins of unroasted coffee beans. The aroma of fresh unhampered coffee beans wafted to my nose. The factory room was unexpectedly small, and I craned my neck looking for the door that would lead to a much larger room filled with workers pouring beans into the roasters and the machines booming and crackling as the coffee was roasted. To my surprise, that room with two machines and buckets of coffee beans is the entire Java Pura coffee-roasting factory.

Java Pura is a micro-roasting company. Currently there are only two people roasting all of the coffee that Java Pura puts on the market, with Colt himself being the main roaster. To demonstrate the process he goes through multiple times a day, he dumped a bucket of the green coffee beans into the top of the machine. He tapped a few buttons, and the coffee beans began churning inside the metal cylinder. Heat began to emanate from the machine, and a loud cracking sound filled the room. The whole roasting took about 15 minutes. Throughout that time, Colt periodically checked the temperature and pulled out a few beans to make sure they were being roasted evenly. When he deemed the beans ready, he pulled a lever, and the freshly roasted, light brown coffee beans dropped from the machine into a bucket. He had made a medium roast.

In the next room, a pictorial timeline of the coffee bean-picking and drying process was outlined on the wall with photos taken from Java Pura's coffee farm in Costa Rica. While traveling around in the coffee-growing regions of Central America in the early days of the company, Colt stumbled upon Don Teofilo, a Costa Rican coffee farmer who owned an expanse of land with hundreds of Arabica coffee trees. During the visit, Colt and his business partner Fielding noticed something unique about Don Teofilo's crop. While the local coffee farms are stripping all the coffee cherries from the trees, both ripe and unripe, in the middle of the coffee season in order to sell as much as possible, "Don and his workers were carefully going from tree to tree paying close attention to picking only the ripest coffee cherries, leaving the unripe ones behind to be picked at a later date," says Colt describing the cherry-picking process. Compared to the high yield that his neighbors experience after only four weeks, Don's whole cherry-picking process takes about four months. However, the biggest difference is in the quality of the end product. Don Teofilo's beans prove to be some of the highest quality and most uniform batches Colt and Fielding had ever seen. They lunged at the opportunity and offered Don Teofilo more than twice as much for each pound of his beans than the other coffee companies were offering. As of four years ago, Don Teofilo's farm officially became part of Java Pura and engages in direct trade with the company, consistently providing the company with quality coffee beans. The beans are eventually brought to the Java Pura headquarters located a mere fifteen minutes from Rice campus. There the beans are roasted, tested, and packaged for local distribution. In addition to their signature Don Teofilo, Java Pura has about twenty-two different types off coffee, including Mexican Fair Trade to Indian Jamboor.

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The last part of the factory tour consisted of a coffee cupping demonstration. Cupping is the process by which a coffee's flavors, aromas and quality are measured by carefully tasting and smelling the freshly roasted beans. Colt describes the process as "getting down and dirty with coffee." Colt and Fielding gave a demonstration of what they do as skilled master tasters. The coffee is ground and put in small ceramic cups, and hot water is poured over the grounds. The ceramic cups are placed on a turning tabletop and many different coffees are tested at a time. The tasters deeply inhale the scent of each cup, noting the unique aromas. Then they slurp the coffee using a special technique that engages all of the taste buds. The tester notes the acidity, body, sweetness, flavor, aftertaste and other qualities of each coffee. These notes of flavor and intensity are what appear on the labels of the bags of coffee found in any store.

Java Pura surely seems to live up to its name: pure coffee. Since it is a micro-roasting company, it has a very specialized selection of coffee. Unlike commercial companies like Starbucks who focus on mass production, Java Pura slows down to focus on quality. Colt and Fielding claim that the "key to quality coffee is uniformity" and thus all of the beans of a certain batch are inspected, making sure that all the beans are the same size and color. Any rotten or stale beans are picked out by hand, as they could ruin the quality of the entire batch. This is what makes Java Pura's coffee so special. As a result of this micro-level specialization, the coffee is completely enjoyable by itself and does not need any flavored creamers or Half & Half to it to make it barely drinkable. With Java Pura's coffee, you taste the real untainted natural flavors and savor each smooth sip. This is how coffee should be.

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