In-season: Coffee
Whether we sip from our morning mug of coffee for the rush of caffeine or simply to enjoy the flavor, our culture has become obsessed with coffee. It’s often referred to as “liquid gold”—mostly for br...
Perfect Cup
Coffee is simultaneously celebrated and cursed, colorful and commonplace. So-called coffee snobs will go on at length about how only the most carefully curated beans and diligently brewed elixir will cross their palates—never overcooked sludge sitting on a burner for hours. But based on the proliferation of “Not until I’ve had my coffee” memes, mugs and T-shirts, given the choice of bad coffee or no coffee, no coffee is never an option.
Michiana is blessed with many coffee shops, though, and many of them roast their own beans. If your favorite spot doesn’t, there’s a good chance they get beans from a local place that does. They all share a dedication to their craft, as well as a sense of the community that coffee helps foster. And they all bring a blend of training, taste and technology to roasting that makes for a sophisticated process.
“We’re really not in the coffee business, we’re in the making-people-happy business,” says Brian Maynard, owner of Forté Coffee in St. Joseph, Michigan. When Maynard, newly retired from a marketing career with KitchenAid, was contemplating a return to the coffee business (he had a mail-order coffee company in addition to his day job in the 1980s, reselling other roasters’ beans), he admits he himself did not expect to be roasting. But while visiting more than 100 coffee shops as research, a café owner in Pueblo, Colorado, opened his mind to the possibility.
“You’re going to roast your own coffee, right?” the owner asked. Maynard hadn’t considered it. “Well, you went to culinary school,” the owner said. “It’s just cooking.”
So he bought a roaster, which demand quickly outpaced. So he bought a bigger one. After that, he started sending interested staffers to roasting school. Then Forté Coffee started selling roasted beans to other cafés.
“The secret sauce is how much development time do you need,” Maynard says. “After first crack [when green coffee beans reach a temperature of about 390°], what temperature do you have it and how long are you going to roast? How are you going to bring out the best qualities of the beans?”
These are important questions, he says, because, for example, once you roast past a medium-style roast, the flavor isn’t necessarily in the terroir or characteristics of the beans themselves, but the roast.
Jessica Nance, owner of Red Arrow Roasters in Harbert, Michigan, first experienced people happy about coffee when she worked in a café in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was a tiny little roaster in the center of the café. She says she “loved the vibe” that rose up around the clientele of students, workers and others in the community.
When she returned to the Midwest, she found that the coffee vibe in Flagstaff hadn’t really arrived here. After living in Chicago for a while, she moved to Harbor Country and got a job as a barista with Infusco Coffee Roasters in Sawyer, Michigan. It was there she learned roasting. Fast forward a bit, and she had experience working at or consulting with a number of places in different roles, honing her roasting skills. When it came time to open Red Arrow, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.
“My roaster is super tiny,” she says. “But that’s because of the business I wanted to do: If I start small, I can always buy a second one.” Since roasting involves a lot of trial and error, she says, small batches lowered the risk if something didn’t pan out.
Nance keeps careful note of her roasting profiles, even down to the weather at roasting time. Once she has a roasting profile set, she can replicate it quickly without compromising on one key thing: freshness. “I try to turn coffee every two weeks,” she says. “I only roast enough to sell it and roast fresh. I am reluctant to have my coffee [sitting] on shelves. I want people to see my coffee and know it’s fresh.”
Consistency is also key for Toccoa Coffee in Granger, Indiana, from roasting to the moment a customer gets their cup, mainly because of its particular mission.
Owner Jeff Whitlow found himself out of a job during the economic downturn of 2008–2009. Around the same time, he attended the Ambex Coffee Roasting School in Clearwater, Florida. “I found there really are a lot of things you can do with coffee,” he says. “I believe coffee can be used to do some really great things.”
One of those, he says, is building community. Toccoa was a wholesale roaster for most of its 12 years, supplying restaurants, cafés, offices and churches around the country. Whitlow liked the sense of community he found in coffee shops and, since he comes from a church background, he wanted to bring that “coffee shop culture” to churches. He also liked doing fundraisers, he says, for churches, schools and charities. Now he’s helping people with disabilities, the focus of the café he opened in March 2023.
The main inspiration, he says, is his 26-year-old son, who is autistic. They were fortunate to receive a lot of services from Corvilla, which aids people with disabilities. When Corvilla opened a facility in Granger, Toccoa partnered with it to open a café in the building.
“We believe our [Corvilla] clients should have access to the public and the public should have access to them,” Whitlow says. When it came time to hire café staff, he wanted people with disabilities to be part of the team. As a result, he says, every part of the operation was carefully thought out. For example, some people with disabilities can’t lift heavy objects, making pouring milk from a large container difficult. So, they designed and installed a pumping system to get the milk from the refrigerator to the barista.
Whitlow uses digital feedback to refine processes and make adjustments. “I’m coming from more of an engineering background, so everything is systematic,” he says.
That combination of technical excellence and mission is what builds the community Toccoa works to foster. “I think the community has responded to the mission that we have,” he says. “They come in expecting coffee and they learn about our mission, and they become fans of our mission.”
A similar sense of mission motivates Marco Micola von Fürstenrecht, co-owner of Rapha Roast Coffee Company in South Bend, Indiana. The idea to start Rapha—which does not have a café, though it has an online store and operates a trailer that sells coffee in the area—was revealed to Micola von Fürstenrecht during a moment of prayer. He says he was called to help others and knew that his ministry, in a way, would be coffee.
Coffee was the common element in all his conversations as he traveled the world doing missionary work. The challenge was that he didn’t really know anything about roasting coffee. That didn’t stop him from buying a small roaster and learning.
Rapha’s coffee is roasted with a process known as fluid bed roasting (sometimes called air roasting). Instead of being turned in a heated drum, where the beans are roasted by contact with a hot surface, the beans are roasted on all sides in a bed of constantly moving (aka fluid) hot air. Think of a hot-air popcorn popper, but with coffee beans.
Rapha provides coffee for charity events and charitable organizations, but it also sells to cafés and consumers. Besides the coffee trailer, Rapha coffee can be purchased at the Garden Patch Market in Mishawaka, Oh Mamma’s in South Bend and the Goshen Farmers Market—all in Indiana—and in Michigan at the Buchanan Sweet Shop, among others.
Rapha also supports international charities that aid women and children as part of its mission.
That focus on giving back also is reflected in its suppliers. All but one of the types of beans Rapha roasts, Micola von Fürstenrecht says, are direct trade, which means the beans are purchased directly from farmers. And while that can cost a roaster more, it also means the farmers get a fairer price for their coffee.
Many of the roasters around the area purchase direct trade beans. Following these practices allows for a general improvement in the quality of coffee beans. As Whitlow says, “The key to roasting good coffee is having good beans.”
A large portion of these beans is supplied by Theta Ridge Coffee in South Bend.
Theta Ridge owner Kevin Kuyers started the business from scratch. Originally part owner of a coffee farm in Kenya, he began importing coffee from that country. He started selling green (unroasted) coffee beans, with a large selection of direct trade beans and some fair trade beans, around the U.S.
Theta Ridge supplies a large portion of the Michiana market, including Forté, Red Arrow and Infusco. Theta Ridge also sells direct to consumers via its website, for those intrepid coffee fans who are looking for the ultimate coffee nerd flex: home roasting.
It’s a huge market, Kuyers says, with some estimates suggesting about 500,000 people are roasting at home.
Theta Ridge sells home roasting equipment. But with the most inexpensive roaster starting at $479 (the price goes up depending on the size and the complexity of the technology involved), Kuyers has a more economical idea for test-driving home roasting.
“When someone is new to this, we recommend getting a hot-air popcorn popper,” he says. It won’t roast a full pound in one go, but it is an inexpensive way to decide if you like the process enough to stick with it.
As the beans roast, he says, you’ll be listening for what is called “first crack.” Much like popcorn, moisture inside the beans expands with heat and the beans crack. This is a light roast. If you’re going for a darker roast, you wait for second crack. That’s when the oils in the beans begin to come out and the flavor becomes deeper.
But if roasting your own beans is not for you, you are more than covered with options for locally made coffee. “I have not come across a roaster around here that has been bad,” Maynard says.
Forté Coffee
2045 Niles Rd.
Saint Joseph, MI
forte.coffee
Red Arrow Roasters
13933 Red Arrow Hwy.
Harbert, MI
redarrowroasters.com
Toccoa Coffee
135 E. University Dr.
Granger, IN
574.217.0972
Rapha Roast Coffee Company
833.772.3267
rapharoast.com
Theta Ridge Coffee
6879 Enterprise Dr., Unit 200
South Bend, IN
thetaridgecoffee.com
Other local roasters
Indiana:
Bendix Coffee Roasters, Elkhart
Cloud Walking Coffee, South Bend
Dagger Mountain Coffee, Valparaiso
The Electric Brew, Goshen
Light Rail Roasting Co., Winona Lake
Main Street Roasters, Nappanee
Refinery Coffee Company, Goshen
A Roaster Called Revenant, South Bend
Michigan:
BeesWax Coffee, Dowagiac
Infusco Coffee, Sawyer
Three Rivers Coffee Company, Three Rivers
Uncommon Coffee Roasters, Douglas
Union Coffee House & Cafe, Buchanan
Mike Petrucelli is a former food editor for the South Bend Tribune who now works in nonprofit communications. He and his wife live in Plymouth, Indiana.
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