Our warehouse is a coffee bean's final step in its odyssey from the white, jasmine-scented blossoms that burst out following the rainy season each year. Those blooms give way to the cherries that ripen slowly over nine months until they're hand-plucked from the tree. While the picking is labor-intensive, it's only the first step in processing the coffee as it's slowly transformed from soft, moist seed to hard, greenish bean that arrives in our warehouse.

In every step of the coffee growing, processing and transporting, small steps can make big flavor differences in the resulting bean. Experienced palates can discern those differences and, in many cases, connect them to some aspect of the processing or growing. Much of our roasters' work is to develop those flavor differences through roasting and to provide feedback to the farmers on what they're tasting in the coffee, completing the feedback loop on a joint quest for more delicious coffee.

At Peace Coffee, we take our responsibility to those who grew the coffee seriously - our roaster's job is to take the best the farmers can offer us and develop its best qualities.

We do that by roasting coffee every day to fill the orders that come in, packing it right away, and by obsessing about getting the details right. While the roaster running the roasting machine may be looking dreamy, he or she's actually tracking a variety of variables (in addition to rocking out inside the headphones).

Those variables are gas and airflow, which work together to change the amount and quality of heat reaching the beans. Unlike your average cake, which bakes at one temperature for a set amount of time, a good roaster will be manipulating the amount of heat moving through the drum throughout the roast. Through those varying levels of heat, the roaster can choose to accentuate certain qualities of the bean itself or to emphasize the rich flavors of the roasting process.

Just how to balance gas and airflow and when to make those adjustments is at the heart of the balance of art, science, and acute perception that is the responsibility of good roasting.

Each lot of coffee requires something a little different to bring out its very best qualities and the roasters are in the lab daily, sampling, tasting, trying something a little different, tasting again until they’re satisfied. Roast a bean with a delicate aroma of bergamot too long and it'll yield nothing but a flat, cardboardy brew; roast it too dark and its nuances will be overpowered. Whether light or dark roast, most coffees take about the same amount of time to roast - somewhere between 13-18 minutes - to get to the final end temperature and desired degree of darkness. The "ideal" roast profile for any coffee changes from lot to lot. The bean's inherent moisture, atmospheric conditions, and many other environmental factors are all variables to be considered.

Once the coffee is done roasting, it's released into the cooling tray where super-powered fans cool it to room temperature as quickly as possible so it doesn't continue "roasting" on its own heat. From there, the coffee is packaged in minutes not hours from when it emerges from the roaster - contact with oxygen will stale coffee, so it's key to protect it fast.

The roasting process is a long series of chemical reactions, but once the coffee's out of the roaster, the chemical reactions continue and gases such as CO2 are emitted. Within the first 24 hours after roasting, coffee can actually be too fresh to drink - if it hasn't "degassed" completely, the residual gases can give it a somewhat misleading flavor. Taste it a day later, and you'll be surprised by the sweetness and complexity that has developed!

Those gases are responsible for the bags of coffee that you may see that look all puffed up - because we package our coffee so quickly (that's a good thing!), the bags fill up with CO2. All our bags have little one-way valves in them, allowing air and gases to escape but not go into the bag. That escaping CO2 pushes out whatever oxygen is present, helping to stave off staleness.

From there, the beans go out the door as quickly as possible, getting fresh, tasty coffee into your hands and your cup.