by Keith Tomlinson, Head Peace Coffee Roaster

The Roaster's Guild Retreat takes place over four days of August in Grand Rapids, Minnesota at the Sugar Lake Lodge. About an hour and a half north of Mille Lacs, the Sugar Lodge has been hosting the Roaster's Guild retreat for several years in a row. Last year was my first time and I was the lone roaster to go from Peace Coffee. This year Derek and Ryan accompanied me. We rented a car and, as I nervously survived my first time behind a wheel and traveling above 30 miles an hour in about six months, we discussed the various ways in which we could bike up the retreat next year. As it turns out, we weren't the only ones with alternative modes of transportation on our minds. The two women who run Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, NY spent a week traveling over 1300 miles via Vespas. You can read more about their visit to Peace Coffee on our blog. I spent part of the drive up from the Twin Cities trying to give some sage advice based on my experience from last year, but as it turns out the retreat is something you learn how to navigate on your own terms as the weekend reveals itself.

The retreat can be divided into basically three areas. Each with their own tone and required skill set: the social scene, the classes, and then the team competition.

First is the overall social nature of the event. It isn't often that you get to meet a couple of hundred other people that do a job similar in nature to the one you do, particularly when your craft is as unique as roasting coffee. Every person has their own theories, convictions, and tastes dictating what they do while behind the wheel of a roasting machine. The gentlemen from Alterra coffee were low-key beer lovers who tended to host their own bonfires and, I hear, played a great game of wiffle ball. David the Clover rep with his long hair and fashion spurned Derek to comment, "I hope the rock star is on my team." Befitting to Clover, David is in love with all things technological, sexy and top of the line. He gave me a demo of his iPhone, my first time to see one, and about eight glorious cups of Clover brewed, cup of excellence, Paradise Roaster roasted coffee. Miguel from Paradise wasn't seen but his coffee spoke well for him, including the mind-blowing, "it" coffee, the Panama Geisha. While playing croquet at night with headlamps, Derek and Ryan prepared a "Mixed-up Yeti" shaker for Paul Songer one of the presenters of the weekend who complimented us on our cold-press.

Approximate recipe for a Mixed-up Yeti. Adjust to your taste:
4oz. Vodka of your preference
2oz. Yeti cold press
1oz. or less of Frangelico

We left with tons of business cards and a bunch more friends that we can exchange ideas with and gather advice from. David from the Roasterie in Kansas City and I spent a lot of time quoting Sarah Silverman back and forth to each other in front of the bonfire that was sponsored by Café Imports. Since coming back to the cities I've had drinks a couple of times with a new friend who has been in the coffee business for nearly fifteen years. We've debated the nuances of Fair Trade and I've learned a minor fraction of what he knows about the coffee industry overall.

At the beginning of the first day everyone is divided into teams and then teams are put into four overall groups. You travel with these groups for the rest of the time there. There were five different classes. Two of them were focused on cupping (tasting) coffee while the others dealt with sensory analysis, organic farming, and the cost of quality. Sometimes armed with a handout, and at other times wearing my hand out frantically taking notes, I took in as much of each class as I could muster. I found myself quite relieved to know that Derek and Ryan were getting the same information as I was so that we could later compare notes. One of the great pleasures of going to the Roaster's Guild retreat is getting the opportunity to taste beans we don't have access to here at Peace Coffee. And then added to that is the pleasure of tasting coffee for purely academic purposes. The first of the two cupping classes was focused on a project being conducted with Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture in conjunction with a Rwandan coffee group and I'm sure others whom I either am not aware of or have since forgotten. The project was intended to analyze the impact of processing on the final outcome of a cup of coffee. We were the first to have a chance to taste these coffees as they had arrived from Rwanda in a brown leather suitcase merely days before. My impression based on what was presented is that fermentation time has a major impact on overall taste, while factors like transport time between harvesting and pulping of the coffee cherry have a much more subtle effect. There is a lot more tasting and analysis that will be done around this experiment, and I know we are all looking forward to the published results. The second cupping course was focused on presenting different varietals of coffee from two origins, Brazil and Panama. This only bolstered my conviction that Peace Coffee will in the future dedicate more time to identifying each of our coffees not only by origin but also by varietal and altitude as it has a huge impact on the taste and on how we as roasters approach the bean. The great synchronicity of having classes on organic farming and the overall cost of quality is the work that I am going to be doing with Cooperative Coffees in Nicaragua later this month. There were at least two moments when Peter from Larry's Beans, in North Carolina and also members of Coop Coffees, and I met in the hallway of the Sugar Lake Lodge thrilled to have more and greater information that directly impacted our ability to interact with Cecocafen. The sensory analysis class information has made several appearances at our weekly staff cupping and will continue inform how we approach overall quality control.

The part of the retreat that was the most rewarding personally, perhaps because it was so challenging last year, was the team competition. As you may have read in the last newsletter, each year the Roaster's Guild holds a team competition: "Team Los Guapos Wins at Roaster's Retreat." Last year the goal was to create a unique blend while adhering to a budget. This year the guild wanted to simplify the task and focus less on economics and more on the talent that was filling the room through the craft of roasting. Every team was given the same three coffees in green bean form: Ethiopian, Guatemalan, and Costa Rican. We were given slightly over a day to turn in our final project. Knowing that a good cup of coffee needs at least two days of the beans resting after being roasted we reasoned the sooner we could be finished the better our chances were of winning. Our approach was simple, we took four initial samples of each coffee to determine what roast level we would take the coffee to. From there we roasted two variations of each coffee, cupped them and chose the best among the two. We even had enough time to try our coffees from the Clover brewer.

A lot of times it can feel like you exist in a bubble, roasting coffee every day, doing your best to make intelligent and informed decisions about every piece of work that you do from creating new roast profiles to choosing one Coop in Guatemala over another. It's events like this that can help to pop your bubble so that it doesn't all seem so disconnected. When you are standing next to people from New York, Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin and you all point to the same cup of coffee as the best on the table it is incredibly validating and humbling and every bit of it is worthwhile.

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