Roasting Revelations: All the Thought Behind that Cup of Coffee
COFFEE—and the power of coffee—vitalizes the individual, and also the community as a whole. The friendly yellow brick of Kavarna Coffee warmly beckons to those wandering the historic Broadway district of Green Bay. Owner Kayla Viste’s attachment to Kavarna began in college, “I had actually worked as a barista at Kavarna years ago, when I first graduated from the University of Green Bay. I had always been impressed by the space and the sense of comfort it brought me.”
“IF WE DON’T MAKE OUR COFFEE ACCESSIBLE , AND THEY HAVE TO COME AND GET IT AND HANGOUT WITHIN A COMMUNITY, THAT’S A GOOD THING. WE TRULY BELIEVE THAT COFFEE, A CAFE, SHOULD BE AN EXPERIENCE. ”
When the UW Extension, where Kayla was a 4 H educator for Outagamie County, merged with UW Madison, Kayla’s desire to own her own business resurfaced, and, serendipitously, Kavarna went up for sale at the same time, leading her to join the Kavarna community as co-owner with Mike Hastreiter. Mike shares her belief about the importance of a cafe in bringing people together, “We are one of the few places where you can come in and it's likely you are going to have a conversation with a stranger.”
In addition to really good coffee, the menu features numerous gluten free options served in an atmosphere that encourages people to linger and stay, some even seemingly keeping office hours in the space. The spacious two story cafe features work from local artists, vintage, mismatched tables, and velour couches. Near the counter sits a table Kayla’s father built from a 100 year old piece of butcher block found in a farm building on his property. Kavarna is a place where everyone just fits, and guests forget how long they have sat there. It is a place of color against a background of old, neutral brick, a mix of vintage and modern. The most modern item? An electric roaster.
Just like chefs, brewers, and vintners gravitate towards particular equipment and processes, so do those who roast our beloved coffee beans. While many roasters use gas roasters, others have turned to electric roasters. Kavarna is one of these places where vintage conversational space has merged with modern day technology. Gas roasters are more popular today, but electric roasters will most likely be prioritized over gas in the near future. Over fifty cities in California and Massachusetts have banned the use of roasters that use natural gas or offered incentives to switch to electric and more states are scheduled to follow.
The new age of electric roasters are not just using electricity as an energy source to heat air, but most of them are also using algorithms and advanced controls to guide the roasting process. Some gas roasters feature these algorithms as well, but this isn’t common. Those who use gas roasters need a lot of experience in order to know when to increase drum speed, air flow, temperature, and other variables. When Mike and Kayla build their “roast curves,” they tell the machine’s algorithm the temperature they want the beans to be at at a certain time in the roast. The roaster then uses this input to control the roast; because it has been told this information, the roaster itself controls the drum speed, pressure, heat, and air flow. Mike and Kayla do not have to do that. “We got to skip the part where roasters learn how to control all these variables because this electric roaster has algorithms,” explained Mike. “This is a reason why I still refer to us as novice roasters and do not take on apprentice roasters.”
Building the roast curves helps them control the richness of the coffee. Cupping is a process that allows a roaster to extract everything out of the coffee in order to ascertain its underlying profiles. It grants someone tasting and playing with flavor to gain a full sense of what might be locked away in that bean. The roasters can modify their roast curves to pull out chocolate notes, citrus notes, etc. In fact, tasting in this way with trays of nuts, citrus, and chocolate can help a roaster better train their palette. Mike and Kayla build a matrix and work to know what they want. “We know the key ways to modify our roast curves to pull out certain things.”
“I am a process nerd,” declares Mike. At one point he was a home brewer who eventually built his own equipment and was using all grain. In high school his friend's dad was a trained chef and would teach them skills. He and Kayla are both curious home cooks who have always liked to play with flavors. Their curiosity and desire to grow also leads them to take three tasting trips a year. They call these excursions Cafe Crawls. While in Milwaukee and Madison visiting family, they might spend a morning going to 5-10 cafes. At each cafe, they order a shot of espresso and a drip brew and share it. Mike believes “if you are always just drinking your own stuff, at some point you are losing sight of what else can be done.” Guests at Kavarna benefit from their methodical curiosity.
Gas roasters and electric roasters are similar in that they roast beans in the same amount of time. It takes about seven to eight minutes to create a light roast and up to about fourteen to fifteen minutes to create a dark roast. Just like on our ovens in our kitchens, electric roasters can provide a more even heat, while gas can provide more energy at one time than electricity can. This is why electric roasters only roast five pounds of beans at one time. Gas roasters can produce hundreds of pounds of roasted beans in one roasting session. Mike, however, is unconcerned about this. He and Kayla do not want to distribute and sell the beans they roast. While people can find their beans at Kavarna to enjoy coffee at home, distributing beans works against their philosophy of opening a cafe in the first place. To Mike and Kayla, working with coffee isn't only about the coffee, but about the space itself and the sense of community that is created in their space.
“If we don’t make our coffee accessible , and they have to come and get it and hangout within a community, that’s a good thing. We truly believe,” says Mike, “that coffee, a cafe, should be an experience. It’s not to say I don’t appreciate people buying beans and brewing coffee at home. I think that’s great. I think that’s economical. I would be doing that. I think that people in this age … everyone is so engrossed with social media and all these other things and I understand. People need to start to again find a sense of place and space and community. That’s really difficult to do. Our customers are an amazing group of people that care and, I think, understand what we are trying to do and I think that's why they come here over and over again even if it's out of their way.” In other words, what if we all sat and mingled in coffee shops? Because of this philosophy regarding connectivity, Mike and Kayla “do not hire bodies.” They hire people who want to banter to customers, who will draw people in with conversation.
Mike and Kayla’s passion about creating a community within Kavarna extends to ensuring a healthy community as a whole. In fact, the thought they put into what goes into the coffee they roast reveals an intense respect towards the earth and the farmers who rely on the earth for their livelihood. That modern electric roaster, created by the engineers of Bellwhether Coffee, is a more earth friendly method of getting us our daily caffeine fix.
Mike’s passion for sustainability was obvious as he spoke and his background in science probably also aided him in clearly explaining the difference between these two roasters to a layperson. While Mike’s explanation sold me on electric roasters, there are probably many who still wonder,“But these things still use electricity which also heat up the earth. So are they really that much better than gas?” Mike’s answer about the skeptics surprised me. “Their claims are founded,” he told me, “that is the same issue we are having with electric cars.”
However, Mike continued, explaining how their roaster and business practices at Kavarna make the electric roaster ultimately better for the environment. First, natural gas itself is, sometimes, obtained by fracking, a practice that has affected the groundwater systems of many communities. While, yes the use of electricity affects climate change, it doesn’t affect our drinking water. Also, an electric roaster does not keep circulating in cold air and then reheating it. Rather it heats the air to the temperature needed for roasting, and then cleans it, remaining at the same temperature to be used when roasting the next batch of beans, making it 88-94 percent more efficient than gas roasters. A gas roaster, however, continuously circulates fresh cold air from outside and reheats it.
While more efficient, roasting with electricity still isn’t a perfect method when it comes to sustainability. To attempt to mitigate these effects, Mike and Kayla opt to pay more for their monthly electric bill. A percentage of their payment goes to the WPS NatureWise renewable energy program, a program that allows WPS to help subsidize wind and biogas programs.
As we rush through our busy days, do we pause to take in the reality of roasting? Do we reflect on the culinary and flavor profiling art form it represents? Are we cognizant of how what sustains us can be produced in a sustainable way? That cup of coffee is about more than just a morning routine. It’s about who we share the experience with.
Kavarna provides an inclusive culture. “It sounds like some big overall thing but it's not, culture is just like anything else, it’s a lot of small things that add to a big thing,” states Mike. And at Kavarna that sense of culture is experienced over that butcher block table that Kayla’s father built; here various people have shared conversation and ideas while enjoying good coffee, coffee cultivated in conscientious choices regarding our planet.
