Kimberton Coffee Roasters

My name in Benjamin Biffis and I am currently a sophomore at Kimberton Waldorf School. As part of our curriculum this year, we were asked to go and experience what it is like to work in a “cottage industry” type business. This project is called our Artisan Internship. 

I looked at all of my options, and saw that coffee roasting sounded like something that I would really be interested in doing. I chose a very small, local coffee roasting facility called Kimberton Coffee Roasting Co. This facility is a small building situated on the owner's (Mary and Steve Polignano) property right behind their house. When I walked in for the first time I was a little nervous because I was not used to something this small. I was greeted very warmly by Mary Polignano, who explained how coffee was roasted, packaged and sold at this small business, and I immediately felt a lot more comfortable.

Here's a bag of freshly roasted Kimberton coffee
and a mug of hot, delicious coffee!

Mary and Steve started their business back in 2004 with the vision of creating small batches of specialty coffees which would be sold to the surrounding communities. Even today, some seven years later, they are still very local, servicing several stores (Acme, Wegmens, Redners Warehouse, Kimberton Whole Foods), restaurants (Black Lab, Majolica), and individual customers who order from their web site.

What happens at these stores where they sell their coffee is that they are given a set amount of shelf space, which they are responsible to maintain and keep supplied at all times. Usually Mary will travel to these stores each Monday and write down by hand the amount and types of coffee that each store needs. Then, after she gets these numbers, she has to calculate how much of each type of coffee she needs to roast. This can be tedious at times because sometimes the blends require several different kinds of coffee in very specific amounts.

Once she has all of the numbers figured out, she can start the roasting process. This process typically takes place on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which are the days I decided to work on. All of the roasting happens in a large, crimson-red coffee roaster. Mary explained to me how it all worked, and how it was essential to keep everything cleaned, because as coffee roasts it leaves behind several sticky by-products which can build up if they are not cleaned regularly. Basically there is a large bin inside which spins over a heat source.

  

As the coffee spins over this heat it roasts, and depending on how dark you want the roast will determine the length of the roast as well as how high you roast the beans at. Typically for a medium roast the temperature is about 430°F, while for a darker roast it is more like 470°. Once the coffee is finished roasting (there are several really cool ways of checking), it is emptied onto a surface which has cold air blowing onto it. Here the coffee beans are left until they are completely cooled down, and then are taken and stored in large, 5 gallon buckets until they are ready to be packaged.

The roaster itself can hold up to fifteen pounds of green coffee beans at once. However, during the roasting process about three out of every fifteen pounds of coffee that goes in is lost due to the extraction of moisture from the beans.

Before we roast, Mary has to decide how many batches of each kind of bean we will roast. We only want to do as much as we need for the week (to ensure that the freshest possible coffee is sold). Mary and Steve have several different types of beans which they use (Colombian, Ethiopian, Sumatra etc.) as well as standard and certified organic versions of each kind. Of course the organic beans are slightly more expensive, but they need to go through very specific procedures once Mary and Steve have them in order for the beans to be certified organic by the USDA. For example, the beans must be kept at different sides of the building then the standard beans, and before they are roasted the coffee roaster must be wiped down in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Once the coffee is roasted, it is brought over to be packaged. Before it can be packaged, though, we have to affix by hand several different stickers including ones telling a little bit about Kimberton Coffee Roasters, what kind of coffee it is, an explanation of that kind, and whether it is whole bean or ground. Mary explained that she could order the bags with prefixed labels already on them, but that it is far too costly and you would have to order thousands at a time.

Each bag needs exactly 12 oz. of coffee in it, so the first thing we do is get the tare of the bag itself (.04 lb). Then we have to fill each bag up individually and constantly weigh each one to ensure that there is exactly the right amount of coffee. When a package of ground coffee is needed, you have to actually put the right amount into a small coffee grinder and wait for it to grind. Once you have a bag of coffee finished, you have to go over and seal it with the help of a small machine. The final step is to fold over the top of the bags, tape them down, and put the bar-codes on them.

In order to get the bar-codes, Mary has to go into each store online and get their unique bar-codes. Then she prints them out using a small machine which she rents weekly, and includes the roast date, as well as a “best by” date (she puts that at three months from the roast date). She explains, though, that coffee can technically stay on the shelves for two years, and shows me how the very large coffee roasting companies simply say “use by 2013.” Having just this end date makes it very hard for someone to tell when the coffee was roasted. That is why Mary and Steve take the time to let people know exactly when their coffee was roasted. If for some reason they cannot sell their coffee in three months, Mary will actually go and remove the coffee from the store shelves and credit the store for it.

Another large part to their continued success is keeping up with the business side of things. When Mary tried to explain the business side of running Kimberton Coffee, my head started swimming. It seemed as if this aspect was so much more complicated and labor intensive then the coffee roasting itself. Each morning Mary checks to see if she has received any payments from her vendors. If she has, then she enters the amount into a helpful program where she can check off who has paid. Then she has to reconcile the amount of money she has taken in with all outstanding payments, and do many other complicated things which I barely understood and cannot even begin to explain. Then she checks to see if anyone has placed an online order. If they have then she has to go back and recalculate how much coffee she will need to roast.

Overall, I really enjoyed this week a lot and look forward to spending more time in the next two weeks learning all there is to know about the production of roasting coffee on a small, local scale.

Benjamin Biffis