Cappuccino Thoughts 56: On How the Coffee Gets Made

Behind-the-scenes roasting coffee with El Condor

Jan 29, 2024

I recently had a very special opportunity to see how the coffee gets made from bean to brew. The wonderful owners of the New York-local coffee company El Condor, Nicolas Simon and partner Dante Piedalue, invited me to their shared roasting facility to show me how to roast coffee.

The day began, fittingly, with an espresso near the 34th Street ferry. We took the ferry to the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where there’s a preponderance of roasting facilities and independent coffee shops. Walking over to the coffee roasting facility, I was surprised to see the Concorde airplane parked aboard a ship. Apparently, it’s getting a final cleaning before being sent to the Intrepid Museum. Just another day in New York City.

We stopped for a second espresso and talked about their future plans for El Condor. Their vision for El Condor transcends coffee. They aspire to make it a modern lifestyle brand. Why start with coffee then? Because it’s a daily luxury. Walking around with a coffee cup is a modern-day accessory, a status symbol that says you support local businesses, know the coolest new cafe, and drink the latest plant milk. Plus, coffee is ubiquitous but hard to get just right.

“The simpler it is, the more we should dig into the details,” owner Nicolas Simon tell me.

Nicolas and Dante roast their coffee in a shared roasting facility, a common practice since the upfront cost of roasting machines runs to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Walking into the roasting facility felt like walking into coffee heaven. The whole place smelled like—not coffee, exactly—but like caramel or toasted quinoa. Warm and inviting. All around the facility were beans in various states, including huge bags of raw beans piled on pallets, ready to be roasted. The beans that El Condor uses come from around the world via InterAmerican Coffee in New Jersey, a sort of market aggregator for high quality beans.

The roasting machines save flavor profiles, so for the West Village flavor we were roasting, it was a matter of pressing a few buttons. As Dante flicked through the list to look for his roast, I spotted the names of pretty much every high quality coffee company in New York. I asked if anyone ever steals another brand’s roast. Dante laughed and said he honestly had never considered that. “I don’t think coffee people trust other coffee people’s taste.”

Dante poured green beans into the machine and showed how magnets at the bottom pull down any dirt and rocks so they don’t end up in the final roast. He also explained that, although we were roasting 50 pounds of beans, we’d only get around 42 pounds back due to water loss. “It’s typical to get 13-14% water loss. The sugars inside the coffee beans break down and caramelize from the heat and that’s where you get the flavor,” he said.

One of the owners of the roasting facility, Alex, came by to introduce himself and asked where I was from. I proudly shared that I was from San Francisco and we started talking about coffee roast preferences globally. Unsurprisingly, New Yorkers favor bold, dark flavors (just like our personalities). Alex explained that in the Nordic countries, people favor a lighter roast. Coffee snobs apparently say it’s because Nordic people like the more fruity, floral, slightly acidic taste. Butt he thinks it’s financially driven. Because there’s less water loss in a lighter roast, 50 pounds of raw beans might result in 47 pounds of roasted beans (compared to the 42 pounds of our West Village roast).

The beans heated up, then were dropped into the drum of the machine at 410 degrees. The temperature plummeted, then spiked back up, which we watched on a screen. We roasted the 50 pounds in two batches. In the first batch, Dante waited for the temperature to spike, then brought the roast burn down to 91%. When the beans came out, Dante thought they looked just a hair too dark, so in the next batch he dropped the burn rate sooner.

Finally, the coffee beans were ejected out of the roaster. “Can you hear the cracks?” Dante asked me. Yes, I could. I lowered my head towards the beans and listened to a crackling sound that was akin to the world’s shyest popcorn, soft but clear. The cracking is caused by the coffee bean expanding and the moisture starting to evaporate. It’s even possible to get to a second crack, but in Dante’s opinion, that leads to too dark a roast.

On the other side of the machine, there was a chute that let out the bean husks. The byproduct, or chaff, as it’s called, is often sold to farmers to use in soil since it’s rich in vitamins.

Dante picked out the occasional burned bean by hand. A whole roast takes between 11.5-13 minutes.

“Every time I roast, I log the taste one variable at a time.”

The whole time we’d been having fun in this mad scientist’s experiment, Nicolas had been painstakingly sticking labels onto bags one by one. We took the bags and brought them over to the bagging machine. Buckets of beans were sucked up by a vacuum that measures them and shoots them back out at the weight needed. “I like to play a little game with myself and see how fast I can bag them up. My fastest ever was an average of 6.5 bags a minute,” Dante confided. He let me have a go and I quickly learned that was lightning fast. I struggled to press down on the lever at the exact moment five pounds of beans were measured out. Nicolas then sent the bags through a different machine that sealed them up so they remain shelf-stable for several months. Finally, we all took turns lugging dozens of bags of the prized finished product up the stairs to storage boxes. For how much effort we’d put in, I was shocked that we’d only managed to fill up two plastic boxes worth.

At the best brands, like El Condor, every single variable is carefully calculated, considered, and customized to get a very specific flavor profile customers will love. From the lugging of 25-pound burlap sacks of beans to the careful observance of the beans as they shift from green to yellow to brown to the hundreds of labels stuck one by one onto bags, coffee roasting is both highly mechanized and highly manual.

It’s a process where shifts in temperature are measured second by second on high-tech screens connected to the roasters, but that also require the roaster to judge on instinct, with tastes and knowledge honed only by repeated processes over the course of years and decades.

After all had been said and roasted, the true test came down to sticking spoons into mini cups of coffee fresh from the roaster. Although my dutiful guide Dante warned me that this wasn’t what the final cup would taste like, since the beans need 3-5 days to off-gas and let the carbon dioxide out, we still carefully slurped up small tastes of the coffee. That few second change in roasting intensity from the first batch to the second was apparent in the final sip.

Stepping out of the toasty roastery and back into the dreary rain of the Brooklyn Navy Yards, bag of coffee in hand, I realized I would never look at a cup of coffee the same way again.

We took the ferry back quietly, all exhausted from the day’s efforts (hey, careful observation is also tiring!). I felt immensely grateful for what was truly one of the coolest days in the life of this coffee lover. I went back to my apartment and fell into my bed.

“I could really use a cup of coffee,” I thought.

Thank you again to El Condor for taking me behind the scenes. You can buy bags of their delicious caramel-y West Village roast, and all their other roasts here.

Updates on the bag project—flash sale continues!

Bags are 30% off this week! Use code CAPLOVE on all remaining inventory.

Look of the week

There’s an old fashion rule that your outfit should have no more than three colors. I’m really into this woman’s green, cream, and brown color palette, an unexpected combo. Love her green and cream coat, cream scarf, green suede boots, and emerald green hat. Why not have some fun with a jaunty hat to beat the brutal New York winter? And she has not neglected the accessories, with chestnut brown leather gloves—and I spy a Gucci two-tone suede bag. (I actually am selling the same bag in black on my site! Renovated with a satin blue lining and currently 30% off).

What’s on the bedside table

A friend recently gave me Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara. I had actually never heard of John O’Hara before, but now I’m not sure how I missed him. [According to his Wikipedia page, he is “among the under-appreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level.”] His work has a Fitzgeraldian sensibility, exploring themes of class, society, and the truth behind the veneer. I found his prose both crisp and highly descriptive. Although not the cheeriest of novels, I’d highly recommend.

Thanks for reading Cappuccino Thoughts. If you want more where this came from, subscribe here.

This week I will be seeing Little Shop of Horrors and dealing with my own little shop of horrors, aka working on my bag project.

P.S. Thank you also

david roberts

for hosting an unofficial Substack writers meet-up. It was wonderful to meet so many other people pursuing their passions on Substack.