Our Roasting Philosophy
Coffee roasting is like alchemy. The inherent qualities of coffee remain locked and hidden in the little green seed, until they are released by fire to shine in all their resplendent origin-expressing glory. Once the coffee is lovingly and carefully roasted, it starts to de-gas, emitting CO2 for a period of about 10 days. When the coffee stops degassing, it is no longer fresh. Nothing can stop the coffee from staling! That is why we roast coffee six days a week.
We are very attached to our East Van micro-roastery. The darlings of the warehouse (other than Manjit, of course) are a couple of old school cast-iron Probat drum roasters. We force ourselves to roast coffee six days a week by keeping the size of our roasters small, even as our volume increases. The two Powell Street roasters have a 90 kg and 22 kg capacity, and we have a 5 kg Probat at our Main St café for special small batches and custom roasts. We roast our samples on a vintage Jabez-Burns four-barrel roaster in the middle of our Commercial Drive café.
Honouring the Journey
Relatively few people in North America have any knowledge about where or how coffee is made. It is easy to think of coffee as simply a tasty drink made from ground "beans". However, there is much more to coffee than that, and we wouldn't even have those beans (which are actually the seeds of coffee cherries) if it were not for the hard work of farmers and workers on coffee farms around the world, as well as the tasters, roasters, and baristas who transform the green beans into the drink we know as coffee. At JJ Bean, we wish to honour the entire "journey of coffee", from crop to cup, as well as the many people who work tirelessly to bring us that coffee.
The coffee farm photos in the following video were taken in early 2011, when members of the JJ Bean team travelled to Guatemala to visit several of the farms that produce our coffee.
