And indeed, North Philadelphia is a very different place from Center City/South Philly. There were times when I wish I had a million dollars to give the entire region a facelift, full-body tuck, and a sex change operation; there were other times when I found the disintegrated buildings and surroundings very beautiful. (And yes, there were many “times” because I was on that trolley for a long fucking time).
One of the most interesting moments of that trolley ride was when we entered the area populated by Islamic Philadelphians. I forget sometimes of that aspect of Philadelphia that I found so strange when I first arrived as a fresh-faced college-bound kid. Soon after we entered this area, my ears perked up as I picked up words of a conversation taking place between the two women sitting behind me. “Allah”, “the Prophet”, “Insha’llah”. It has been a while since I’ve heard these words, and I was hearing them now on an eternal trolley ride through ghetto Philadelphia.
At last, the trolley pulled up to my stop, a few blocks away from the roastery.
“Thought you’d never arrive huh?” said the bus driver.
Yes thank you. I ran out of there and didn’t stop running. (I hate being late.) I ran all the way instead of bothering to wait for Renee to pick me up. The cold air did a number on my lungs; I couldn’t stop coughing for the first half-hour or so after my arrival. The amazing thing is, I smelled the roastery even before I saw it. That smell of coffee that is now so familiar to me, that clings to my clothes and hair, and permeates my very skin, and remains there until my next shower; which then fills up the curtained-off shower as soon as I run myself under the hot water (an alternative form of hotboxing). I followed that smell the rest of the way to the Warehouse.
Giant sea-green sorting machine, pipes running every which way carrying beans, gases; bright red monster roasting machine; tank of liquid nitrogen harvested from the surrounding air; heavy sacks of beans from Brazil and elsewhere, waiting to be tested, sorted, and roasted. Bins full of roasted beans degassing or waiting to be bagged, labeled with the familiar names of our blends (Nizza, Corsica,...). Bins full of ground bean that feels almost as soft as flour as I run my fingers through the dark brown meal. A computer system with a readout screen that displays the analyses of the beans being roasted, and several attached dials like video game controls with which one can single-handedly control how the beans are roasted with respect to flavor, aroma, darkness, etc. Drums-- solid versus perforated. Perforated wins, but solid prevails in the current state of roasting. The destoning process, like column chromatography except separated by weight. More later. A spectrometer used to test samples of the roasted beans every 15 minutes.
In the other room, antique roasting machines refurbished to a shiny vintage state, or else in the process of being refurbished like the one destined for the new Chicago shop. Large skids piled high with boxes of beans. One man winds clear tape around and around before rolling the skid out for shipment. Lots of Frenchies. Bagging Lionhearted. Overall, for such a large operation, it’s a surprisingly small crowd that handles everything from sourcing the beans, sales and promoting, all the way down to serving them in beverage form at our three current locations in NYC and Philly. About 100 people to make it all happen.
A few times while Todd was treating me to a one-on-one tour during one of his rare free hours, I felt very much like a certain character from a certain book penned by Roald Dahl; like a very special child being given a very special tour of a very special chocolate factory. In fact, I had my own “gold ticket” moment of sorts. It happened when Todd opened up the destoning tray. From among the usual impurities like stones and kernels of corn, he pulled out a shiny gold-colored coin.
“Well now, this is amazing.”
In the 20-some odd years that he’s been roasting, explained Todd, this was only the second time he’s ever pulled out a coin from the destoning tray. Wow, what were the chances? I felt like I had just inherited a million dollars-- or a great secret. Now for a thorough description of this archaeological find: it is gold-toned, and has a raised edge with a distinct border. It is folded in half and there are two roasted coffee beans trapped in this space. The only legible inscriptions are a zero on one side and parts of two words that run along the curved border. It reads something like:
...MONOA... BLANC...
Where the bold indicates certainty in the identification of the letter. Other than those above inscriptions, nothing else can be made out. Everywhere else, the coin is pock-marked with dents from going through that monster roasting machine.
My benefactor peered at the coin for a few seconds before handing it to me for keeps. “It looks like it could be from Indonesia,” he said offhandedly, “but I can’t see anything without my reading glasses. With his glasses, my globetrotter boss could probably easily have identified the coin’s origin. However,...Upon my own inspection, I found a zero engraved off to one side of the heavily-damaged coin, but otherwise, just dents. It wasn’t until I got home later that night and studied it under better lighting that I found the words.
For the time being, I simply pocketed the find and followed my guide as he continued his tour of this great playground, giving super-animated descriptions of the rest of the process, explaining the difference between roasting with solid versus perforated drums, explaining why he was going to bring the old pre-Strada espresso machine back into the shop for pure espresso shots, and sharing stories about back in the day when they were young twenty-something-year-olds skateboarding around the then one-room warehouse, roasting beans on a much much smaller scale.
After the tour of the pipes and machines, we went upstairs to his and J.P’s office, which is another amazing infusion of all kinds of smells-- but mostly tobacco. The smell hits you like a wall when you first walk in, and on the one hand, it smells good; on the other hand, it smells like a hamster’s nest. Two large desks sprawled with papers, books on trade, architectural blueprints, and other important clutter. The two desks face a large blackboard and I sat back on one of the leather chairs and watched and listened as Todd took a piece of chalk and started writing and sketching all over this blackboard, giving me a visual speed-tutorial on coffee origin and its harvesting process. Arabica versus Robusta. Typica. Region, varietal, size. Like coffee bloodtype: A, AB, AA, AA+, or 10-18+. Altitude. Natural versus wet processing. Brought me back to my college days.
“What else, what else?” he kept saying to himself throughout the tour. There was so much that he could show and tell me that it boggled my mind every time he said this. He showed me a room, a spare-looking room with two long tables and benches made of wood that was polished to a sheen but so “raw” that you could see the particular tree from which it was made. Along the white walls were hung large-scale framed photos of coffee farmers and landscapes-- the very ones that used to hang on the walls of the Rittenhouse shop before they were replaced by a rotating array of artwork by local artists. Hum, I’d wondered what had happened to these images. Another small secret discovered.
At the front of this room, facing these tables, was a faux-barista station equipped with some ceramics just like the ones we used at the shop. I learned that this room was going to be used for training purposes-- a place for trainers to train trainers because it was so impossible to interrupt the flow of business at the shops for this purpose. Sitting at the edge of the table nearest the door were two portable hand crank antique roasters. The one on the left had given birth to La Colombe’s Nizza blend and belonged to J.P.; the other one, which belonged to Todd, had given birth to our Afrique blend. The latter roaster dated back to 1927, a year that had special significance for Todd and so he had jumped on the opportunity to purchase this particular toy. Significance...is not something that exists inherently in anything or anyone. One imparts significance upon things and people...and dates. It is not a sign from God; it is rather a sign from you who perceives and receives the sign and gives it special meaning.
A coin is a coin, and when it’s found deformed and disfigured in a destoning tray at a coffee roastery thousands of miles away, it’s a coin that accidentally fell out of a harvester’s pocket and got mixed up with the beans along with stones and kernels of corn. Yet, I couldn’t help being pulled by the mystery surrounding this coin’s identity. When I got home later that night, I googled all possible iterations of the words I could think of, along with images of coins from the countries we source from, but found nothing. A couple days later, I showed my co-workers, who also tried to figure out its origin in between making drinks and doing dishes. They were equally stumped.
On Monday morning, I woke up and determined that I would find the origin of this coin even if I had to painstakingly go through every nation on this planet and study their money. As daunting as such a project sounds, the fact of the matter is the number of nations on this planet is finite, and so the answer was there, somewhere. I made a second attempt at google: I visited the World Coin Gallery website and drafted the following list as I checked each nation:
Countries checked (blends that source from this country):
Indonesia (Monte Carlo)
Brazil (all)
Rwanda (Afrique)
Ethiopia (Afrique, Nizza, Monaco, Phocea, Savoia)
Tanzania (Afrique, Savoia)
Haiti (the Haitian)
El Salvador (Phocea)
Guatemala (none). End mystery.
And boy was I lucky that the list ended here and not 200 countries later. As it turns out, the full inscription reads: “MONJA BLANCA FLOR NACIONAL”
The Monja Blanca, or “White Nun” is the national flower of Guatemala symbolizing peace, beauty, and art. It’s also known by the scientific crowd as Lycaste Skinneri Alba, (belonging to the Lycaste genus of orchids, species discovered by an Englishman named Skinner in the 1800s), and grows in the moderate altitudes (1200-1800 feet) of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador in their moist montane forests and pine-oak-liquidambar forests. An image of the virile-looking trefoil-like monja blanca is impressed into the center space. To its right reads the denomination, 50 centavos (a Spanish/Portuguese word meaning ‘one-hundredth’, from Latin centum + suffix -avo).
On the flip (“observe” as the numismatists would say) side, the inscription “Republica de Guatemala [date]” circumscribes the central figure of the Guatemalan coat of arms: two Bay Laurels branches forming a wreath around a pair of crossed rifles fitted with bayonets; a pair of daggers crossed underneath the rifles; overlaid in the center by a scroll inscribed with the date of Central America’s independence from Spain (“Libertad 15 de septiembre de 1821”). Sitting atop the right-hand corner of this scroll is a Resplendent Quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, which bears a great presence in Mesoamerican mythology.
It is made of brass.
But Guatemala? A mystery in itself! None of our blends sourced from this Central American nation, so what was one of its coins doing amongst our beans? I sent the following email to my boss:
Hey Todd, do you source from Guatemala? And if so, for which blend?
About an hour later, I received the following response:
Yes we do - Guatemala is an important component in our new upcoming blend Louisiane.
QED. Case Closed.
Following the discovery/revelation, a dialogue between Sarah and I:
“You know what this means right?”
“What?”
“I have to go to Guatemala.”
“Why?”
“It’s a sign! From the coffee god.”
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