Some roasting machines cost way too much for most cafes to buy them, however in some places, machines may be for rent. Renting machines takes away a lot of the pain of roasting coffee for some small businesses.
Trey Wrage is with Ninth Street Coffee, which opened up 12 years ago. Instead of roasting their own beans, Ninth Street built up their brand of cafes with the newest location on East 56th Street. They always bought already roasted beans, but now, they're starting to roast some of their own, honing in on the perfect version.
All of the subtle changes in the way you handle coffee in the roaster, greatly affects the way the coffee tastes on the table. That is something that Steve Mierisch understands all too well.
"My cousin's uncle's grandparents were coffee farmers," Mierisch says.
Mierisch created the Pulley Collective with the idea of helping those small cafes who want to go into roasting.
"A pulley is a mechanism that allows you to lift heavy loads more efficiently, and I feel that si what we are doing here," Mierisch adds.
He is also selling beans directly from farmers, which the cafes can opt to use, so he is cutting out the middle man in a couple of ways. This allows cafes to have even more control of the kind of coffee they serve, and that is like liquid gold for some.
