Coffee roasting popping in Fort Mill

It’s not every day that a farmer gets to try his own coffee in another country, but this particular Friday evening was different.

Fort Mill coffee roasters Nick Peñaloza and Ryan Waldroop gathered around a barista’s counter in Charlotte with farmer Matti Foncha, who had traveled around the world from his village in Cameroon, West Africa.

“Is this the first time you’ve tasted your coffee in Charlotte?” The Fort Mill Times asked Foncha, who works with Cameroon Boyo Coffee.

He paused for a moment, then smiled. “Why yes, it is the first time I’ve tasted my coffee in Charlotte!”

Foncha, who left his home in early August and had been traveling since, said his coffee can taste quite different from place to place. He’d come a long way to get there, so we imagine he’d had quite a few cups along the way.

On this particular evening, the trio was preparing for a presentation the following day at Coco and the Director, a Charlotte coffee shop that exclusively serves beans roasted at Fort Mill’s Forte Legato Coffee Company.

Peñaloza, Forte Legato’s owner, is currently preparing the coffee company’s upcoming permanent location inside Spectrum Brewing. The move is a sign of how popular coffee roasting in small batches has become locally.

Roasting is a technique that transforms green, unroasted beans into brown, roasted coffee, suitable for brewing. Once roasted, the coffee is ideally consumed while fresh, within a week, according to Waldroop. That’s right, one week. So what if the coffee has been sitting on a grocery store shelf for a few months or longer?

Other local coffee connoisseurs have raised this same question, and there are viable solutions. Buying weekly from local roasters is the most obvious way to ensure fresh coffee. Additionally, a small but growing number of people are buying unroasted beans in order to put in the elbow grease themselves, roasting small batches at home.

It’s actually not as difficult as it sounds.

Driveway roasting

On any given Saturday morning, you might find Fort Mill resident Ben Ficklen in his driveway with a popcorn popper, a slightly smoky atmosphere, and a smile. No, he’s not prepping for a movie night: He’s roasting a week’s worth of coffee.

Ficklen, who lives near Fort Mill High School and is a tax and treasury manager, started paying attention to coffee quality after visiting Honduras with Fort Mill Rotary Club. In our first story of this series, we discussed Rotary’s clean water initiative in the third-world country. Members visit frequently. In fact, we interviewed Ficklen via phone while he was on a plane heading for another visit.

Ficklen initially brought home 25-30 pounds of coffee after each trip.

“But I started realizing the coffee that tasted great for the first three weeks after my return home didn’t taste so good eight months later,” he said. So, he started bringing the coffee beans home unroasted.

Ficklen said it’s a fun way to dabble on a Saturday morning. Why the driveway?

“The beans have a fine membrane on them, and roasting them creates a lot of smoke. I don’t want to do it in the kitchen – I’ve never wanted to contend with my wife after I’ve made that much of a mess.”

Backyard roasting

Christian book writer Diana Asaad, who you may remember making Turkish coffee in our first story, also roasts beans in what she called a “hacked up popcorn popper.” Rather than in her driveway, she roasts in her backyard in Adler Grove.

While roasting, she listens to the pops and cracks of the beans as indicators to how dark the roast is. One loud pop indicates a medium roast and a second pop indicates a dark roast, Asaad said.

Asaad purchases unroasted beans online, and occasionally she convinces Charlotte coffee shops to sell them to her unroasted. “Sometimes, if the Smelly Cat Coffeeshop owner is not around, the employees will sell the unroasted beans, but I don’t know if they are supposed to do that!”

(We followed up with Smelly Cat’s owner, Cathy Tuman, and she clarified the coffee shop at 514 E. 36th Street in Charlotte actually will, in fact, sell unroasted beans for $8 a pound. No sneaking needed, Diana!)

Adler said roasting beans is just a hobby, so it’s not the only coffee her family drinks, but about every month or so, if you happen to be walking along the lake by the old Heritage USA at just the right time, you might hear that popcorn popper whirring away.

‘You don’t know what you’re missing’

Olde Williamsburg Village resident and travel agent Tom Eddens has been a home roaster for about four years, and he said he’s nowhere near alone in his craft.

“There are a lot of home roasters around,” Eddens said.

“I didn’t realize how many until I started doing the research and reading the different websites on how to get started” (Eddens and Asaad both recommended Sweet Maria’s for a good starting point).

Eddens said Starbucks in Baxter Village piqued his interest about different coffees around the world, which inspired him to research different regions and varieties of coffee. He spends approximately 45 minutes a week roasting coffee for the upcoming week.

“I also send coffee to my children in Georgia and Florida,” he said, “as they are addicted to fresh coffee, too. (Until) you’ve tried truly fresh roasted coffee, you don’t know what you are missing.”

Fort Mill’s coffee scene is awake

Several weeks ago, when we embarked on this journey to explore the world of coffee, we thought we knew coffee. We knew to grind fresh before brewing a pot. We knew a little about how to make a pour-over (clarification: we knew how to enjoy a pour-over someone else made). We knew freshly roasted beans were important and the type of roast mattered.

Now we realize: we knew nothing.

After all the hours spent in kitchens, restaurants, coffee shops, with baristas, roasters and farmers, we’ve still only scratched the surface of this world that is part artistic, part culinary, part research –and all heart.

During one conversation at Flipside Café, a source reversed the interview back to us. “You’re writing about coffee?” decaf drinker Jason Haynes asked us. “Wait, you tell us, then – what do we need to know about coffee?”

Well, Jason, here’s what we’ve learned:

▪ In the search for good coffee, we had some K-cups we liked and some pour-overs we didn’t. We had amazing coffee made in a kitchen where an iPhone calculator seemed the most important component, and we had lattes made by professional baristas we didn’t want to finish.

▪ Everyone’s taste buds tell a different story: one source told us she liked a particular brand of coffee because it wasn’t bitter; another told us she didn’t like the same coffee because it was bitter.

▪ That said, the best cup of coffee may be roasted in a local brewery and served from a truck. It might be made by the local café’s barista, who knows to hand you extra sugars when you arrive. Or it could be awakening to the sound of the grind-and-brew because you set the coffeepot the night before in order to have your coffee ready when you get up, made your way.

This story was originally published November 15, 2016 at 6:44 PM with the headline "Coffee roasting popping in Fort Mill."