A tale of two coffee roasters, Barefoot and Catahoula
By Erin Wade For the Bay Area News Group Posted: 03/24/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT
One doesn’t often associate coffee beans with relationships, but two Bay Area roasters have embraced that notion in very different ways.
In San Jose, Barefoot Coffee’s Andy Newborn revels in his global community of growers, roasters and drinkers. In Richmond, Tim “Timber” Manhart sees his Catahoula coffee company as a way to build a local community. These are their tales.
The aroma of toasting coffee beans fills the air at Barefoot Coffee Roasters. Inside this converted house on a quiet San Jose street, staffers quietly buzz around two Probat roasting machines and owner Newborn runs his hand through a batch of cooling beans.
The coffee farmer is the rock star, he says, and for the better part of the last decade, Barefoot’s goal has been to let that farmer’s work shine. Barefoot prides itself on what it calls “relationship coffee,” a web of close personal relationships with coffee farmers around the world.
You won’t find much company information on a bag of this coffee. Instead, you’ll read about Guatemalan farmer Gloria Rodriquez, for example, one of the few female coffee farmers in the industry, and owner of a farm whose first coffee trees were planted in 1815.
Newborn becomes emotional when he talks about these farmers: the company’s involvement in farmers’ lives during lean harvests, the clinic his company built for a Latin American farm, and the individuals he has brought to the Bay Area for meet-the-producer events Advertisement at his Santa Clara coffee bar.
And he loves to tell the story of his favorite Ethiopian farmers, who roast their own beans over an open flame. The beans often char, he says, which masks their flavor. So Newborn brought bags of Barefoot-roasted Dominion beans back to Ethiopia for the farmers to try.
“They freaked out,” Newbom says. “They could not believe our beans were the same thing they had been drinking — they loved it.”