Kawa roasts custom coffee blends
It was late at night on a Wednesday and everyone was asleep except Jeff Wilkins, who, ironically, was roasting coffee.
Wilkins is the owner and roaster of Kawa (pronounced “Kah-Vah”) Roasters, a small-batch coffee roasting company in Manchester. He was roasting batches of three pounds of coffee each.
“I ordered this machine brand new,” he said, laying his hand on a large, stainless steel appliance with a window showing roasting coffee beans being tossed and circulated. “This does a maximum of three pounds at a roast at a time,” he said. “I can buy a machine in this same design that will do up to 18 pounds, and that’s what I’m hoping to grow into, but at the moment this is where I’m at. I do multiple roasts a night, and then I blend them all together because it’s all manual. I don’t have any automation on this, so it’s all by sight, smell, time and temperature. Sometimes I’ll get there and that’s the whole point that I mix it. If one roast is a little too dark, I blend it with one that’s lighter.”
Wilkins said coffee roasting started out as a hobby for him.
“About three and a half, almost four years ago,” he said, “I decided that it was time to quit drinking alcohol and needed something to stay busy at night. My wife and I love coffee. So I said, hey, let’s learn how to make it. So I bought a roaster. It’s a little tabletop, you know, $500 job. I set it up in my garage and started playing around with it. I started watching videos, I read articles, and I did whatever I needed to do to try and figure out how to do this process. I made a lot of bad roasts and I burnt a lot of things. I found some things that worked, and eventually I kind of settled in on a, I’ll call it a recipe, that worked for the tastes that we like to come out of the beans.”
This led to gifts of home-roasted coffee to family and friends, who eventually convinced Wilkins to start roasting coffee professionally. Although he sells his coffee at a number of farmers markets and other events, most of his focus is on custom-roasting coffee beans for individuals and small businesses.
“I can do customized roasts for those that want to do their own unique blends,” he said. “I can do [bespoke] roasting where if you’re a cafe or a baker that’s doing, you know, 20, 30, 40 pounds a week and you want to private-label it, I’ll roast them and put them in your bags. Or I can do wholesale. So I can pretty much do whatever somebody wants.”
Wilkins said a lot of the variety in the flavor of coffee comes from how dark it has been roasted, but also from where it has been grown.
“There are so many different varieties of coffee,” he said, “ just like there’s so many different varieties of wine. But you can grow a chardonnay grape in California, and it’s going to taste completely different than a chardonnay grape coming from Europe. It’s because of the terroir, the conditions specific to where it was grown — it’s the nutrients, it’s the water, it’s the temperature, all plays a part in it. The same thing is true about coffee.”
This means coffee grown in different parts of the world, Wilkins said, often needs to be roasted differently.
“On my website I sell coffee beans from Costa Rica, Brazil, El Salvador, Vietnam, Thailand, and Sumatra. The Vietnamese coffee is unbelievable. I [roast] that one to a medium dark roast. It brings out a nice, almost like a Baker’s chocolate flavor to it at the end of the sip. I have tried the Sumatra as a light roast and it’s like drinking tree bark, it’s just terrible, but you take it to the darker levels and you get some really nice flavors coming out of it. Same thing with the Costa Rica. That bean lends itself to a lighter roast to pick up those nuances.”
Kawa Roasters
Fresh roasted and custom whole-bean Kawa coffee is available at kawaroasters.com, as is grinding and brewing equipment. Visit kawaroasters.com/our-retailers.
Featured photo: Coffee beans at Kawa. Photo by John Fladd.
