Roaster Profile

GILLIES COFFEE CO.

Championing Coffee's Past, Present and Future

by Jim Fadden

THE WORLD THROWS many challenges at today’s specialty coffee roaster: green coffee price fluctuations, domestic and global turmoil, changing consumer tastes and competition from all directions. Roasting companies who have been operating for 10 or 15 years are often considered the wizened veterans of the business. However, few roasters can say they have operated continuously through two world wars, the great depression, countless green coffee crises and even the Civil War. But Gillies Coffee Company can.
       Gillies Coffee Company of Brooklyn, NY, was born out of an economic crisis (remember the financial panic of 1837?), when Wright Gillies was forced to leave the family farm to seek his fortunes in New York City. In 1840, he opened a roasted coffee retail shop in the back of a dry goods store near the Manhattan ferry docks. This was a time before bridges and tunnels, when Manhattan was truly an island, and everyone with business in the city arrived by ferry. Proving that the old adage “location, location, location” truly is an old adage, the business quickly became successful.
       Although business adages haven’t changed much, roasting technology, plant layout and green coffees are quite different. In 1840, uncontrolled thermal events (also known as “fires”) from roasters were not put out by a sprinkler system, fire extinguishers or often even the fire department. To avoid a catastrophic fire, the original Gillies coffee roaster was located outside, in an uncovered courtyard, behind the retail shop. Built by hand, the roaster utilized a wood campfire as a heat source and employed a horse to turn the barrel shaped roasting chamber. Fifteen to 20 pound batches of Arabian and Java coffees, the only ones available in the U.S. at the time, took 40 minutes to roast and remove from the chamber.
       As roasting technology evolved, Gillies went along for the ride. After the Civil War, Gillies acquired a Jabez Burns roaster with an extraordinary innovation: a set of flanges inside the drum which tumbled the coffee and moved it back and forth in the drum. This innovation, which roasters take for granted today, provided for a 10 to 20 minute reduction in the amount of time it took to roast a batch of coffee by forcing the coffee to spill into the cooling tray when the drop door was opened. Near the turn of the century, gas was introduced to provide the heat. Over the years, generations of Gillies roasters spent hours in front of a Jabez Burns four-bag Jubilee roaster.
       Gillies has now moved to a new 12,500 square foot roasting facility in Brooklyn, with a specially designed Lilla four-bag roaster. Coffees from Arabia and Java are now roasted alongside coffees from all of the origins familiar to roasters today, as well as from more unusual sources such as Maui and Nepal.
       The team of Donald Schoenholt, current president, and Hy Chabbott, CFO and business partner of 30 years, credit a consistent commitment to quality coffee as the most important reason that the Gillies Company has thrived for so long. “As the 20th century progressed, large corporate marketing made most people accept coffee that wasn’t good,” says Schoenholt. “Gillies was able to survive because our coffee has been consistently good.” Other contributing factors included the company’s prime location on Manhattan and a family commitment to pass down the passion for coffee, which continues with Donald’s son, David Schoenholt.
       For the future, Gillies believes that continuing education, not just within the company, but also within the industry as a whole, will play a critical role in the continuing success of the company. Aside from an uncontainable, almost religious, fervor to share their knowledge about coffee, Schoenholt believes actively helping others in the industry also has a business benefit for Gillies. “We share our knowledge freely because we really believe that the coffee world would be a far better and safer place for a little business like ours, and for the farmer and consumer, too, if there were more small roasters just like us,” he says. The more businesses that produce fine coffee, the more the consumer appreciates fine coffee and the better the odds for success for all specialty coffee roasters, including Gillies.
       Gillies has been a participant in and witness to the evolution of the specialty coffee business that new roasters today take as a given. Much has changed since 1840: roasting technology, new green coffee origins, quality expectations, packaging and marketing. Gillies, however, has remained one of the constants in the world of specialty coffee and expects to do so into the future.