THE FIRESTARTERS

By Christopher Schooley

Who are The Firestarters? They are the people who relish the intimate relationship with the flame afforded by coffee roasting. Many of them are recognizable by the singed hairs on their arms and the mischievous grins on their faces.

     We decided to talk with some of these roasters to find out what keeps them lit and see if maybe they’d tell us a story or two around the old chaff fire.

NORMAN KILLMON is a man of few words. It’s not because he’s shy or timid. He has a confidence, a certain comfort about him that can only be gained from nearly 40 years in the coffee industry. And yet that comfort doesn’t keep him from exploring new possibilities or from jumping at exciting opportunities. Fourteen years ago, he jumped at one such opportunity and began working at The Roasterie in Kansas City. Thus began a thrilling new adventure in specialty coffee after what was already a distinguished turn in the commercial world at Coca Cola Foods. Talking with Norm, I learned a great deal about living a full and happy life, working in coffee and about the inevitability of fire.

Christopher Schooley: What is your earliest coffee memory?

Norm Killmon: My dad pouring coffee into the saucer to let it cool.

CS: Was your first work experience in coffee?

NK: It was at Coca Cola Foods (Butter Nut Coffee and Maryland Club Coffee), I actually started as a janitor.

CS: And you jumped straight from being a janitor into roasting?

NK: No, I operated a De-Palletizer. I took the empty cans for coffee off the pallet and sent them upstairs to be filled.

CS: Do you feel like that kind of factory work helped prepare you for coffee roasting?

NK: I don’t think it specifically helped with roasting per se, but I think all jobs in a manufacturing environment are connected and it gives you a respect for what others in the factory are doing.

CS: I personally love working the assembly line and manufacturing jobs in general. I find them to be invigorating and inspiring.

NK: No question. It’s just like being an artist and painting a picture; no matter what the result is, it’s something that I made and I like it. That’s my favorite part of roasting. It’s hands on, you are taking a raw product and transforming it into a wonderful beverage. You can see the results of your labor everyday.

CS: How did you start roasting for Coca Cola Foods?

NK: They needed a roaster operator for the coffee division. What actually happened was that they posted the roasting job and no one would sign up for it. I’m not sure why but they thought that maybe I would want to do it and they asked me. I was always looking for opportunities to present themselves so I jumped at it.

CS: No one wanted to roast?

NK: We were using continuous roasters that would roast 10,000 pounds an hour and those things are just designed to blow up. I could tell you hundreds of fire stories.

CS: We’ll get to that shortly, but first, how long have you been at The Roasterie?

NK: I’ve been here since the very beginning, about 13 years. I was a roaster operator for Maryland Club Coffee, which was a division of Coca Cola Foods in Houston, Texas. Danny [O’Neill] was a box vender who used to sell me boxes for shipping. I could tell he was really interested in what I was doing with the coffee. One day he called me and asked me to come to Kansas City. I told my wife, “Honey, Danny wants me to go to Kansas City.” And she said that whatever I thought was best we would do, and I’m really happy that we did.

CS: What’s your typical day like?

NK: I now oversee the roasting department. So I do a lot of cupping. I love it when the samples of each roast come to the cupping room and I love tasting the results of so many origins and so many different roasts.
     Our typical production day starts at 5:30 each morning. We will roast around 4,000 pounds of coffee on any given day. The roaster operator gets a schedule from the production manager to determine how much and what to roast; we always try to match roasting to production. Production workers start working on morning orders that will go to the restaurants that should leave the building by 8 a.m. Then they work on grocery stock for our two grocery drivers. Private-label runs are next, and the form and fill machines run all day. The last hour of each production day is spent on cleaning the factory.
     In the cupping room, coffees prepared the previous afternoon are cupped in the morning and roaster samples are brought in on a regular basis. Last year, we cupped 917 coffees from origin and more than 7,500 roaster samples. In the afternoon, the next day’s cuppings are prepared, we do green analysis on the coffees, and then roast them for the next morning’s cupping.

CS: How did you guys decide to go with the Sivetz roaster?

NK: Danny made that decision before I came on board. He had traveled the country studying coffee before he started the business and liked the smoothness of the air-roasted coffees that he tasted versus drum roasters so he decided to go that direction. It was a wise decision.

CS: Out of all the different machines you’ve roasted on in 40 years, do you have a favorite?

NK: You might as well ask me which of my children I like best. They each had a character about them and I loved each and every one. I heard a couple of years ago that the J. B. Burns continuous roasters we used at Coca Cola Foods in Omaha went to Russia. True or not, I like to think they are in Siberia somewhere still producing product.

CS: What do you see as the biggest issue facing specialty coffee today?

NK: Making sure that social issues don’t cause us to leap-frog over quality. There has to be a marriage of the two. There has to be quality. It’s the give a man a fish/teach a man to fish scenario. We’ve had part of our profits going into getting different programs off the ground at origin because when a farmer is living hand to mouth it is going to lead to cutting corners. Quality is what is most necessary to fuel our market.

CS: I understand that you’ve traveled extensively at origin in your pursuit of quality.

NK: I’ve been to most of Central and South America. I believe it is imperative for roasters, and for that matter everyone in our industry, to make it a point to visit origin. The understanding gained and the connections made are indispensable. Even without being a fluent Spanish speaker, I have been able to learn so much from growers and have been able to find a common language through coffee.

CS: Which coffee origins that you haven’t been to are on the top of your wish list of places to visit?

NK: Ethiopia is on the very top of that list. I would love to visit the birthplace of coffee. I have spent a lifetime in this industry and it would be grand to see where it all began. Sumatra is one of the world’s greatest coffees in my mind and making that trip would be quite an adventure as well.

CS: Alright Norm, now’s the time: Tell me your best fire story.

NK: In my early days, I used to run what was called a Presca Pressure Roaster. We had three of them. It was technology out of Switzerland which would take double-digit grade Brazils and make them more palatable. Well, it looked good on paper anyway.
     They were basically pressure cookers and each was as big as a room. The coffee would roast using steam under pressure, at the end of the roast the fire would go out and the pop-off valves would open to release the pressure. One day, both pop valves got plugged up with a combination of chaff and water. The pressure kept climbing into the red zone on the gauge. I got up on the roaster and jumped up and down on the pop-off valves but they would not release the pressure.
     By this time, the fire department and our chief mechanic had arrived. The mechanic decided that the only way to release the pressure was to unscrew one of the pop-off valves. It shot off like a bullet, the noise was as loud as a jet engine and the whole room filled with steam. You couldn’t see a thing. As the steam cleared all the firemen and I were flat on the floor but our mechanic was just standing there looking at the roaster shaking his head and wondering why it didn’t operate properly. I knew that day why no one but me had signed up for the roasting job.

CHRISTOPHER SCHOOLEY is the roaster and green coffee buyer at Metropolis Coffee Company in Chicago. He drinks his coffee black. Chris and fire go way back. Tell him your fire stories at ceschooley@yahoo.com.