Roaster Profile

PHOENIX COFFEE COMPANY

Cultivating Cleveland's Coffee Culture

by Jim Fadden

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to cultivate a city’s level of coffee sophistication. Phoenix Coffee Company has been raising the coffee awareness of Cleveland, Ohio since the company’s inception in 1990. With freshly roasted coffee from a skilled roaster with 30 years behind the machine, SCAA Golden Cup Certifications at three retail cafés, a “Super Barista” and a blend that took seven years to develop, Phoenix has created a place for specialty coffee in Cleveland’s consciousness.
     Carl Jones and Sarah Wilson-Jones, owners of Phoenix Coffee Company, believe that one of the keys to ensuring their continued success in the Northeastern Ohio coffee market is to promote a specialty coffee culture through their wholesale bean business and their retail cafés. For Phoenix, enhancing a city’s coffee culture boils down to simple guidelines: make excellent, fresh coffee and get people excited about it.
     The most basic tenet of advancing the cause of specialty coffee is, of course, the coffee. For this, Phoenix draws upon Jones’s vast experience in roasting, tasting and blending. In the early ’70s, Jones began his roasting journey on a 1936 Probat, teaching himself to roast by sensory perception and empirical trials. Eventually, he connected with Michael Sivetz and began to appreciate the capabilities of the fluid-bed roaster. Jones has roasted on a 1/4-bag Sivetz roaster since 1994. “I love it,” Jones says of his roaster. “The key is to take the time to learn the intricacies of the machine and have exact control over the development of the roast.”
     For Jones, uncovering the complexities of roasting machines is matched by his desire to uncover the complexities of flavors derived from coffee blends. With a tinge of seriousness, Jones jokes, “Many roasters put their own name on one of the first blends they develop, and they are stuck with it from then on. I had the sense of what I wanted in my blend, a full body with a snap-off finish, a very clean aftertaste.” It took seven years of development before Phoenix finally started offering Carl’s Blend, now one of their best selling coffees.
     The Phoenix approach to getting a city excited about excellent coffee is also based on education and fun. “For each sales call, I estimate that I spend a minimum of 50 percent of the time on education,” Wilson-Jones says. She believes that customers need to understand the importance of quality coffee, whether they work in a restaurant or coffee shop or they brew at home. To encourage baristas to develop skills which will influence consumers, Phoenix started a new certification program for baristas. And to encourage coffee appreciation among consumers, Phoenix is organizing a coffee shop tour in October. By visiting establishments that have earned the SCAA Golden Cup brewing certification, consumers will learn about properly brewed coffee.
     “You have to make [education] fun,” says Wilson-Jones, who is sometimes known by her alter-ego, “Super Barista.” Donning a red cape and red shoes, Super Barista teaches at customer sites, gives away coffee for correct answers to questions, hates the word training, and does her best to generate excitement about coffee from restaurant and coffee shop employees. “Whether it’s baristas in a shop or servers in a restaurant, I find there is often one person in each group that I address who is the coffee nut,” Wilson-Jones says. “They get the most excited and learn the fastest. The key for me is to identify and encourage these people, as they are the ones who will continue to educate others long after I have left.”
     Phoenix has been particularly successful at cultivating coffee appreciation at restaurants, which represent 70 percent of the wholesale business. In addition to getting restaurant staff excited about coffee, Wilson-Jones has hit upon an approach which resonates deeply with restaurant owners. “I ask them, ‘What is the last thing your customers taste before they leave your restaurant?’” she says. “Of course, the answer is coffee, and that leads us into the discussion of quality.”
     A new venture for Phoenix is the office coffee market, which is not traditionally known for exemplary coffee. Addressing this market has been more difficult, as traditional office coffee distributors are often a problem. “Office coffee distributors tell me that ‘your coffee is better, it costs more, so we don’t need to use as much,” says Wilson-Jones. “They want 1.5-ounce packets, and I tell them that they really need three- to four-ounce packets.”
     In its attempt to change the way the office market looks at coffee, Phoenix is sticking to its successful formula: making excellent, fresh coffee. To ensure the coffee arrives fresh, Phoenix worked with a packing manufacturer to develop specialized office packaging. The foil packets are affordable for small-batch production and utilize special valve tape, which works as a one-way valve to keep the coffee fresh. Progress is slow in the office coffee market, but Phoenix is confident that this can be an excellent avenue for future growth.
      Fresh coffee, carefully developed blends, superheroes and education add up to an improving coffee culture and a successful business model. Recently moving from a cramped 1,800-square-foot roasting facility to a comparatively enormous 6,800-square-foot roasting facility, Phoenix continues to lead the Cleveland community toward full appreciation of excellent coffee.