Roasting

The act of roasting, at its most basic interpretation, is simply cooking coffee. You need heat to unlock the flavors of the pale “green” coffee bean, which is the sad, pallid color your coffee beans look like prior to them being blasted with heat. The flavor in your cup starts here. The roaster acts as an oven, dispersing heat over the coffee beans until they crack. They’re then removed, cooled, and packaged. The variations matter: the amount of heat and the roast time determine a dark roast or light roast. It is why you taste deep flavors of chocolate or something more delicate and floral. Lucky for us, Dallas has an assortment of roasters producing coffees across the continuum of flavors. Let’s meet some of them.

Founded in 2013 by owners Chris and Michael Wyatt, Full City Rooster offers only single origin coffees from its home in The Cedars. As he stands over his roaster during a cook one recent morning, Michael pulls a handful of beans from the sampling handle and slowly breathes in the scent. The smoke billows around his tattooed arms and his eyes are shut; he appears completely transfixed.

Those beans come out of a pricey Loring Roaster, which distributes heat to the beans evenly using 80 percent less energy than other roasting machines. Michael Wyatt has roasted beans for 26 years, making him somewhat of a mad scientist in his focus. He and his wife’s dedication to preservation extends to their sourcing: they only use beans certified by the Rainforest Alliance, a nonprofit that verifies that the coffee has been grown sustainably and transparently. The roasts aim to achieve a balance of body, sweetness, and flavor. Most of the coffees come out in the medium range, showcasing the flavors of chocolate and caramel notes. Your best bet for finding these comforting coffees is to visit their shop on South Akard. It’s a cozy little space and, if you’re lucky, you might see the Loring in action behind the bar.

Kevin Sprague always loved figuring out how things are made; he makes his own pasta and mills his own flour. His then-girlfriend and now wife, Marta, suggested he try roasting coffee and bought him a table top roaster. That was 2003, and he’s been doing it ever since.

What started as a hobby grew into an obsession. Together they traveled the country sourcing coffees and meeting with roasters. In 2010 the company they worked for shut its doors, so they decided to roast full time. In the world of coffee, a “coyote” is known as someone who takes advantage of farmers. Kevin and Marta’s goal was the opposite; to support coffee farmers by working through direct trade and eliminate the middleman. So Noble Coyote was born.

They began in 2011, at the White Rock Local Market. In the beginning they were roasting anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds per week. They’re now at 1,000 pounds a week, their beans found at specialty grocers throughout the city. Hallelujah.

With their Diedrich Roaster, which can complete 18.5 pounds per roast, Noble Coyote recently earned a Good Food Award, putting them in the same company as the nation’s most revered brands. Kevin and Marta use mostly single origin coffees along with a few blends. Those blends typically come out of experimentation. They’re willing to try things, to notice different flavor nuances unique to the beans and then pair them together. They don’t believe in any set route for roasting. Instead, they embrace the diverse possibilities of each bean, which explains why you’ll find so many variations on the shelves.

Russell Hayward opened Ascension Coffee on Oak Lawn Avenue in 2012 with no aspirations of roasting. But then came the consistency and quality problems from his suppliers. That first year was filled with these hiccups. Baristas found wild flavor swings from the varied quality and roasts of the supply they were receiving. This caused constant fluctuations in bitterness, acidity, and body; they were continually tweaking their dials to hit their desired profiles.

And in some of the blends they received, the beans would come in different sizes and densities, which caused issues when grinding. The baristas felt powerless in controlling consistency. It seemed roasting was, in Hayward’s opinion, the only option to ensure his shop was properly supplied with a reliable source of coffee. In January of 2014 it all came together. He had a Canadian roaster fly down to Dallas to train him and then an Australian friend came to work with him for a month. He spent the next year slowly building up a roasting practice and dialing in Ascension’s first espresso blend, known as Levitate. It took two years.

Now that it’s fully operational, Ascension supplies all of its shops with its own coffee. And while some of it moves through wholesale, its main purpose is to be the support system for its three stores. And when Hayward is not overseeing the Design District roastery or the shops, he’s traveling to coffee farms around the world to select his coffees and support direct trade with his farmers.

Kevin Betts and Ryan Smith had been friends for a decade, but their love of coffee didn’t blossom for another five years. Smith was experimenting with roasting at home. His guest bedroom was wall-to-wall storage for green coffee. He started selling his roasts from a pop-up coffee cart at the White Rock Market in 2008. Betts, meanwhile, got a barista gig at Roots Coffee in North Richland Hills. The two attacked it from all angles.

The process-oriented Betts and the experimental Smith were good fits for a partnership in coffee roasting. While Betts develops consistent roast profiles, Smith searches high and low for the right coffee sources, often traveling to Central and South America for coffee competitions and to visit various farms. For Novel, consistency is paramount, yes, but it’s not always a given from any particular farm. So they keep their options open.

Once they have that coffee back home, it’s their customized Giesen roaster that allows them to exact the profiles they so passionately insist upon. Landing a roast curve for Novel—the temperature applied to the coffee inside the roaster across the cook time—involves microscopic measurements that are fantastically nerdy in every way. Novel coffees are available online and in select shops around Dallas.

Co-owned by super couple Shannon and Jenni Neffendorf, Oak Cliff Coffee Roasters sold its first batch of roasted beans in March 2008. Three years before that, Shannon was inspired by an espresso he tasted on a trip to Milan. It took him a year to begin roasting coffee himself. Today, Oak Cliff Coffee Roasters is poised as an unstoppable force in Dallas.

It roasts upwards of 4,000 pounds per week in the back of Davis Street Espresso, the couple’s no-frills (and no Wi-Fi) coffee shop. They were also the first local roaster to offer coffee in Dallas grocery stores with the date of roasting on the bag. Oak Cliff Coffee also supplies coffee to offices and business (D Magazine being one of them) and is sold in espresso form from the sidecar of a motorcycle, lovingly named Motokofe, their way of bringing their best espresso to parties and events around town.

They also have a shop next door to Davis Street Espresso strictly devoted to selling coffee brewing supplies. The Neffendorfs also prides themselves on being good stewards of the environment, whether it’s helping farmers they source from improve their processes or maintaining transparent transaction practices with all they do business with. They even bring their four children along on sourcing trips. It’s certainly not difficult to find their coffee in this city, so if you haven’t had any, you’re not trying hard enough.

Jonathan Aldrich, lead roaster at Tweed Coffee Roasters, started his coffee journey at White Rock Coffee in 2007. But he met his future colleague, Sean Henry, after moving to Austin. Henry is the founder of Austin’s Houndstooth Coffee, which has since opened three stores in the Dallas area.

Houndstooth became one of the first shops to carry more than one roaster, but Henry soon decided he wanted to do it his own way. He brought on Aldrich as lead roaster and launched Tweed in 2013. The most important aspect of their coffee is balance. Tweed makes great effort to produce roasts that balance acidity and body, sweet and savory, in order for their coffee to be attractive to all types of palates. From their 15 kilogram Giesen roaster, they roast 2,000 pounds per week. Tweed is sold entirely in Texas—40 percent of their market is Austin and another 40 percent is Dallas. The rest goes to San Antonio, Midland, and Abilene.

But you won’t easily find one of their rotating single origin or three-blended coffees in retail stores. Tweed is mostly sold in shops and restaurants, but their coffees are available online. It’s also the only coffee sold at Houndstooth. Drink up.

Tucked away in a nondescript warehouse a block from their coffee shop in East Dallas, Cultivar roasts on a Probat, a brand that has been in the business of coffee for 150 years and whose products are found in the roasteries of big names like Intelligentsia and Counter Culture. Rugged and deliciously unkempt, Jonathan Meadows and Nathan Shelton, the fellas who founded Cultivar in 2009, are tuned into the science of roasting in an exciting balance of ease and attention. The two of them bring a wealth of experience and devotion that is impossible to miss in their coffee.

Cultivar focuses on mostly single origin coffees and the beans are available in several retail locations in Dallas. You should also taste directly from the source at their shop inside Goodfriend Package Store. (You can also find its coffees in Denton’s Hypnotic Donuts). Cultivar leans toward washed process coffees that they rotate based on seasonality. One of their signature roasts is their Finca Malcara from El Salvador, which they’ve offered for the last five years. You’ll taste notes of marzipan and sweet almond as well as a tart acidity, much like a green apple. Get some.

Corrado Palmieri, owner of the Italian hot-spot café in the Dallas Farmers Market that bears his name, is the city’s newest roaster. In December, Palmieri unveiled a project he had been working on for over a year. The man behind this place of morning loiterings, who perfected his pastries by returning to his hometown of Lecce in Southern Italy to study—those custard-filled pasticciotto are specific to his hometown—and whose Piemontese hazelnut and Sicilian pistachio gelato rival any in Italy, had taken the next logical step and turned to roasting his own coffee.

For this Italian-born entrepreneur, the aim had always been to control the process and make his business a place of artisanry from top to bottom. Switching from the custom espresso blend made for him by a roaster in Puglia, Italy, he began his apprenticeship. “I found a small, local roaster near Milan,” he says. “I asked him if he could teach me.” From this seasoned roaster, he learned the nuances and technical points for Italian-style espresso roasts. Then Palmieri turned to the United States, finding two small-batch, craft roasters—one in Virginia, one in Illinois—willing to teach him the same for American-style drip coffee roasts, knowing that his clientele would expect both. He rented commercial space in North Dallas to house the roaster that would be the engine of the tricky transformation.

In August of last year, Palmieri began roasting in small test-batches, zeroing in on the beans that suited him. His goal: to offer an experience of the full spectrum of coffee processes and roasts via a rotating list of single-origin beans. At the counter are dark, medium, and light roasts; washed, pulped natural, and natural processes are represented by his single-origin beans from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Peru. Every several days, the single-origin on offer rotates (all are available as pour-overs). Meanwhile, the espresso is a blend of Arabicas. The final piece is in place. Palmieri’s hand is behind everything at the buzzing little spot, from buttery pastry crumb to the fragrance of coffee.