NORTH DUMFRIES — The dark coffee beans dipped and danced like lottery ping-pong balls inside a stainless steel roaster.

Then, they started to crack in rapid-fire succession.

"It's like popcorn right where it starts to pop in the microwave," said Tim Barrie, who runs the Blacksmith & Bean Coffee Co. with his 18-year-old son Will. "It's pop-pop-pop."

His roast master, Luis Molina, kept his ears cocked and his eyes on the beans grown in his native Colombia.

The first wave of cracks finished. The bean shells were broken. Silence settled in around the whir of the roaster. But not for too long.

The second round of cracking — the pace of the popping picking up as Molina rapidly smacked his palms together — signalled the heat was seeping deep into the fair trade organic beans.

Molina, who immigrated to Canada 14 years ago, watched. He listened. He inhaled the smell of the roasting coffee as his wife Adriana worked beside him in the rebuilt shell of an old blacksmith shop on an asparagus farm in the fertile township flatlands between Kitchener and Cambridge.

Their secret? Use your ears and your eyes.

"Two cracks, the whole process," Molina said. "One crack, then two cracks. Then, look at the beans."

And keep an eye on the laptop computer screen, too. There's a graph showing Molina what's happening inside the beans. Temperature is tracked and the rate of rise.

"If this goes up too fast, it's like burning the marshmallows," said Barrie from beneath the peak of his beloved Bobby Orr ball cap.

Burn those beans and your coffee goes bitter. It's a slow process, like roasting a marshmallow to gooey internal perfection.

The two roasters run on patience, four days a week.

One machine, picked up in Chatham, does two pounds in 15 to 18 minutes. The other, an import from Wisconsin, does six pounds in 20 to 25 minutes.

Will, rubbing the tummy of his dog, Millie, watches from a few feet away.

Beside Will and the three-year-old Havenese pup, an old anvil sits on a wooden stump. On one wall of this rebuilt blacksmith shack, a mutton-chopped portrait of James King hangs. King was the blacksmith who ran this shop. He was also Will's great-great-grandfather.

"We started to think of the things that we love," said Will, recalling how the idea of starting up a coffee company with his dad began more than a year ago when he was finishing high school at Southwood Collegiate in Cambridge.

"One of those things was coffee."

A year and a bit later, their dark roast sells in 37 shops in the area. You can buy their beans and have them ground in the farm's own shop. A medium blend is coming. Business, they say, is perking up.

Success from the grounds up is what they worked for.

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That's why they went to "coffee school" at EcoCafe in St. Jacobs. There, local coffee guru Ed Denyer took them in as "guest roasters," training and treating them as collaborators, not competitors, in the fresh-roasted fray.

The Barries burned a lot of batches to get to this launch point for product expansion. But there are finer points to marketing a fine coffee in a modern age to consider. These are the coffee concerns that grind on Will's promotional mind as he cradles Millie, a curly-white armful.

Social media can be a multiplatform minefield.

"We've been focusing more on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram — because everybody is on Instagram, right?" said the Conestoga College marketing student. "Old people don't really go on Snapchat as much."

So, more Instagram is in the plan. Snapchat will get more focus, too. Will aims to start a podcast, interview people of interest in the coffee world.

They used to go door-to-door in Ayr when the venture first began as a day-a-week operation. They'd hand out little brown bags of grounds.

"Want coffee?" they'd message people ahead of delivery.

"We wanted to get people to taste it," Tim Barrie said.

Now, they say, some customers come from hours away to get their coffee at their fourth-generation Cedardale Farm, where an asparagus plant grows in a hollowed out log in the front parking lot.

When the sun rises over the nearby Highway 401 during asparagus season in May and June, Barrie likes to pour an espresso and sit it down on a stump at the entrance to the coffee-roasting blacksmith shop.

Usually, Millie comes out to join him. Will is still asleep.

"You hear the birds waking up," he said. "It's amazing."

jhicks@therecord.com

Twitter: @HicksJD