Welcome to The Novel Bean

Welcome to The Novel Bean. My name is Scott, and I’m on a mission to show people they don’t have to settle for stale, flavorless coffee.

I worked most of my life in the company that my parents started. I started the summer before high school, and worked every summer during high school to have spending money through the school year. Back then, my dad had me working in the production side of the business, running big plastic thermoforming machines, die cutting presses, and panel saws. When I got into college, I started thinking I wanted to do something different that would get me into the air conditioned office. So I started learning the front office side of the business. I was the receptionist for a while. But then when I asked my dad for a raise, he gave me the most useful advice I ever got in business. If you want to get paid more, find a way to do something that is worth more to the company. So I learned bookkeeping, that allowed my mom to finally retire from the business. A few years later, I bought the company from my dad, so he could retire. And 20 years later, the business was doing poorly, and I decided I needed to be done with it. I sold off what I could, and got rid of my company, my salary, and a large amount of stress.

I have loved coffee for a very long time. I drink a lot of it. I have long tried to find better coffees. For a long time after a trip to Hawaii, I was buying coffee from a roaster on the island of Maui. Back then, it seemed a bit expensive, but was worth it. For a while. I started getting some bags that weren’t quite as good. That tasted a bit stale, like they had been sitting around too long. Back then, there was no way of knowing how old the bags were. Some brands might put a Best By date on the bag, and it was always 6 months from whenever you bought it, but you still didn’t know how long it had been sitting on the shelf already. I got frustrated, until a friend suggested I try a company in town that roasted the coffee right when you ordered it. I called them up and talked with the owner of the business. Told him what I wanted. He took my information, and roasted the coffee the next day and sent it to me. I had the bag of coffee in my hands 2 days after it was roasted. That first bag was Columbian Supremo. Nothing special. It’s a fairly common coffee. It was some of the best coffee I had ever tasted.

I realized in that moment that how fresh the coffee is makes much more difference than where it’s from or how much you paid for it. Oh yes, I’ve tried some expensive coffees. Getting Kona coffee while sitting at a table in Hawaii is magical. Buying Kona beans that have been sitting on a shelf for a year, not so much. I had someone gift me with some pure Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee once. It was a lovely gift, very thoughtful. But the coffee was not that impressive. But cheap, ordinary Columbian coffee that was roasted yesterday? Mind-blowing. Ever since, I have tried to always get the freshest coffee possible. Sometimes cash flow dictated getting lesser coffee, but I always tried to get the freshest I could at the price range I was buying.

Fast forward to the family business closing down. I didn’t get enough from the business to retire, much as I may have wanted that. So I started thinking about what to do next. My wife and I have long talked about opening a bookstore/coffee shop. She is not done with her current job, but I figured maybe I should start the coffee side. I have never been the barista type. Nothing against people that do that, but I’ve just never been interested in all the different ways to make the coffee. Instead, I decided to try roasting. I got a small roaster at first, to learn as much as possible. Earlier this year, I bought and installed a larger, commercial roaster so I can do larger batches, but also run them continuously.

A lot of the coffee roasters out there use a drum-type roaster. You’ve probably seen these. They look really cool, and many coffee shops will put the roaster right out in the shop so people can see it roasting. I chose a different type of roaster, called a fluid-bed roaster. That means that instead of the coffee tumbling inside a metal drum, it is suspended in an air current. At its most basic, this type of roaster is most like the air pop popcorn machine you may have. Some people even use the popcorn machine to do coffee, though those are usually not built to withstand coffee. A commercial air roaster, though, is built to handle larger batches of beans, and vent out the chaff and smoke that you get from roasting the coffee. Fluid-bed roasters tend to be more efficient and more consistent. Because the bean is suspended in the airflow, it gets roasted more evenly on all sides while absorbing heat to cook the interior of the bean.

So now you know how I got here. I hope you try my coffee and love it. I think just about every batch I make is some of the best coffee I’ve ever had. I hope you do too.