Welcome to Cafe Today, a feature wherein we peer behind the veil to glimpse the very source from which the delicious gourmet treats found in the Soundry’s cafe flow. In this issue– who can make a rainbow, sprinkle it with dew? The coffee man can. The Amplifier is proud to bring you an exclusive interview with Soundry coffee supplier Tony Xavier Williams of HypnoCoffee. Famed in song and legend for his dedication to the art of roasting and preparing the finest coffee drinks in the land, Tony owns HypnoCoffee, an artisan roastery in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Periodically Tony visits us at the Soundry, or has staffers out to the roastery to pass on precious coffee knowledge. We caught him on one such visit, and interviewed him good;
Amplifier: When and why did you start HypnoCoffee?
Tony: Why? because there was no decent coffee where I lived, and that was Davis, West Virginia. We were used to good coffee, we’d get coffee in different shops, we were kind of coffee geeks at home and when I was there we started buying all kinds of gear, brewing it at home… I had time off, flex time, a couple of years, so I got bored and started a coffee shop, and that was 2007. We wrote the business plan and bought all the gear, and we opened January of 2008.
Amp: I know nothing about coffee. You know a lot about coffee, so what question should I ask you?
Tony: I think the question, THE question is why do some coffee shops fail at what they do? Why are they bad? Why does all the money go to national chains like Starbucks that have sort of morphed coffee into clichéd Italian terms? It’s the independent chains that try and combat that, but don’t have the knowledge, the skill set, the execution. I don’t think enough people take coffee seriously as a skill set. It needs to be taught and a ritual needs to be followed. The more you know about it, the better you are at it, and that goes from knowing where the coffee’s grown and what it should taste like, to having the correct posture and tamping when you tamp your espresso. A thorough knowledge and understanding of the skill set is necessary to create a good product, and then finally, executing it the exact same way, every time. It’s not oversimplification– there’s just one good way, one correct way. It’s very Zen that way. So, a deeper question would be what makes mine different from other people’s? Not that there aren’t other people doing it that way. The East Coast is starting to happen.
Amp: Favorite coffee drink? Favorite bean?
Tony: My favorite coffee drink is a macchiato. The Nicaraguan’s my favorite right now. I don’t blend or mix it with anything else. It stands alone. They are extremely special. It’s an old varietal of Dutch origin. It grows well at high altitudes, it’s grown in cloud forests in Nicaragua. There’s a farmer committed to growing fields of nothing but that bean. Most farmers grow macro lots– this is a micro lot. Having beans from a single farm is a prized kind of green bean to have. It’s beans from a single farm, from a single variety of tree, and it’s an heirloom variety of tree. Meaning most farms have to plant several different varieties of coffee. There could be all different kinds that have all different weaknesses and strengths. Then at harvest, they pick them off all the trees, they go to the mill and they stay together from that one farm– they don’t get mixed with other farms. You get several different varieties of beans, and the reason is that some are more susceptible to disease, some fight disease better, some do better with little rain, some need more, so they plant a bunch of different ones so it’s guaranteed to have an outcome. If they grow these heirloom varieties like this Nicaraguan farmer did– he’s a German doctor– anyways he committed to a micro lot field, just one variety of plant that grows well at high elevations. So he grew it, it bore fruit, he milled it, and a guy called a Q grader goes there to guarantee that there were no other varieties of plants in that field and he watches it get milled, then he picks out the bad beans. Another Q grader follows up his work, and ensures that it’s good. Then he meets the farmer. It’s an heirloom bean– it’s like I’m drinking coffee the way it tasted in the 1600s. So he’s probably making about three times as much as the neighboring farms, but he’s also taking a much bigger risk. This particular one is susceptible to over-precipitation. It’ll get rot. So he’s gambling when he does it.
Amp: HypnoCoffee is pseudonymously known as the HypnoShip. Is the HypnoShip pirate, legit, or something in between, like a privateer?
Tony: MUCH more like a pirate ship.
Amp: What’s the story about the new HypnoBeer?
Tony: It’s true. We’ve been doing that. Since last winter. It’s HypnoStout. We take our espresso blend, and it’s 16 oz. of espresso to 5 gallons of beer with two oz. of Ghirardelli powdered mocha.
A friend of ours, who owns a brewery where they make stout, brought a keg over one day and we started to squirt espresso into the keg … We’d put a few more shots into the keg, mix it, we got pretty drunk. The owner Willie, myself and my father-in-law, and the UPS driver.
Amp: How do you evaluate a coffee?
Tony: I still cheat and use a flavor tasting wheel from the Specialty Coffee Association of America. When I get a new coffee, or it’s a new lot of a coffee, I cup it. The first thing I do, first roast, I shoot for a roast that I’ve been using for that coffee in the past, but I may take it below that roast. I always roast it at a medium roast. I coarsely grind about an oz. of coffee, throw it in a cappuccino cup and then add hot water to the top of it. Gives you a real, naked picture of the coffee. To evaluate the taste I just start with basic flavors– is it sour, is it sweet? If it was sweet, sweet how? Was it chocolaty, sweet like caramel? And just get more and more and more narrow. The other thing I do is to go online to the Roasters Guild, and compare notes with other roasters– “I cupped it this way, how did you cup it?” We trade information… usually I have a flavor or a taste in mind and I try to achieve it. So I don’t cup for evaluation to buy or not to buy, usually. I’m trying to find the sweet spot of each bean, find where it tastes the best.
…Herbaceous tastes are more from the aroma. Bourbons especially have herbaceousness. It smells like asparagus when you grind it, it’s really weird. And you taste it, and there’s a slight vegetable-like sweetness. It’s really cool. The Nicaraguan has a carrot taste. It has a sourness, not like citrus fruit, but like unripened cherry fruit, which is darker. It also reminds me of a sweetness from a beet. These are not negative things to say about coffee, it’s just the dynamic of coffee. It also has a real nutty finish, so it tastes like you’ve eaten cashews. If you’ve ever eaten unsalted cashews or unsalted nuts, it leaves a taste in your mouth that’s kind of grainy and sweet. Along the lines of all this, I’m taking a course in the fall to get my Q graders license. Then I go back in the winter to take a two day exam, where I’ll need to successfully identify 22 varieties of coffee.
Amp: I’m a hardcore tea drinker. Can you get me to drink coffee?
Tony: Well, if you’re drinking Earl Grey, you get a caffeine delivery. Even green teas have that a little bit. So maybe you could say your body craves caffeine to a certain point like coffee drinkers do. So that’s something in common, you want that organic caffeine compound in your body. And I think, the lightness of tea– coffee, when it’s done really well, and all the stars are aligned, and it’s grown really well, picked at the right time, milled well, didn’t get damaged in shipping, got to the grocer’s hand and he didn’t screw anything up, if he did a good job roasting it, and then the barista prepares it correctly, water in proportion to grounds, then you get this expression of something delicious. And, if you appreciate good beer, or good tea or good food or good wine, then it helps you appreciate good coffee. I think the same could be said of anyone who’s into any kind of food or drink. I mean if you’re really into tea, why couldn’t you be really into coffee?
Try the Java that’s here right now. It almost– the finish is molasses. I’ve never had an Indonesian coffee taste like that. It finishes sweet. In that way it would be herbalesque. That’s really a cool trick in a coffee. It has a quality like slightly unripened fruit.
Sumatra are light, like red wine from grapes that are maybe slightly unripe, so, tart, with heavier bodies. They feel substantial in your mouth.
…The other reason why a tea drinker might turn into a coffee drinker– because it’s cheaper than tea.
That’s all from Tony today, reader. Be on the lookout for another heaping helping of savory savoir faire in The Amplifier’s next installment of Cafe Today, right here on Soundry.net.
