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“
I was born in
a coffee farm and my family used to grow coffee,” Lopez
says. “In
the coffee producing countries, it is common to
have the kids help pick the coffee cherries—when
the family owns a coffee farm or just working for
one the whole family works as a unit.”
Once
Lopez graduated from high school, he started
working for
a German coffee company called the Neumann Kaffee
Gruppe. There he worked as coffee exporter, regional
office controller, miller, taster, trader and regional
manager—positions
that exposed him to all aspects of coffee business,
from paperwork to computers (the company paid
for his college degree)
to learning everything there is to know about coffee beans. His coffee bean
know-how serves him at the Flying Star Café every day. Owners Jean
and Mark Bernstein knew he was the man for the job.
“When we saw his
resumé,
we were so impressed we hired him right away,” Jean Bernstein says.
The Bernsteins are themselves coffee aficionados with an extensive knowledge,
and search the world to buy beans.
Lopez can tell a bean’s
entire history, just by looking at it: if it was
picked too soon (yellowish color), if it was dried
too much,
too fast or not enough (white on the edges), if
it was kept in water too long (yellow spots, moldy)
and if it was dried on the sun or in a machine.
He can even tell if the
bean was grown in a high altitude (tighter shaft)
or low.
“Based on how the bean looks, I decide if I want to roast
it longer— like, to get rid of the green flavors of beans that were
picked too soon,” he says.
Lopez roasts all of
the coffee sold at Flying Star Cafés
and Satellites: that’s fourteen to 16 55-pound batches a day, totaling
500 pounds of green beans and 400 pounds of rich roasted beans. He tastes
every other batch to ensure quality, unless it’s a brand-new batch—those
he always tastes.
To know how a bean should
be roasted (different coffee beans require different
lengths of time in the roaster), Lopez experiments
with small batches of new beans. From those, he
learns how the coffee
should look and sound at the time it reaches its
peak of flavor and acidity—the
time it should be “dropped,” or released from
the roasting machine.
“If I drop it
too soon, I have a lot of acidity,” he says. “If
wait too long, I lose all the acidity and get bitterness.”
The
theory is that the temperature in the machine is 475 degrees Fahrenheit
and the beans should be dropped when their temperature is between 400–430
degrees—when they’re darker in color and
make a cracking sound for the second time as water and oils are released.
But Lopez says he doesn’t like to rely on numbers too much. He
likes to trust his eyes and ears because it makes every batch different
and personal—and he says that’s how he likes it. Also,
every bean is different, even when it comes from the same farm because
the
conditions around it were different as it grew. Even the way to process
the beans is different, depending on where it came from.
In Costa Rica,
the process is to pick the coffee cherries, press and
wash them to separate the fruit from the bean, put the beans in small
water
tanks to ferment (raising the acidity level), then into the drying
machines for 24 hours. After that, the beans are moved into big
silos for months to settle, then into peeling machines.
Only after all
that the beans are ready to be sold. Lopez also worked with coffee
in Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Germany.
After a lifetime of
exposure, Lopez’s knowledge of coffee has no boundaries. Even
when he came to the United States, while taking a break from the
coffee business,
all he did in his travels was to look for a great cup of coffee.
He says it’s an addiction.
“Everywhere I
go I try to find a coffee shop,” he says. “You
can ask me questions about all the places I’ve been—I
don’t
know the place, but I can tell you where there you can get a
good cup of coffee.”
He adds that he found
great coffee in Irvine, California; Los Angeles, he
says, had no good coffee.
“There’s
no coffee culture there, just Starbucks,” he says. “For
me Starbucks is to coffee what McDonald’s is to hamburgers:
nobody says McDonalds has the best hamburger, but everybody
eats it sometimes.”
For
Lopez a great cup of coffee is one that’s balanced—without
peaks of acidity or flavors. Bad coffees usually have
an aftertaste, sometimes from being overly fermented or
burned.
For Lopez,
a great life is one that’s connected to coffee.
He loves it so much, he says, he hopes his children,
Adriana and Alberto, will follow in
his footsteps.
—By Karina
Guzzi
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