First things first, I started to record this interview…then my mother called and it stopped the recording. I’m going to attach the first part of the recording, but the rest of the interview is highlighted below.
Scott started drinking coffee at a young age, which a lot of children don’t do, and that fueled his passion for coffee later on. Fast forward to today and Scott now owns his own coffee company! He began his journey roasting his own beans when he was running a café. Scott began his coffee career as a café owner and then something just clicked…. he wanted to source and roast his own beans to make his own blends. He has been in the coffee business for 20 years now and is travelling the world sourcing coffee beans and ordering directly from the farmers themselves. When he gets his beans, he and his team roast the beans to find the perfect blends to sell and serve to his customers. The goal for his coffee company is to grow slowly. He is happy with the business he is running now and is in no hurry to scale it to some massively huge corporation. When starting out, Scott did not pitch to investors. He relied on his credit cards, friends & family, and a few small loans and has been able to keep control of his company. Scott believes that there is a need for an artisan/specialty decaffeinated market because it is an underserved niche. He even sells some decaffeinated blends himself! He reassured me that there is a market out there for decaffeinated coffee drinkers and a need for someone to fill that void, however, it will be difficult journey as nobody “experiments” with large scale decaffeinated coffees due to the cost. Decaffeination plants will only run a batch at a certain volume and coffee companies don’t want to experiment with decaffeinating large quantities of coffee because you never know how it will affect the flavor. This is great news because when someone, like me, comes along and does want to conduct those experiments…the decaffeinated market can be captured. Organic and shade grown coffee doesn’t really mean much when put on a bag of coffee. It’s basically a marketing scheme. It means more for a coffee sourcer to visit a farm and check the quality themselves. Every bean from every country roasts differently. Even coffee from the same farm, but on the other side of a hill roasts differently, which was news to me! Every batch that a coffee roaster roasts, should be given individual attention because there is no secret formula to roasting a batch of beans the same way every single time. I had planned to run roasters at timed intervals to get as much coffee roasted in one day as possible. Now I know that each batch will need individual attention and will reduce the number of batches I can produce in one day.
