Ruben Enriquez of Origen Coffee Roasters didn’t know how good the coffee he grew up with in Michoacán de Ocampo, Mexico was until he left home. Replicating (or improving) on the coffee experience from when and where a roaster first fell in love with coffee, sometimes without realizing it, has been a common theme through three seasons of this show.
My first experience with coffee came in the form of a coffee-flavored hard candy that was placed out for guests at my parent’s restaurant. I remember expecting root beer, and then spitting the gross coffee flavored candy onto the floor. It would be nearly 20 years before I tried real coffee after that. When I think about all the years I missed…
We associate food and drink with our homelands. I’m from Wisconsin, and damn if I don’t love cheese and beer. At Origen Coffee Roasters, Ruben is continually trying to share the experience of good, craft, specialty coffee that he had in Mexico with others.
But it did take him awhile to get there! He’s studied culinary arts, been a mechanical engineer, and gone to business school. All stops that eventually helped him form the idea behind, and have the skills to pull off, the opening of his own business.
He couldn’t do it alone. During the show we talk about how his entire family is involved in the business including his wife Perla, who is the CEO, and kids who help at the Farmer’s Markets. We delve into how it can be difficult to walk the line between being family and co-workers. It can also be rewarding when the family shares in their successes together.
Origen focuses on organic, specialty coffee’s which, according to Ruben, is meant to show respect for the land, the workers, and his customers. He’ll be taking that attitude into the next phase of Origen which includes expansion into more retail locations, into more custom community coffee cart experiences, and sharing more of his passion for coffee and the experience it creates with all of us.
Thanks for listening to the show, and for drinking good coffee!
New Roasts from Origen Coffee Roasters
Just this week Ruben started roasting these organic micro-lots:
Colombia Millennium Natural
Guatemala Caserío Chanjon
Honduras Finca La Florencia Typica
Honduras Finca La Lupita Honey
Honduras Finca La Torre Natural
RUBY COFFEE ROASTERS
Shout out to Ruby Colorful Coffee Roasters in Stevens Point, Wisconsin (with a roast facility in nearby Nelsonville) for making the first coffee roastery visit on a recent road trip a success. Great vibe, great service, and general manager Kellen Furkey even took a moment to tell me how he got into coffee on this week’s episode.
I was not entirely prepared for the November chill, and the coffee definitely helped warm me up.
COFFEE IN THE NEWS
A pair of entrepreneurial engineers in Italy have created an environmentally friendly way to roast coffee beans without electricity or gas by concentrating sunlight directly onto coffee beans using mirrors. It may sound like an elementary school experiment, but according to the team who developed Purosole, it is anything but.
According to the inventors, in a sunny locale—like southern Italy or perhaps Southern California—a solar plant with 40 mirrors is capable of roasting up to 66,000 pounds of coffee a year, saving about 60,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
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ROAST! INDUSTRY PARTNERS
Thanks to the the Roast! Industry Legacy Partners. Click these links. Drink their coffees (and whiskey).
Zumbar Coffee & Tea • First Light Coffee Whiskey • Leap Coffee • Steady State Roasting • CAFÉ LaTERRE • Mostra Coffee • Cape Horn Coffee Importers • Marea Coffee • Coffee Cycle • Camp Coffee Company
COFFEE CINEMA
“Cappuccino is the perfect movie,” says Ruben Enriquez during the show. In honor of that quote we’re closing this week with some coffee in film instead of our traditional quote.
Parental Advisory Warning: This clip ends with a fairly emphatic f-bomb.
“Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.”
―As said by Blake, played by Alec Baldwin and written by David Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross
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Roast! - Ruben Enriquez, Origen Coffee Roasters