111 | Gradient Coffee Roastery | John Mills

We have a coffee roaster in the neighborhood. I got a chance to talk with John Mills and his son Quinten about them and the business. I learned a lot about coffee roasting and we will do a segment soon on the intricacies of roasting. But here is our conversation about John and his journey to being a neighborhood coffee roaster.

Here is a link for those who want to see the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Q5zcolW5E)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello and welcome to the Tower Coffee Hour. This is Preston or Ty Tyree, and I was able to sit down with John Mills and his son Quentin in their garage here in Miller this week. John has a coffee roaster in his garage and provides many different coffee options to friends and neighbors. We talked about John's early life. He's a Texas native, having been born in Midland, but has lived outside of Detroit, Michigan, in London, England, and in Cape Town, South Africa. And his family is from Australia, so it's interesting talking with him. John's moved to Austin and finally to Miller, gave him a chance to get a small commercial coffee roaster. John has created a coffee roastery in his garage and supplies many different varieties of beans roasted to order. I took advantage of his subscription plan to get one order of coffee each month for $15. I am looking forward to taste testing some of his specialty roasts. So please join John Quentin and me in John's garage to talk about coffee. John, it's awfully nice to meet you and Quentin.

unknown 1:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Really nice to meet you as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Thank you, Quentin. Tell me more about you. Where were you born?

SPEAKER_02 1:30

All right. So uh When were you born? When was I born? Where was I born? I was born in Texas. I was born out in West Texas in a little town called Midland. That alone is kind of an interesting story because you know, typically people from Midland are very involved in sort of oil and petroleum.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Sort of, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Uh not everybody, but some of them. And my family wasn't. Uh in fact, my dad, he he's Australian. My mom, she's from New York, but she had been living in Australia with him for a number of years. And my two older siblings were actually born in in Adelaide, in Australia. And my dad, he uh would build, he was working for a race team where he would build performance race engines, uh, different cars. I forget the name of the league itself, but this was yeah, sort of back in uh back in the 60s and 70s. And they they had sort of an abrupt change in their in that team, and they they moved to uh this little town in in West Texas. And my dad, I don't think, had ever been to West Texas before. Neither my mom, I suppose. None of us had actually been to Texas before. And this is sort of funny because there's this sort of this racing culture, uh small pocket of racing uh out there. And so there's this team that was ended up building not Formula One, but uh indie car uh engines.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Indy cars in Texas, yeah, in Texas.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

Okay, and in in Midland of Texas uh of all places. And uh anyway, so a few years after they moved to Texas, uh, I was born and and I lived there for 13 years or so before so moved out, I think it was like sixth or seventh grade, and we moved to Michigan, which is a what year was that that you were born? I was born in 1985. So I was born in 1985. So I moved when I was 13. So it was right around millennia. So it was nineteen, I think it was 1999. We moved. So we moved to Michigan. And so there was like a bit more of a natural fit for for racing. It was for for my dad's company. And so yeah, so that's so that's sort of when I when I think about like uh uh childhood or home, I think about probably not so much Midland, Texas, in spite of you know, I lived there for a good 13 years. I I think of more of Michigan.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

I think of just you were in Midland when you were at Quentin's age. Correct. Quentin is nine. Yes, all right.

unknown 3:30

That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

I didn't know that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

We're here today with John and Quentin Mills. John is an older one sitting here in the chair. Quentin is our friend standing with us, and we're gonna talk about their lives and coffee. You're in Michigan, you go through school, you get out, you start working, I assume, doing something. What? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

So this is another, right? Actually, as I sort of moved into Michigan, I got really interested in computers. Okay. So particularly like uh programming, just getting like really curious about like how computers work. And this is also the time that the web was becoming really alive. Like the internet was become very popular, and I was really fascinated with particularly the like the internet. Not not as much as like like writing code for like building a video game, but really like how services and products are connected. That was really fascinating to me. And so through uh from a very early age, I learned really how to write code and program computers. And in fact, I think that's probably an interesting segue into coffee, but I'll hold back on that story for a minute. So learned how to code, spent that was sort of my hobby. I even in high school, I went to one of the high schools where they had a computer science class. And it was one of the sort of like early computer science classes, and I just a fantastic teacher who really taught me more than just writing code, but just like how to how to work with it, how to understand it. Yeah. I would he he was my first period teacher, and I was always late. And then after high school, I had an opportunity to work professionally as like a software engineer. It was just a very small company, it was a startup with these two brothers, and we had, and they sort of invited me in and they sort of like showed me the ropes. And this was great. And I knew at the time, like I knew I wanted to go to college. I I wasn't sure what I wanted to do in college, though, because I hadn't I had enough of a foundation of computer science and sort of the the fundamentals there that I I wasn't uh it didn't really spark my joy or spark my curiosity of I want to go learn something. And so I delayed going to college for a few years and I ended up working for this company. This company ended up being fairly successful.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Gwynn, have you heard this story before?

SPEAKER_01 5:42

No.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

No, good. I'm gonna quiz you on it later.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

This is this is good.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Thanks, yeah. You're gonna come into the story very soon, actually. Yes.

unknown 5:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

The company that I was working for, we we ended up getting acquired as as as as good good companies can. And then after that, we actually acquired a company in in London, in the UK. So at the time I was maybe 20, I forget exactly how old I was, maybe say 23, 24, 25. I remember very vividly I had this. I went into work sort of an average day, and I remember my boss, he comes into me, comes to me and he says, Hey, you know, I know like, you know, you don't have you don't have a house, you don't have a dog. Would you be interested in moving to London? Because you you sort of work on this project. We want to move this project out to the UK, where this company is. This would be a good opportunity to, you know, just like handle like an acquisition, like a good from a business side really well. But also like to build a culture, like an engineering, like a software engineering culture was basically jumped at the chance. So they were you know they were gonna fly me out there, put me up. And I was coming from a you know a little town outside of Detroit to moving into London.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Um, I have a question. Did anyone go on the plane with you? Like anyone like nobody I knew. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

I went all on my own.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Wow.

unknown 7:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

And so I got there and and the company was great. I and London is such a fun city.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Really fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Okay, so you're in London, and uh I'm assuming that's where you met your South African wife.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Yeah, so that's where you're you're gonna come to the story in a minute. So, yeah, so that's where I met Faye. She's so she's South South uh South African. She'd been living in London at the time for I think about 16 years. I shouldn't know that, but I think about 16 years. She had actually done a similar move. So when I moved from Texas to Michigan around 13, she had moved from uh Cape Town to London at a similar age. Okay. You know, as much as I I love love London, I still do.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

It sometimes can be confusing.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

You know, I I think for a big city, it's the one of the least confusing cities.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Really?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

What I what really drove me away from London is the weather. And and I, you know it's like this. It's a lot like this. It's like every day. Every day. It's a little, it's just too cold. It is too wet.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

And it feels like you're walking to Alaska every day without like the actual fact of s factor of snow.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

No snow in London. Well, some snow in London. Yeah, but not. Not much.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Yeah. Not a not like snowing at all.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

But that's why they talk about a foggy day in London. Foggy day in London. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Like that's their equivalent of snow and ice. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Yeah. I think uh maybe a small part of my story, my childhood story, is uh when I when we had moved from from Texas to Michigan, we had actually left one of my siblings behind because she is about seven years older than I am. And so she had actually was she was just going to college at the time.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

So she went to uh St. Edwards University back in, I don't know exactly that, 1998 or something. I don't know. So we we left her here. And so she had actually always she's a she's a longtime Austinite, and and she's still here. Uh she although recently had moved to to Bathstrop. And so I had this connection back here in Austin. And so when she and I got together and I said, Hey, not really enjoying this this London thing, would you be interested in coming back to Austin with me? And so one thing led to another. So she got here.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

And we moved into a little bungalow in Cherrywood.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

And we had lived in Cherrywood for about 10 years. During that time, Quentin, you you emerged.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

That was nine years ago.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Nine years ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

We, you know, and when Mueller was coming, you saw the the beginning. Yeah, we did because we were so close and we knew a lot of friends here, and we would just constantly be on on the website saying, Oh, this house is really cool. You know, it took me a long time to come around to the idea. But I mean, but realistically, it was over the course of years that we would look. In fact, like where we are now, it didn't even exist when we started looking.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

It did not, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

One time I was using my metal detector in our backyard, and I pulled out like a small shard of an airplane.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Wow. That's really cool. Hope it's not one that crashed.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Anyway, so that was a bit of a fun to do.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

We're gonna get back into a discussion later at the end.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Yeah, I think we need to talk more about it.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

We need to talk about coffee. All right, yeah, let's go for it.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Because I feel like we've been talking about his life more than coffee.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

We've been talking about your dad, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. And then the next question is how did you go from being a software engineer? Are you still a software engineer? I am, yeah. Okay, yeah. How did you make that step into coffee? Yeah. You know, what was that first? You know, I might want to roast this stuff. That's not normal conversation.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Yeah, it's like not your first idea.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

So it's a it's a really good story. Oh, I think it's a really good story. And so coffee, coffee for me has always been a a delight, for lack of a better word. A real delight for me. And so when I was sort of learning how to coat, I was the sort of typical, I think typical person where I would love to stay up extra late, working on a project, getting something done, and I would just drink coffee nonstop. It wasn't fancy coffee, it was probably Folgers in your cup coffee. Uh, I in fact, I don't even know the name of the coffee that my parents had when I was growing up. I do remember the Folgers tin, of course, but but it was typical to just drip coffee, and I would drink it black, and I loved it. I never really enjoyed milk, a little bit maybe, but mostly it was just black coffee. And from an early age, like probably that sort of 13, 14, age. You know, coffee is just what you like. You know, it doesn't you don't have to sol follow the trends, you don't you just drink what you like. And the yeah, so so my so my background.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

That's a really good lesson for most of life. Okay. You do what you like, make sure it's reasonable, but yeah, yeah, you don't have to follow the pack.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

I've always liked coffee, but but there was never this sort of like particular moment. But I was always I would always sort of identify as like a coffee person. Like I every time I would travel, I'd go somewhere going into great, thank you. Whenever I would travel to you travel, I'd grab a coffee. In college, though, there was this one particular coffee shop that uh I would I would frequent, and my my favorite drink would always be an iced Americano. I'd put a little bit of milk in there, and I I'd sort of I'd always grab that right before class. And I don't know if I actually finished that story. I did end up getting a degree. I actually have a degree in economics, uh, of all things. That's all again, it's to your point, a whole other story. But yes, I did get a I did get a degree. And so I'd always go to this coffee shop. It wasn't really until after Quinn was born that we we actually had moved temporarily to to Cape Town, just after he was born.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

So this is in South Africa. So basically, this I mean, the quick story is you know, after he was born, uh, we wanted to be a little bit closer to family. So we moved out there and we we stayed there for maybe a little under two years, but about two years. Okay. This was probably if I'm honest, this was probably the first time that I really understood what it meant to be a to have a coffee culture. You know, Cape Town is not a typical coffee place, or it doesn't even come up in a coffee culture.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

It didn't come to mind immediately.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

No, yeah, it's more of a wine place, but their coffee culture is really strong. And so every everywhere you go, really, like whether it's every restaurant, like farm stall, they're on different farms, on the road, on traveling, they would always have uh a barista and a really nice espresso machine. So their typical drinks are espresso drinks, so like a cappuccino, flatlight, lattes. We went over there, got really into the coffee culture there. So the company I was working for, uh it was a tech startup, but they had a it was a really cool office, sort of in the cent in the central business district of Cape Town. And you could see Table Mountain in the background. And everything was very nice. It was probably arguably one of the nicest offices I've ever worked worked in. And they had a barista, an on high on a step barista.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

And and he was fantastic. And every morning you'd go in, you'd wait in this very long line, and you would chat. And it was sort of, it became like a company culture almost of you know, people talking about sort of what they're gonna work on their day, but also meeting different people. Um, it wasn't a big company, but it was probably like three or four hundred people. Oh, yeah. And and that's when I started to really just sort of get really curious, really interested in like, okay, well, what am I actually drinking? So, yeah, that's kind of that was sort of my first part like big participation in like what it meant to be like a part of the coffee culture. There's so many fantastic coffee shops around Cape Town. So we'd always go for little like off-sites or like meetings off-site, walking distance from the office, grabbed coffee, and it was just this really enjoyable experience. And this was so this what's interesting now is it was around 2017, I believe. And I don't know, I always never never really know like how much this information got shared around the world news networks, but Cape Town as a city almost ran out of water, like drinking water. And basically, what it was is a result of cyclical uh dry seasons, and all of the dams where we collected water were dry. And this wasn't just sort of like a fear-mongering point. This was a very literal who could go down to the dam and see that there's no water. And so we went through this really interesting period where every day you kind of think, okay, it's gonna rain, it's gonna change, and and and and nothing really changed. And so we would progressively get closer and closer to this point of like real catastrophe. And the company I was working for, we we went through a couple of exercises. We went through these contingency planning, sort of, I don't know if you call them workshops or not, where how do we as a company continue operating if we run out of water? Now, in retrospect, maybe that sounds a little bit like the last thing you're worried about if your country runs out of water, but you know, there's some continuity question there. And so one of the continuity questions was we are going to where they sent this was before COVID. Uh, and so we didn't have nobody really had like a working from home culture. So we went through an experience where we sent everybody home and we said, you guys all need to go home, figure out how to work remotely, if it hits the fan and we run out of water. One of the first things I did, and I remember very vividly, it was a Friday, and I'm pretty sure it was right after like we had just gotten a bonus. And so I took my bonus and I went down to the store that was selling espresso machines. And I said, Well, I'm I'm so accustomed to drinking my daily espresso now that if I have to work at home where we run out of water, I need to have my the most important thing for me right now is to buy an espresso machine during this time of crisis.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

And so I went, I went down there, I grabbed this espresso machine, it was like this little Breville. It's a very common espresso machine nowadays. It had it was the Brevel, had a grinder built into it, brought it home. And it was the most fun, enjoyable experience because now I could finally get curious and tinker with this. So I had all the beans, I had all the water, I had all the, you know, the learning material, YouTube's books, etc. And I spent so much time just learning about how to brew and extract coffee using an espresso machine. So that for me was probably the moment at which it sort of like solidified like, okay, I'm I'm I'm more than an average coffee person. I'm like, this is more than more than just a hobby. This is actually like a thing that I really am passionate about. And so since then, you know, obviously we're back here in Austin and I've gone through a number of different espresso machines. I I unfortunately don't still have that one. I do have a part of it. It's up there actually. It's a uh it's one of the boilers that I've kept. So that was that. And so now I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. So it wasn't until about a year ago. I I forget exactly if I was on email or Instagram or something like this, but there was an ad that showed up about taking a learn, like a learning how to roast coffee course, like a roasting 101. And I was like, this sounds really interesting. And yeah, like this theme of me, I think, is yeah, you know, I get curious about things and I just want to learn more. And so I reached out to this, the food's ad. And what I actually learned is this this company, I think at the time it was maybe a relatively new company. I'm not sure exactly the timeline, but relatively new. The company is called Rising Tide Roastery, or so actually Rising Tide Collab, I think. And what it is, it's like this fascinating company. I never even thought about this idea before. But what it is is they they have a big warehouse down in South Austin, and they have these quite fancy uh coffee roasting machines. And and for people who don't know, coffee roasting machines are big, fairly hard to run, and expensive.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

So this is not one of what you were describing.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

This is definitely not. This is the smallest one, and I'm I'm gonna explain to here in a minute about my my coffee roaster. At rising tide, they actually have this exact same coffee roaster. Okay. And the the the pitch on it, the reason they have this roaster, and the reason you train on this roaster is that this is considered like a very manual roaster.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Uh meaning you have you have to control the gas, the heat, the airflow, um, the timing, and all you really get is temperature sensors. And that's it. Everything else is very manual. A lot of the newer machines can be more automatic. So you plug in a roast profile and you say, okay, roast for this amount and this degree, and you etc. And so anyway, so it went down there and I was like, wow. And I knew nothing about coffee roasting. I mean, I I think I had a really good sensory development of like what good coffee tasted like, like low different local companies. But I would also get beans from all over all across the US, across the world. Like I loved experimenting with different beans. So we learned on this machine. It's called an ARC 800. It's a machine that's built out in in Taiwan. Probably the one of the simplest but most like interesting things is that I had no idea how long it takes to roast coffee. And in fact, it's kind of a fun, like trivia question for people because it takes anywhere from you know, maybe eight minutes to 10 minutes to like 12 minutes. It's a very fast process. And then I can get into some of the specifics there. And then, and but for me, it was, you know, I I I as much as I like getting into hobbies, there was something very special about roasting coffee. And I think the the particular thing that stood out to me was roasted coffee is a little bit of a scientific endeavor. So you you do have it's a very scientific approach. Like you want to like isolate variables like the the temperature that you drop the beans in from the hopper, goodness, the amount of time, the amount of temperature rise. It's a so in that part can be very scientific, but the the flip side of it is that it's also a very artistic and craftsman sort of endeavor. Because at the end of the day, you get these green beans that the green beans are the beans that have been picked off of the coffee tree. They're actually cherries. The hist the the processing of coffee is really cool because you have a coffee tree and uh it sort of looks like a it's a pretty like if I'm honest, a pretty uninteresting tree. So the leaves are sort of like sort of oval, like like they're sort of long, but they produce cherries. And they look, they call it coffee cherries, and they look a lot like cherries.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Well, when they get ripe, they turn red. They turn bright red. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

And so that's when you pick them. And in fact, some of the the farmers or they actually have like these color gratings they wear on their wrist. And so they say, Okay, this is red, just pick this, you know. Because I think uh over time you start to you know it start to get complicated. So then you pick this coffee cherry and you let it ferment. And almost all coffee, basically all coffee is fermented. What happens though from that point is very different.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

When I think of ferment, it's in a liquid. But are you not are we doing this in a liquid or are we just letting it age?

SPEAKER_02 21:43

It's both. And so it gets it gets very complex.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

So let's let's get up and go to your equipment. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

So this is the coffee roaster. Like I said earlier, this is called an ARC 800. But the 800 comes from a the amount or the volume of coffee. You can roast any time. So 800 grams of coffee. And so coffee roasters effectively have two main things that you can control. The first thing is airflow. That's one of the variables that you can control. The other is gas. This is a propane-powered coffee roaster. They do come in natural gas nowadays, more and more becoming electric, but it's overall a fairly efficient machine. So inside of here is basically a gas, uh sorry, a flame that's powered by the gas. And if you want to have more heat, you increase this. Those are the only two variables that you actually have. Things you can control. Air and heat. Air and heat. What makes the coffee roaster unique is the temperature sensors, the probes. So there another name for them are called RT RTDs, I believe, or thermocouples. But this is a this is a thermocouple. So this machine actually has four probes. There's a primary one, which is in here, called a bean probe. And this is a since it's the drum roaster, the there's a you can hear it kind of spinning, spinning like this uh at a given RPM. And there's little blades inside of there that like churn, make the beans tumble. And the bean temperature probe sits inside of the beans as it's as they're rumbling through. Then up here, a little bit higher, is something called an environment temperature probe, and it measures the environmental temperature. It shows you it's the temperature of going into the roaster. The rest of the sort of, we'll call it the anatomy of the machine is this is your hopper. When I open this little chute, the beans will flow from here into the drum, and you'll hear it. It's it's like a fairly pleasant sound. It sort of actually sounds a little bit like raindrops. Uh they sit in there, and then I start to control the heat and the temperature. And then after about, say 10 minutes, depending on what I'm my goals are, I will hit this little button here called cooling. And this is a really fun machine because there's a sort of an extractor fan over here, and that's the second hose.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Show me a raw bean, show me a cooked bean.

SPEAKER_02 24:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

And we're not going to go through the 10-minute process of cooking them, but you know, then we'll talk about grinding.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

So this is a coffee, a sample of coffee that I got just recently. I've actually not even roasted this yet. But it's the varietal is called a pacamara. And these pacamaras are quite a very big bean, like a very large bean. Let's show that. And what I I like to keep my batch size sort of like consistent. So what I usually try to do is keep that at about 400. And these beans are what you call green beans. All right. Now, these beans are actually a little bit bigger than than normal. They have a particularly interesting smell. It's unlike anything. You wanna like I can't.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Oh, okay. There's a it's very earthy. Very earthy.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Yeah, it's a it's a raw, uncooked bean that the only thing that's happened to it is it's been fermented. Effectively, on my screen here is a roast profile. So depending on the amount of moisture, depending on the density of the bean, and also the size of the bean. And then you can also look at there's some more, you know, maybe tribal knowledge of, you know, where the bean came from, which farm, how it was processed. Those those things also do come into the come into play. But in terms of objective variables, bean size, the density of the bean, and the moisture of the bean are very important variables. I actually have a machine here that measures both the moisture and the density for you.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

At what point does the artisan take over?

SPEAKER_02 25:27

I think where the artisan comes in is there's no set formula for roasting coffee. When you're roasting coffee, you're thinking about what is your like what are you what are your goals? Are you trying to create a coffee that is maybe going to be more used for like a pour over? For me as a roaster, what I've really tried to do is create coffee that I personally like. It's a good start. And and because and I think that's what's really enjoyable for me is doing something that I like and then sharing that with the neighbors of Mueller. And I think different roasters can also do the sort of the inverse of that, where they're saying, actually, I want to go make a really nice, fruity, acidic coffee because that's what my customers like. And I'm sort of the other way around where I want to make something that I really enjoy and then share that with the neighbors. In roasting, there's roughly three phases of uh roasting coffee. The very first phase is you what you're doing is when the bean goes into the roasting drunk, you're drying the bean. You're taking off all the sort of moisture on the outer shell. The second phase, once the bean has dried, which is usually when the bean has changed enough color, it'll become a sort of a yellowy color. So this is where I usually like to spend a lot of my time in the roast profile, is trying to elongate, but not too long, the Maillard phase. And then the third phase is called the development phase. And so typically the number one characteristic that people talk about when they're buying coffee is do I want a light roast or a dark roast? And development is usually that. So when you have finished your Maillard phase, and you know you finished the Maillard phase when you start to hear the beans pop. So just like popcorn, because the moisture inside of the inner part of the bean has now basically reached a boiling point and it's cracked open the bean. So we actually call it first crack. And that's when you know that you've finished the Maillard phase, you're moving into this, what we call the development phase. And the development phase is you you tend to like keep the roast time to a minimum there. So maybe it's only, maybe it's a percentage of the total roast, or just say, maybe it's just say one minute after the mayored phase. And then you turn off and you can call it drop the beans. If you leave it, say two minutes, that's called maybe, let's just call it the medium roast. At that two minute mark, the beans have become a little bit darker. All the moisture will have been extracted through that first crack, most of the moisture at least. And then if you leave them in a little bit longer, that'll be more of a darker roast, maybe three or four minutes. Most of the beans that I make are somewhere between sort of a light to a medium, a little bit higher. Like I like a little bit stronger than a typical light roast. I like the darker, darker roast, but I want to make sure that that sweetness is really what's coming to life. Right at this moment, I'm capturing this note of these people think this one tastes a little bit like lime blossom.

unknown 28:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

And so at that note, at that moment, you're thinking, I can do that. But if I go a little bit longer, that lime blossom might go away. And so these are all the variables that you get to take. And I think it's a lot like cooking, or I think sourdough is actually a pretty good parallel. Is everybody's sourdough is a little bit different. Everybody's baking style is a little bit different. And so it it attracts a certain person to that style that you have created. And so that's what I've been trying to do. These are a bean out of Bolivia. This is my Bolivian coffee. I have actually loved this coffee so far. I call it this, it's really interesting. I call it the abajita, which is in Spanish the the little bee. And the reason is, and I don't know what it is about this particular coffee, but as it's roasting, there's a little honeybee. And I don't know if it's the same one or just a family, or they're all interested in it. This little honeybee comes in. Doesn't bother me, just sort of smells around. He's like, what is this? Uh and then he goes away. And so I named it the little abejita. And so, yeah, then this is what shows up in your bag. So I will take a little coffee bag. So this morning, yeah, we we had a bit of the coffee there. Uh we we we we grounded.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Well, actually, Quentin ground it.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Sorry, you're right. Quentin, he he loves he is a is a major helper. And so, yeah, that is coffee roasting.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

What have you learned about life from roasting coffee?

SPEAKER_02 29:38

My genuine answer, and I think it's pervasive in a lot of my sort of life's endeavors, is it's curiosity. When I first saw that ad to learn how to roast coffee, it it it piqued curiosity. But what it what curiosity for me is, is sort of unearthing something that is that you that you're unsure of how it works. And I think learning how stuff works really broadens your world purview. And I think things start to make more sense the more things you understand. And so you you can I've, for example, before I started roasting coffee, I enjoyed specialty fancy coffee for I mean years, maybe a decade before I got and I knew anything about roasting. And like I said, I claimed I knew everything about, you know, specialty coffee and do all the processing and all of that, but I actually had no idea how long it takes to roast coffee. Like it's such a simple thing, right? And since I got curious and I learned how that works, it has sort of started to create more clarity for me of like just how the coffee coffee, the pipeline, I guess I'll call it, like the coffee pipeline works, whether it's importing the green coffee, which I've done, it's roasting. And then the next thing that I'm really curious about is to start going to origin and going to talk to the farmers who are running these farms and and sort of what their challenges are. What are their also what are their art are artistic versus uh mechanistic viewpoints on actually growing coffee? Sustainability is such an interesting passion for me, but I'm actually moving into more of a glass jar. And because I'm only really selling to neighbors, what's also great is they actually prefer that too. They can return it.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

And you can get your glass jar back.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

I can get the glass jar back, I can give them a discount. Like it's a it's a really great system. Okay. And then, yeah, sustainability though on the farm, thinking about like what actually got me into this was the country I was living in ran out of water.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

And that's a th, these are real things that are happening around the world.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

I I get so much kick out of talking to people like this because you begin to see those connections.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

You know, why did you give me the coffee? Because the country ran out of water. What what was that? Yeah, right. What was that? Yeah. Now let's talk about a little bit about Miller. Two questions. What one thing you really love about Miller. And then the other one is if you could change anything, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 32:03

You know, I was saying earlier in the interview how we moved from Cherrywood to Mueller. In spite of being so close, I was always so worried. You know, maybe I just it was not the place that we wanted to be. But literally, like, you know, those moments you have in life where you immediately know this is the right place. I had that with Mueller. Okay. Like that night we moved in, and you know, half of our stuff wasn't even. I was like, this is exactly it. Like the it was immediate friendship, immediate connections. Quentin, he had immediate friends. He can go down the street, it's safe. It's just incredibly diverse, like groups of people that we meet. And that for me is like the most exciting thing. Just the the the the different types of people you're able to meet. In fact, I think the reason you and I had met was Kaz, he my when I first got this machine, this roaster, sorry, I had just come out of a back injury, and my wife actually put a message out on the WhatsApp group saying, Hey, can anybody help me move it in? Kaz came over, you know, no question. I I don't even know I had met him at the time. And then he, a few days later, he's like, Hey John, you know, just so you know, like I run the MA, would you like to donate your beans? And I was like, this is fantastic because now I get to learn as I'm roasting coffee and share with neighbors. And that was my first injection point into like, okay, let's go connect with neighbors. And what's been so nice is you know, 99% of my sales is just local neighbors. And for the most part, my my whole pitch was that me and my me and Quentin, we would like deliver the coffee on our bikes. And we still do that for a lot of people, but and it was a few days into the business that somebody had mentioned, hey, like you should do a pickup option because people enjoy coming to look at your roaster. And so so many people show up and they're like, Hey, nice to meet you. I've never met you. I live so-and-so over here, over there. Can I see your roaster? And I was like, absolutely. And as you can tell, I enjoy talking about it. So I come and I show them. And for them, I hope it's again sort of satiating their curiosity about something that is otherwise maybe a little bit opaque or foreign. And so getting just getting to know different neighbors like that. And then we've also started doing quite a lot of like really creative like pop-ups. So there's a group that does a pop-up in Tanaguchi Park. I I I'm able to give them some coffee beans uh for their thing. Another one of our neighbors, he has like a little Japanese truck that we're I'm I'm offering or giving him some beans for. Uh, I think this weekend there's a a new I don't know if they've if they just moved here or what their deal is exactly, but they they're selling or make they bake Japanese style bread. So we're gonna do like a little collab where I'm gonna provide the coffee and they're gonna provide the bread.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Let me know.

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Uh yeah, well, uh definitely. And and so all these little fun connections that are just so unique. So the thing I would not I would change, I think it's the name, though. I I really want to be the person who calls it Miller. I just can't. I can't call it Miller, and I I I don't know why.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Question. I want to buy a bottle of coffee, I love it. And I can specify the roast and the bean and all of that.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

That's one of the big my favorite things about this is that because I literally make individual batches, so this is like I said earlier, like this is my 400 gram batch. If you, when you sign up on the website, if you say I want light roast or dark roast, I can literally keep that in just a little bit longer for you. And it's no, I mean it's no different to me. And so I can make them hyper personalized, or you can just buy them as as you want on the website. Like just give me what you think is the very best.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

So this is the the tower coffee hour. It'll be interesting to see what we get up when we get all this put together. John, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time, and it was so much fun getting to meet Quentin. That was fun. And the coffee John served was delicious. Quentin supplied the coffee mugs and was helpful in setting up the audio and video equipment. So it was went better than expected. John is a supplier of coffee to the Miller Neighborhood Association for our monthly meetings and donates part of his proceeds from one of his store brands to the Miller Swim Team, the Manatees. If you like good coffee and enjoy a special taste, you need to visit John's website, Gradient Coffee Roastery dot com, and check out your options. Until the next time we find an interesting in every interview, this is Preston or Ty Tyree signing off and wishing you all the best.