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“How did Din start roasting coffee?”
This is the question I hear most about how Din Johnson, the owner of Ristretto Roasters and my husband, got into the coffee biz. No doubt, the glass-enclosed roasting room he built at our first shop in Northeast Portland inspired people to ask. It was here that fathers holding toddlers, teenage girls, little boys and grown women stood as Din poured green coffee beans into the hopper of a rumbling Probat L-12 roaster and monitored the beans’ every crack and smell and color change, until minutes later he released them into the cooling tray – toasty-brown, aromatic, ready to be ground and brewed. The image of freshly roasted beans being slowly revolved in the cooling tray was so mesmerizing, people often watched for an hour or more.
Din’s coffee odyssey began in 2000, when we were living in Los Angeles, and he brought home a coffee roaster the size of a small popcorn popper. Taking over the spot on the kitchen counter usually reserved for my KitchenAid (the nerve), he began roasting a half-cup of beans at a time. Soon, we were receiving regular mail deliveries of little pouches of green beans with names like Tanzanian Peaberry and Guatemala Huehuetanengo. After working all day as a contractor, Din would come home and fire up the tiny roaster — which, as I recall, made a noise like a very tiny hair dryer. And did we drink good coffee? We did, if not much of it; a half-cup of beans not going very far.
A few months later, I came home to find something that looked like a small aircraft engine sitting on the counter.
“What is it?” I asked Din, but I don’t think he heard me, so transfixed was he by the new gleaming chrome roaster, which he immediately sparked up. This one sounded like a rather larger hairdryer, plus it took up most of the available counter space, so down to the basement it went, along with an ever-growing supply of green beans, in ever larger sacks — so much coffee Din was able to not only fuel our needs, but those of our friends, who’d taste the smoothness of his freshly-roasted Mexican Chiapas and say, “Can you roast me some to take home?”
I started to see less of my husband, occupied as he was in the basement with the roaster, and on the 
Internet, drilling deeper into coffee culture, and on rare occasion – this was Los Angeles, where most people at the time drank truly execrable chain coffee and called it good – interacting with other coffee roasting aficionados. This was the same year we decided to relocate to Portland, where Din had grown up. In the fall of 2003, we bought a house in Northeast Portland, which Din remodeled and made beautiful. My teenage daughter and I followed in the summer of 2004.
Our first year here was tough: Did Din want to continue to be a contractor, which meant working eight months of the year in the rain? He was 37 years old; he’d had enough of banging nails, or at least, banging nails with no purpose other than driving them into walls. I asked him, if he could do anything, what would it be?
“Roast coffee,” he said. It was decided: he would roast for a wholesale-only business, based in our garage. He bought the Probat, on eBay. It was driven from North Carolina by what appeared, as they unloaded it in our driveway, to be two stoned teenagers. Din and his sister wrote a business plan; we got up some money from family and friends, and Ristretto Roasters was born.
O
r sort of born: even before the new roaster was fired up, Din realized we probably needed a storefront. We found the location on NE 42nd Avenue, and for five months, starting in May 2005, Din did everything: he painted walls and finished floors and built the furniture; he picked out and installed lights; moved in the roaster and helped construct a truly epic afterburner, the system which essentially atomizes the smoke that comes from roasting. He hired our first two baristas, Rachel and Katie, and on opening day, September 17, 2005, the four of us stood in the 600-square-foot café, ready to introduce to the world Din’s hand-crafted, medium-roasted coffee.
I think we sold $57 worth of it that day. It’s gone up from there.
Certainly, we have had our trials building a business: burst pipes and blackouts. Setting the brewer to
“Full” when you meant to push “Half,” so that you come back five minutes later to a coffee river; delivery people who show up five hours late with the pastry, and schoolboys who systematically destroy the outdoor furniture because, well, they’re schoolboys. But these incidents have been dwarfed by our great good fortune, which has come and seems to keep coming because of the uncompromising nature of the work Din does. It attracts good people with good ideas, people like Josh Gibby, who for eight months (and before putting in an eight-hour day as a contractor), arrived three mornings a week at six a.m. to work alongside Din and learn how to roast, a skill he has perfected and then some. People like Jeffrey Stuhr, who, when I asked if his monumentally successful architectural firm Holst would consider doing an itty-bitty job that would be the design for our second shop, on North Williams, said, “Of course! We love your coffee!” People like our baristas and bussers, who are cheerful and strong and at the heart of why Ristretto Roasters is a success. They are what make the cafés so many people’s daily constitutional, a “third place” to sit and chat and read and think.
And of course, to drink great coffee: since Ristretto Roasters opened in 2005, the word has spread about Din’s work, the philosophy of roasting each type of bean to the peak if its individual perfection (a Panama Honeyed is not a Ethiopian Harar, so why would you treat them the same?), and the coffees and all their wonderfulness. We are delighted and honored to be featured in Bon Appetit magazine, in The New York Times; to be named in 2010, by food authors Jane and Michael Stern, as “Best Coffee in the Northwest.”
But what really makes it all happen are the people: the farmers we meet when we travel to Panama, to Brazil; the bean suppliers who introduce us to new sources; the roasters who come into our orbit, to share knowledge and stories and hey, have you tried these beans? The artisans inspired to incorporate Ristretto Roasters coffees into their work, people like Elizabeth Montes of Sahagun Chocolates and her KA-POW! coffee bar, and the craftspeople who inspire us to use their great products. And of course the ever-expanding number of cafes, restaurants and retail outlets that buy their coffee from Ristretto. We are all part of the extraordinary and enormously rich world of coffee. There’s never been a better time to enter this world, when in Portland and (slowly, slowly…) the rest of the nation, people are coming to appreciate how truly great their morning cup can be.
We look forward to meeting you at our retail locations, and invite you to visit the roastery to cup some coffees on our Brazilian granite cupping tables, and to watch Din roast on the (yet another! And larger!) vintage Probat roaster.
Nancy Rommelmann, for Ristretto Roasters
