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By Nancy Rommelmann
“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 has inspired people to want to ask. It is here that fathers holding toddlers, teenage girls, little boys and grown women, stand as Din pours green coffee beans into the hopper of a big rumbling Probat L-12 roaster and monitors the beans’ every crack and smell and color change, until minutes later he releases them into the cooling tray–toasty-brown, aromatic, ready to be ground and brewed. The image of freshly roasted beans being slowly revolved in that cooling tray is so mesmerizing, people often watch for an hour and more.
It didn’t start out this way. Din’s coffee odyssey began in 2000, when we were still 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 KitcheAid (the nerve), he began several times a week to roast a half-cup of beans at a time, beans he would order online. Soon, we were receiving regular mail deliveries of little pouches of green beans with names like Tanzanian Peaberry and Guatemala Huehuetanengo. After he worked all day as a contractor, Din would come home and, by night, fire up the tiny roaster, which, if 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 number 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 drink truly execrable chain coffee and call it good–another coffee roasting aficionado. If memory serves, Din even went to a coffee convention up in Seattle.
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 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, and 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 to be, as they unloaded it in our driveway, two stoned teenagers. Din and his sister Hillary wrote a business plan; we got up some money from family and friends, and Ristretto Roasters was born.
Or sort of born: even before the roaster was sparked up, Din realized we probably needed a storefront. We found the location on NE 42nd Ave., and for five months, starting in May 2005, Din did everything: he painted walls and finished the floors and built the furniture; picked out and installed lights; moved in the roaster and helped build a truly epic afterburner, the system which essentially incinerates 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, smiling and 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 simply because of the uncompromising nature of the work Din does. It attracts good people with good ideas, like our former manager Heather James, whose previous coffee experience taught us so much, and Josh Gibby, who for eight months and before putting in an eight-hour day as a contractor, came three mornings a week at six a.m. to work with Din, to learn how to roast, a skill he has perfected and then some. People like the architects at Holst, who, when I asked partner Jeffrey Stuhr if his monumentally successful firm would even consider doing an itty-bitty job that would be the design for our second shop, said, “Of course! We love your coffee!” People like our baristas and bussers, who are cheerful and strong of heart; who tell us when something can be going better, who have been an integral part to the success of Ristretto; they are what make the café so many people’s daily constitutional, a “third place” to sit and chat and read and think.
And of course drink great coffee: in the three years Ristretto Roasters has been open, the word about Din’s work; the philosophy of roasting each type of bean to the peak if its individual perfection–i.e., a Panama Honey is not a Ethiopian Harar, so why would you treat them the same?–has spread, through the city and beyond. The people who are coming into Ristretto’s orbit, the bean suppliers, the farmers, the cuppers, the roasters, the ever-expanding number of cafes that buy their beans from us, is extraordinary, making you realize what an enormously rich and exotic world is coffee, one we are privileged to be part of at this moment, when, at least in Portland and (slowly, slowly…) the rest of the nation, people are coming to appreciate how truly great their morning cup can be.
And fascinating, one of the reasons why the second Ristretto Roasters, which opened in September 2008 on N. Williams Ave. in North Portland, has a coffee lab, where customers can get up close, sitting at granite cupping tables from Brazil, watching the beans be roasted on a sample roaster, listening to Din and Josh and others in the coffee world expound on the whys and wherefores of the beans, the process, the coffee, and here, have an espresso.
For us, there seems no better time to both walk into and help others enter the world of coffee. We hope to see you at our shops and online.
