King David Coffee News

Brewing a cup of success

Local kosher coffee roasting business takes off

Published in Hippo Nashua, Jan. 13, 2005; Page 22.

By Amy Diaz
adiaz@hippopress.com

It is not enough for Sam Brest simply to make the best cup of coffee and passover food. In search of a way to make his specialty coffees more marketable, Brest decided to make his delicious roasts kosher.

“That’s kind of how I make myself different,” he said. “My market niche.” King David Coffee Roasters produces more than a dozen varieties of specialty and passover coffee—that is, coffee made from the top 6 percent of coffee beans in the world. The varieties (which, as with French wines, get their names and their distinct flavors from the location they are grown) come to Brest’s Bridge Street roasting facility and are roasted, packaged and sent out to stores nationwide, including to Brest’s own Spinelli’s Café and Subs on Amherst Street.

But wait, isn’t coffee already kosher?
“Since I’m supervised, there’s a guarantee that there’s nothing else here,” he said.

The designation has more to do with what else is going on at King David Coffee Roasters—namely, nothing. No other foods are prepared at the roasting site so there are no worries about cross contamination from products that could prevent the coffee from being kosher. And, it’s designation as such helps get Brest’s coffee into specialty and kosher markets across the country which has helped him build up a customer base, he said.

“If you’re a religious Jew, then you’re not going to buy something that isn’t kosher,” Brest said.

From bean to cup

If the kosher designation opens doors for Brest, it’s surely the taste that keeps customers coming back.
“It’s a real full smooth taste…not bitter,” Brest said.

The specialty coffee is a particular designation among coffee beans—these are the artisan beans, those grown to be specially cared for. The rarity of the beans requires Brest to use a specially trained broker out of Houston, one who searches for the perfect beans in places like Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Hawaii and Africa. These beans usually come from small farms, he said. They arrive at his warehouse-like roasting facility in burlap bags, which Brest buys by the pallet-full. The beans inside the bag are of the raw variety—they are a grayish green, small and hard (not brittle like roasted beans).

Once at King David’s, the beans are roasted individually by variety—mixing beans muddies the taste.
“High altitude beans work well at any roast,” Brest said. Coffees are roasted light, medium and dark. Light and medium roasts tend to allow more of the distinct flavors of the bean to come through, whereas dark roasts bring out the oil and carmelization effects in the bean.

“I prefer the light,” Brest said. In dark roasting, “you can hide the sins of the coffee.”

Brest goes with lighter roasting on beans from Africa and Central America and darker on Indonesian beans. His favorite coffee beans come from Costa Rica, specifically from Tarrazu. This is the highest altitude region and it produces a concentrated flavor.

Brest’s roaster—which looks a little like a furnace-sized cross between a coffee maker and a KitchenAid—can roast about 30 pounds of beans at a time. A sensitive computer helps to control the temperature of the bean and various features of the roaster allow him to check the beans for color. After the beans are cooled, he packages the whole beans or grinds them in a large grinder that can do up to seven or eight pounds a minute. The coffee then goes into shiny packages that are mostly sealed—a one-way valve allows the air to go out but not come in.

The Crème de la Coffee

King David Coffees aren’t just kosher—they’re delicious.

“I didn’t realize that there was such a thing called specialty coffee and how much better it is than what everyone else is selling or drinking,” he said.

Brest said that the knock-down fabulousness of specialty coffee was perhaps the thing that most blew him away about the product. And when he says that, I believed him. But you don’t really know what he means until you try the coffee yourself.

Actually, you can get a good idea about the difference the specialty designation makes when you first sniff a package of coffee. Brest gave me some of his coffee to try out. It looked good, it smelled good but I must admit I didn’t think I was in the presence of anything all that special.

At first.

I got in my car, tossed the coffee into the passenger seat and took off. I stopped a few blocks later to run an errand and, after only a few minutes out of my car, I was met by an incredible surprise on my return. My car smelled like coffee. But not that acrid, over-powering coffee smell. This one was warm, nutty and rich. This coffee smell had a buttery note to it. The coffee smelled the way it always looks in television commercials.

I pressed my nose right up to the air spout on the bag, the one that lets aromas out but no air in, and inhaled. The smell was amazing. I have worked at coffee bars but none of the coffee—even the kind tarted up with sweet flavors—ever smells as full and rich as Brest’s.

Naturally, I went right home and—after thoroughly scrubbing my coffee maker—I made a small pot of kosher coffee. I poured a small cup and proceeded to drink it black.

There is almost no way to describe the difference between the coffee we drink on a daily basis and Brest’s coffee. It is the difference between wine from a box and the very best French Burgundy. It is the difference between a Hershey’s Kiss and a Godiva truffle. It is the difference between taking the bus and flying first class.

Brest is right—it comes as an amazement, even for longtime caffeine addicts, that coffee can taste this silky, this nutty, this good.

The perfect cup

For a man this in to coffee, Brest is surprisingly unfussy about it.

He doesn’t see a measurable difference between the coffee beans that you buy today and the ones in an unopened bag that has sat on your shelf for the last few months. Nor does he think the coffee you drink from a bag you open today will be much different from the last cup you make from those beans or grind six weeks from now. And, while he says fresh grinding your coffee for each use will keep the full flavor of the coffee longer, it isn’t enough of a difference that most people can tell.

“I wouldn’t by ten pounds at a time,” he said. But when he takes home a pound for himself, Brest goes straight to the ground beans.

“In a retail bag size, you are going to use it before it goes bad,” he said.

He also recommends keeping it out of the refrigerator (where it can collect odors) and using three ounces of grinds for every half gallon of water to make a good cup of coffee. So how much coffee does a professional roaster drink?

“I’m down to one caffeinated cup a day,” he said. In the early days of the café business it was sometimes four or five cups in the morning—and that was before he got the really good stuff. Now, Brest said he only drinks decaf—which he also roasts—after the first caffeinated cup.

“I sleep better.”

King David Coffee is available online at www.kingdavidcoffee.com.

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