Market Forces: Coffee Afficianado

This week, Patch spoke with Paul Merces, co-owner of Coffee Afficianado, a coffee roaster in Morganville, N.J. He and co-owner Adam Bossie, both in their 20s, started the business in October 2007. They supply coffee and espresso to restaurants–including Summit’s Roots Steakhouse and Huntley Tavern–and sell their blends at the Montclair and Summit Farmer’s Markets. Their stand at the Summit market, with its tall glass jars of oily beans, is located near the center of the lot along Maple Street.

So—how many cups of coffee do you drink a day?

Today I’ve had one so far. Sometimes if I’m real busy, I don’t drink any. But if I’m not doing a whole lot I’ll have maybe 2 or 3. When we taste coffee even then we don’t really drink it. You’re just supposed to slurp it and spit it out, just like drinking wine.

Would you describe your business?

We’re a gourmet coffee roaster. There are three employees.We supply restaurants and farmer’s markets. We roast to order. We don’t stock anything on the shelves.

How did you get into the coffee business?

Adam is the one who really came up with the idea. He came to me and said, “What do you think of this idea?” I kind of just laughed at him, but I said, “We’ll try it anyway.”

Our family has an electric motor distributing business. We have machines to fabricate metal and things like that. So we made a coffee roaster and it worked. We started off in farmer’s markets and started to do well, so we invested and bought a coffee roaster.

How did you know Adam?

I met Adam through friends from high school. He’s from Lincroft and I’m from Sea Bright.

What restaurants do you provide coffee to?

Up in the northern part of New Jersey we supply the Bernard’s Inn and Equus in Bernardsville. We supply Roots Steakhouse and Huntley Tavern (Ed: both in Summit) and Trap Rock Brewery (Ed: in Berkeley Heights) with our espresso, and we’re working on getting our coffee in there.

Where does your coffee come from?

They’re all blends. They come from Colombia, Kenya, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Sumatra.  

Are any of your products organic or fair trade?

We do have organic and fair trade coffees as part of our blends. We used to have a sign saying we’re organic and fair trade, but we took it down because people were asking a lot of questions. They wanted proof and we were getting harassed. Some of our products are fair trade/organic.

How do you buy coffee in bulk?

We have an importer that does it, so we buy it from them. They supply a whole bunch of coffee companies, such as Folger’s.  There’s three different ports that we go to–one on Staten Island, one in Hillside, and another one is in Jersey City. Every coffee importer has their coffee stored at one of those three places pretty much. So usually when I go to pick up coffee it’s 15 to 20 bags at a time—a couple thousand pounds.

What do you think good coffee tastes like?

Good coffee in my opinion is something that’s not bitter—that’s nice and smooth and you don’t have that nasty aftertaste in the end. I really don’t like dark roast coffee–my personal favorite is medium roast. A lot of people like dark roast. I just like a  nice smooth mild-tasting coffee.

Why sell coffee at a farmer’s market?

We do it for extra income. You get a lot of exposure. We started doing it in the beginning because we needed any kind of income possible, and we continued doing it. The way the economy is, the income from the markets has been cut in half at least.

What’s your best seller at the Summit Farmer’s Market?

I would say we sell mostly our dolce blend. Dolce and Symphony. Dolce is our medium roast best seller, and our dark roast is the Symphony.

How did you learn how to roast coffee?                      

I just did a lot of research on it. I watched other people. I went down to some other roasting facilites. And when we got a roaster, it’s a lot of trial and error. Once we got the hang of it, we were able to start selling to restaurants. So we did it a little while before we started selling to people.

Do you ever think about having a café?

We have thought about it, but right now we’re just so caught up with trying to build up a business and expand and trying to get capital. It would be a lot of money to open up a cafe the way that we would want to do it.

What’s the most difficult thing about your work?

Probably  trying to find out the good coffee and bad. Trying to find the proper coffees, because every time a new lot of coffee comes, we have to try it and sample it and taste it and make sure it’s good. We don’t want to be putting in anything that’s not good.

The coffee market is so vast. How are you different from other suppliers?

Nothing is kept on the shelf, so everything is fresh. Whenever someone orders coffee it gets roasted and we have it fresh the next day. A lot of roasters, it may sit on the shelf for a couple months. We make sure the quailty of our beans is the highest quality.

Do you have to read a lot about coffee?

Yes. You know, how much coffee each country has grown, because every year is different. Colombian coffee is very expensive this year because they didn’t export a lot.

What do you like best about what you do?

What I like doing is roasting and doing the hands-on type of thing. I like doing eveyrthing and seeing the finished product come out. Adam, he handles the office, and he enjoys doing sales and talking with people, he’s good at that. But I like doing the hands-on type of stuff, working on the machine and all.