Coffee Was Always Fairfax City Man's Passion, Now It's His Career

FAIRFAX CITY, VA — Scott Orange's first experience making and serving coffee came at a very young age.

"I was kind of dragged into doing it by my grumpy parents, who wanted to sleep in Saturday mornings," he said. "I was up anyway watching cartoons and they asked me to bring them coffee. They showed me how to basically scoop it out of the can and do a pour over in the Chemex, which is coming back into vogue today."

Those cups of coffee Orange made for his parents were probably not that good, he admitted. It wasn't until many years later when he was in college that he discovered what a good cup of coffee tasted like.

"When I started working at the University of Maryland, it had a food co-op in the Student Union," Orange said "It had really good-tasting Guatemalan coffee, and that kind of turned me on to coffee and finding coffees that I liked."

After graduating, Orange scoured the D.C. area and found two places on Dupont Circle that were making coffee that rivaled what he'd tasted in College Park. But it wasn't until he and his wife relocated to Seattle that he found his true passion for coffee.

About that time, Starbucks was just getting underway, but Orange found its coffee to be very dark, bitter, and not pleasant to drink. So, he decided to start roasting his own. In the process of figuring out how to do that, he found a coffee wholesaler who happened to be one of the foremost specialty coffee importers in the country.

"They just walked me through the different coffees they had," Orange said. "They really excited that passion, because I drank amazing things that I'd never tasted before."

Orange and his wife moved to Northern Virginia in 2021. After a career in market research and consulting for technology companies, Orange decided it was time to take a leap and start his own coffee-roasting business.

Index Coffee Roasters sells specialty coffee, which traditionally means the seller is using higher rated beans as determined by people who taste and import coffee for a living, according to Orange.

"What we're really talking about is maybe the top 10 percent of all coffee crops make it to getting the designation for specialty," he said. "They are, first of all, free from defects. So, things like insects or being damaged during processing."

Once the coffee is pulled from the field, it undergoes a variety of quality checks to test its flavor.

"They're different things such as wet and dry aroma, just the flavor of the coffee, the aftertaste, acidity, mouthfeel, all sorts of variables there," Orange said. "It gets scored on a scale of 1 to 100. Commercial grade coffee is somewhere in the high 70s to low 80s. So, Starbucks typically gets 80 to 81. Commodity coffee kind of starts getting an approval of somewhere around 70, so if you're talking about a can of Maxwell House, for example, it has to at least achieve that."

The higher up the scale you go, the tougher it is to earn an extra point. Index's highest rated coffee is Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, which earned 93 points from Coffee Review.

"The coffees that we're looking for are distinct in terms of standing out above other coffees from the same country or growing region," Orange said. "We're looking to highlight those characteristics in the way that we roast the coffee, so that we bring out those natural flavors of origin. At the same time, what we try to do is get a roasted coffee so it's not harsh or bitter but has more of a sweetness to it."

Index Coffee Roasters does not have a cafe or storefront, although Orange does sell coffee at area markets, such as Fairfax City's Funky Flea Market. Customers can purchase a variety of coffee beans, either ground or whole, from the Index Coffee Roasters website. Some of the coffees are available for Keurig machines. The company will ship beans and deliver free to Fairfax City addresses.