Maker Feature: Nantucket Coffee Roasters

Wes's 'Nantucket as home' funnily enough dates back to the 60's when his father was hired as pastry chef for the season at the Gordon Folger Hotel (James A Folger, the founder of Folgers Coffee, having Nantucket origins and relatives). They returned again in the early 70's when his father was hired to be the pastry chef for the Beineke properties. After this initial Nantucket time on the island with his family, a not too long and not too circuitous route led Wes back to Nantucket via Maine, where he had witnessed the success and popularity of Green Mountain Roasters. Wes had made his way back to the island with some ideas about the potential for coffee and Nantucket and while he knew it could be tough to make a go of a business on Nantucket, his interest in roasting coffee and the opportunity he saw on Nantucket, brought him out to San Francisco for a weekend crash course in roasting followed by the purchase of a roaster and the subsequent roasting of the first batch. As what seems like the ultimate combination of savvy and luck, Wes has embedded good coffee into the cornerstone of many island businesses (including Pip!) since the 80s when Nantucket became home.

It varies country to country with Kenya being the most unique in that most of their coffee is sold through auction houses and it is a bidding process. I work with a great broker and ultimately am looking for beans with the 'right' profile for each of my blends. Sometimes where the beans come from for a blend may change but ultimately it is the overall quality and the flavor profile that I am looking for.

Light roast is where you get the purest expression of the beans and some beans, ones with more floral notes, are really suited to a light roast. While some beans and blends are suited to a dark roast, much of the time a dark roast is used to hide imperfections in the beans so they may be a lower quality and may not have the complexity of flavor that you would typically get in a bean that is a light or medium roast.