Interview: coffee professional Sol Salzer (City Bean)

  • Home
  • Coffee
  • Interview: coffee professional Sol Salzer (City Bean)
Coffee Los Angeles

INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

What will it take to make the L.A. coffee scene great, if it isn’t already?

It’s vastly improving. Certainly, a lot of the big name roasters taking an interest in this market has put us on the map. Where is it going? Certainly the single cup brew revolution is here. About five years ago, I put together a seminar for the SCAA. The title was, “Becoming a Coffee Brewing Artisan.” It was basically talking about extraction before any of the single-cup was happening, and this all has taken foot. I was going to do it with a friend of mine. The night before, my friend had to pull out of the seminar, and a guy named Bryan Core Nelson, who is now with David Rio Teas, but has also been with Fetco and Portland Roasting Company, stepped in and quite admirably tackled the seminar with me, and brought a lot of the science of coffee knowledge to the seminar that I didn’t possess as much of, and we did that same seminar for Coffee Fest, and as I was doing it for Coffee Fest, I was going up to David [Heilbrunn], who runs Coffee Fest, and said, “This isn’t a seminar, this is a workshop.” He put us on the schedule the next time, and I said, “David, this isn’t a seminar, this is a workshop.” We had a chance to do something different with coffee, and we were already formulating single cup and how to present it, and what to do with it, four or five years ago. It took three years of us pounding on us for him to give us the chance to do the workshop. We did it last September at Coffee Fest in Seattle, and they gave us three workshops with 12 people per workshop and it sold out about a month before the show. The exact concept was retooled a little bit to keep it modern, and the title of the workshop was “Single Cup Brewing and Extraction.” We did it, we added a couple spots because they were just screaming at us. Literally, they were 10-deep outside our door trying to crash our workshop. It was really that popular. We just did it three weeks ago in Chicago. They doubled the number of spaces, they doubled the price, and we still sold out two weeks before the show. It’s been incredibly rewarding workshop because it’s really helped focus us on single-cup brewing. In the workshop, we talked about 45 minutes to an hour about extraction, defining it, bringing it to an intermediate shop owner’s level, someone who’s been working with an auto drip machine my whole life. Maybe they’ve dabbled in French press here or there, but they don’t have a clear concept of what’s happening when you’re pulling water soluble products from ground coffee into hot water. So we helped them to understand that whole process, but mostly the workshop is hands on, single-cup brewing. We do six methods in the workshop, so it gives them a chance to play and get exposure. During the whole workshop, we’re accumulating all the data of extractions. We’re measuring all the TDSs [Total Dissolved Solids] of each brew we do, each brew they do. We’re marking them, we’re keeping a data sheet together and we’re measuring the actual extraction with refractometers. We send that data to the people who take the workshop.

How was your coffee being brewed?

The six methods we’ve been doing so far, we get a Trifecta from Bun, we do French press, Hario pourover V60, Chemex, siphon and Tim Mod.

How do you feel about coffeehouses that feature multiple roasters?

It’s great. Coffee’s a lot like wine. Nobody works with one vintner. It depends upon the environment and how they’re presenting the coffee. If they have the ability to really feature coffee and really do it right, and they’re dedicated enough to really extract properly and do the hard work to really present coffee in a great way, it’s a real opportunity for a retailer to do it that way. It shows a real commitment to coffee as opposed to taking the easy way and just working with one roaster.

Where do you like to drink coffee that isn’t yours?

Hmm…not many places. I’m reticent to really talk too much about competition, not because I don’t want to give them any props, just because I think on any given day, any given place can do it really well or not really well, and that’s the challenge. That pretty much goes for everyone across the board, including every one of our clients. I don’t think there’s anyone out there that truly does it spot-on, remarkable, every time I’ve been in. That’s the challenge of coffee. It’s an inexact science.

What’s your preferred brewing method at home?

Tim Mod, absolutely, positively. We have everything here. We can do anything, but we really prefer the Tim Mod. It’s what we’ve found can get – especially taking it to a client – the most consistent results.

Tags:

Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

Leave a Comment