Locally roasted coffee returns to McBride vendor

By Andrea Arnold

Coffee connoisseurs in the McBride area have locally roasted specialty beans available for purchase. Randy Packer’s new business, Loom and Forge Coffee, has started supplying Welcome Home with bags of beans he has small batch roasted in his home based set-up.

Packer says he was a tea drinker who hated coffee until he was 30.

“I was tricked into trying coffee by an ex-girlfriend,” he said. “She first snuck a shot of espresso into my Chai. It wasn’t bad.” 

From there he started expanding his pallet, beginning with a caramel macchiato. 

He also spent some time in Portugal where, in spite of or perhaps because of his bad Portuguese, he experienced straight espresso. He admits it was challenging at first, but then he began enjoying it and tasting the many flavors in each drink.

After receiving a Cup of Excellence award winning brew from his wife and being shocked to experience a whole new list of flavors – toffee, grapefruit, and honeysuckle, all coming from the beans, he understood why someone would pay $25 for a bag of coffee beans.

However, he did feel it was expensive, so he began experimenting at home, trying to recreate the flavors.

“We used a heat gun and a metal bowl for about four years of at home roasting,” said Packer. “One of us would hold the heat gun, and the other would stir the beans. It was a neat experience to learn and work together, watching every step of the process.”

Fast forward to now, Packer has invested in the smallest scale roaster he could find. It sits on the countertop and can roast 1.2kg at a time. Each batch takes about 15 minutes and that includes time for the machine to cool down between batches.

“It allows for repeatable roasts,” said Packer. “The carbon fiber infrared heating is responsive, providing consistent results if I do the same thing each time.” 

The cooling down of the machine is important, because if Packer were to immediately turn around and dump another batch of raw beans into the roaster while it was hot, the timing and temperatures needed for the desired result would be harder to control.

Step one is the drying out of the beans. Packer watches the beans through a little window and periodically pulls a small sample out to check. It takes up to four minutes for the smell and the yellow hue of the beans to tell him the beans are dry enough to start roasting.

Once the roasting phase starts, Packer has to pay even closer attention to the appearance, smell and even the sounds coming from the beans. He listens for the first crack, a popping sound that sounds similar to a full popcorn popper. 

“If I wait too long after the first crack, the coffee will have a bitter taste,” he said. “There are 11,000 flavour compounds that break down during the process of roasting. Two or so minutes after the first crack, most beans will taste the same having roasted out a lot of the flavours.”

The batch he roasted during our interview was for his own personal use. This was his second attempt following the same steps. 

“I had some this morning,” he said. “It has notes of lemon and caramel.” 

He had made some small adjustments hoping to increase the flavours in this second attempt. Packer has a unique ability to identify more individual flavours than most people. He has twice the tastebuds of most people. This trait provides him with the ability to taste and identify specific things even as far as what region wine comes from based on flavour profiles. This ability is proving very helpful as he works to isolate flavours with each roast.

When the time is right, Packer drops the beans into a tray and stirs them to cool them as quickly as possible. The beans will continue to cook from the inside out until their temperature drops. This can affect the final product’s flavours.

When Packer first moved to McBride, he started handing out roasted bean samples to people and through feedback decided to develop the passion into a small business. Selling beans through Welcome Home is the first step. He is eager to see where this venture takes him. Packer will be hosting a tasting on July 9th at Welcome Home. He plans to have an assortment of roasts served using a variety of methods of preparation available for sample.

“Coffee has become a real passion,” he said. “I hope to convert more people to yummy coffee.”