About once a week, anyone walking down Shawville’s Main Street might pick up on something peculiar in the air. A nutty, somewhat chocolatty, somewhat acidic smell rides the breeze for a few hours, and if you’re positioned just downwind of it, you may be lucky enough to get a whiff.
The smell rarely occurs at the same time every week. It could be first thing in the morning, or after most businesses have closed for the day. But it’s the smell of a process that produces something most depend on to get through their day: coffee.
Around the back of Café 349 and up a rickety set of wooden stairs lives Pontiac’s only commercial coffee roaster – that is, as far as Ruth Hahn, its current owner, is aware. Once a week it comes alive, toasting various medleys of beans imported from all over the world that are then brewed and served as piping hot coffee to Hahn’s café customers downstairs.
The roaster has lived in the Pontiac since 2010, when Thorne resident Raymond Sander-Regier decided to open a small coffee shop in his studio and gallery space in Shawville, in the strip mall across from Valu-mart. He called it Art Brulant, and for just about a decade he produced the only Pontiac-roasted coffee beans that could be found on grocery store shelves from Fort-Coulonge to Shawville. For some of that time, he also brewed the beans right there in his studio.
“I actually had somebody show up from south of Ottawa and they had been told that I served a good cup of coffee,” he said.
But in 2022, he decided his coffee roasting days had come to an end, and decided to close the business, selling the roasting machine to Hahn.
“I just think it’s a neat thing to have in the Pontiac, and it was so close to being gone,” Hahn said of her decision to take it on. “I think I just thought it would just add something more to the café and it would fit in well with what we do.”
Now, the machine has a new master. For three years, café employee Glen Hartle has been experimenting with blends and perfecting the process of getting each roast just right.
“The art or the craft of roasting is you have to decide when you add air, when you reduce the heat, and when you do any of these things in order to get that flavour profile you want,” Hartle explained one rainy morning in April as he dumped a bowl of raw coffee beans into the top of the roaster.
Through a complicated process of controlling heat and airflow, and tracking the temperature at many intervals throughout, a master roaster can bring the beans to just the right hue of golden brown.
“The first part of the roasting process is endothermic, where the beans are absorbing heat,” Hartle explained. “The second part is exothermic, where they can actually heat themselves. They have enough heat that they’ll finish the roasting process.”
This means careful attention needs to be paid to ensure the machine’s temperature is reduced as soon as the beans reach a certain internal temperature, to ensure they don’t burn.
Soon after that point, the beans will start to pop, or crack, as the industry insiders prefer to call it. Releasing the beans after the first round of cracking produces a light roast. Leaving them in there a few more minutes until just before their second round of cracking produces a medium roast, and letting them finish their second crack in the roaster produces a dark roast.
It’s a process Hartle learnt with guidance from Sander-Regier, and performed solo at the café for the first time in Feb. 2023.
“Raymond kind of gave me an apprenticeship-mentorship over several laughter-fueled sessions at his shop. We had such fun,” Hartle said.
On this particular April morning, Hartle was beginning his roasting session with the Isla blend he created (and named) using a combination of three beans: a Sumatra bean from Indonesia, a decaf bean from Columbia, and a Robusta bean from India. He said he’s found it to be one of the favourites for people who like a medium coffee.
“We tend to mix all the blends ourselves,” he said, noting this allows the café to adapt to local preferences. “You know how you can drink a glass of wine and I can drink a glass of wine and you’ll go, ‘Hmm, cherry,’ and I’ll go, ‘Hmmm, plum,’ and we’ll have completely different ideas as to what we just drank. Well, the same thing is true with coffee beans.”
Hartle works with a distributor in Montreal to source the beans needed for the various blends he’s created over the years, something Sander-Regier said he didn’t spend as much time doing.
“He’s working with one of their suppliers very closely,” Sander-Regier said, noting he was happy to see the roaster stay in the community.
“Glen’s probably doing a better job than I did, when it comes down to it.”
Hahn said while she doesn’t have big plans to expand the reach of the coffee roasted by her business, and is happy simply serving it to customers in house and selling it on her own shelves, she wishes more people could see all that goes into producing a single cup.
Though customers don’t get to see the roasting process first-hand, Hartle, who also works serving food in the restaurant, knows the extra effort is appreciated.
“People who come here love the authenticity of the café roasting and producing its own coffee,” he said. “That feels really good, especially when I’m serving them.”
