Chemistry meets creativity at Taos coffee roaster

TAOS — Tim Moore and Andrew Manley meet every week in the same corner of The Coffee Apothecary, which became their favorite coffee shop not long after it opened 10 years ago just south of downtown Taos.

They say it was a specific combination of factors that made it their preferred local cafe — the community, the location, the baked goods, and of course, the coffee, which the shop’s owners and staff treat as an art and a science meant to evolve with time and taste.

“Coffee is still so structurally intact, that when you brew it, you’re just pulling out the oils of the coffee,” co-owner Pablo Flores said while holding a small cupping — or coffee tasting — for an Ethiopian bean he and his staff roasted this month in the back of his shop. “That’s what you want to drink. We try to make coffee that has more of a tea body than the traditional heavy-bodied coffee.”

The steaming liquid in his glass swirled a color of semi-transluscent amber as he held it up to the light.

Flores and his wife, Lydia, poured their savings into the local shop in 2016 with a dream to serve sustainably sourced, locally roasted coffee to a dedicated Taos clientele, which has steadily grown alongside their wholesale roasting business.

Stephen Welter, a certified Q Grader — or “coffee sommelier” — joined The Coffee Apothecary a little more than a year ago and roasts between 250-300 pounds of green coffee per week from countries like Guatemala, Mexico, Ethiopia and Peru.

“The real creative part is figuring out what each coffee needs, based on the coffee itself and then what we’re using it for,” Welter said while operating the shop’s large commercial roaster. “Some coffees we’re using for drip, others in the espresso machine, others for pour over, so that kind of problem solving is very creative — but not necessarily something we do every day.”

The Floreses and their staff are constantly experimenting with new coffees in a smaller, sample roaster installed beside its larger sibling, where they perform a basic roast before holding cuppings and then refining the specific blend of air, gas pressure and time to produce optimal taste for their customers and a dozen wholesale clients.

In time, they intend to host public cuppings to give customers a glimpse into how their coffee is made.

“This is a coffee that some friends of mine picked up from this farm in Mexico,” Flores said as he roasted a sample batch while Welter monitored another whirring inside the drum of the commercial roaster nearby. “I was down in Puerto Rico not too long ago with Lydia, and we visited another farm to get a few samples.”

It’s a small-scale example of how the Floreses would like their business to eventually operate — sourcing green coffee beans directly from farmers rather than buying them through an intermediary.

Coffee is the fifth-largest bulk export commodity by value and accounts for roughly 7% of total global bulk agricultural exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The majority of coffee imports come from Latin America through traditional supply chains.

Flores says that process creates costs for both the environment, and often, the small international farmers that harvest beans. Even if it adds expenses to his own business, he and Lydia want The Coffee Apothecary to join a growing number of coffee roasters moving away from that traditional model toward a relationship they see as more ethical and sustainable.

“When you’re buying coffee from someone else, you have to think about the carbon footprint,” Pablo Flores said. “It’s shipped overseas. It goes from port to port and then to a warehouse. From a warehouse, it goes to a coffee roaster that roasts it, and then they put it in these bags that won’t go away for 100-plus years, and then there’s the cost of shipping it to you. To me, this is insane.”

Pablo Flores’ father ran an espresso cart on Bent Street in Taos before opening Elevation Coffee in El Prado, north of Taos, but the younger Flores didn’t develop a taste for coffee until he tried a café con leche on a high school trip to Peru.

“I remember the guy at this shop had to stand on a crate to reach the handle on a lever-handled espresso machine to pull it down,” Flores recalled. “So I decided to try it without sugar for the first time, and I just remember being like, ‘What is going on here?’ I didn’t understand why it tasted so much better than the coffee I was drinking back home.”

Flores met his wife-to-be while working his way through college in Albuquerque at his father’s third coffee business, Espresso Fino. Frustrated with her regular request for a shot of vanilla in her latte, Flores urged her to try it without the added sweetener.

“That was the first time I tried espresso,” Lydia Flores recalled. “Then I went with lattes and then to an Americano with cream, but now I just drink black coffee. That’s what tastes good to me.”

And taste is something they’re constantly refining at The Coffee Apothecary. Feedback from staff and customers helps the Floreses introduce new coffees brewed to achieve balance in a distinctly third-wave style, defined by its emphasis on higher quality beans sourced from single-origin farms.

“A lot of the past 10 years has been about building up our crew, the people working for us,” Pablo Flores said, crediting his new general manager, Julia Vaive, with fine-tuning operations at the shop, where she plans to double indoor seating space in coming months.

There’s ample reason for an expansion. Dozens of regular local customers like Moore and Manley — whose friendship formed at the behest of a barista — keep coming back for coffee and a sense of community they say are hard to find at other cafes in this small northern New Mexico town, which is now home to its first standalone Starbucks.

“Corey, a barista who’s not here today, he looked at me one day, fairly recently, and said I’ve been trying to get you and Andrew together for months,” said Moore, a retired OBGYN who delivered the Floreses’ baby, who spends hours at the shop each week.

Michael Ferrara, who owns a computer repair store across the street, comes in almost daily for a latte.

“It’s conveniently located and it turns out to be the best coffee in Taos,” he said. “Every bit of it, from sourcing the beans to roasting them themselves, the fancy machinery they have — all of it adds up to great coffee.”

John Miller is the Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.