Their kind of coffee is specialty coffee. Specialty coffee is sometimes called “gourmet” or “premium” coffee. It’s the kind of coffee you’ll find in a good coffee house, as opposed to the mass market “commodity” coffees you buy in a can from your supermarket. Though, today many supermarkets are branching into specialty varieties. Commodity coffee accounts for 90 percent of the coffee produced and sold, the remaining 10% is specialty coffee.

Coffee comes from a bean, a red berry that grows on bushes that originated in Ethiopia and grows well in some of the poorest places on Earth – Cenral America, South Asia and Africa. Alan Spear and Mary Allen Lindemann owners at our next stop, Coffee by Design, make it a point to get very involved in the farms where coffee is grown, traveling to the origins and meeting the farmers. Lindemann says, “We think it’s important that we get to know the farmers. I think that’s a huge point of difference for us. We want to be able to tell our customers we know, because we’ve been there.” She says while specialty coffee is the top ten percent of coffee beans sold, Coffee by Design buys from, "The top one percent."

Coffee by Design began selling roasted coffee they bought, but within a couple of years they opened a roasting facility of their own on India Street, which at the time was also somewhat down on its heels. “People said we were crazy to locate on India Street. We’re right next to the city’s detox center. People thought we were insane. You know what? Detox? Hey! Built-in customers! I think people have a one-side view. This is an amazing part of town.”

The Washington Avenue location has some other differences. “We get a lot of truckers. Truckers know really good quality, because they’ve had a lot of bad coffee on the road.” Some of the neighborhood’s growing African community stop by to buy green coffee beans to pan-roast at home. “They’ll get their beans here instead of going to Boston.”

With all the coffee for sale in Portland, is the competition fierce? Lindemann says, “We think there’s room for us all because we all have a very different philosophy about how we do coffee.”

Ed Govoni agrees.

Govoni runs Breaking New Grounds in the Portland Public Market, where they’re roasting coffee every couple of days, and selling coffee daily. Govoni’s son, Matt, started the business in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1993. His brother opened a second store in Durham, New Hampshire, and the family bought out Java Joe’s retail locations on Exchange Street and in the Public Market in 2001. In 2002 they added a roaster to the Public Market because the Portsmouth roasting operation was having trouble keeping up. They’ve just opened a new retail location in Ogunquit.

Govoni says he also has great respect for the people who run the national Starbucks chain, because they’ve done so much to introduce people to quality coffee. That’s been good for the coffee business in general.

There’s still room in the industry for the little guy, “Because we’re not in the volume business we can experiment with things. That’s why you’re going to see some turnover in the things we have, periodically we offer things that we may be able to offer for only a short time. So on a trip to Breaking New Grounds today you might experiment with a Brazilian Daterra, and tomorrow your choice could be a medium-bodied Sumatra. (Both of which were excellent -ed)

Even if you just like your coffee “normal,” and that’s something these folks hear all the time, you can tell the difference between the junk they serve at work and the good stuff. Jamie Corriveau, at Maine Roasters Coffee, our next stop, says once you start drinking quality coffee you can’t go back to the mass-produced commodity coffees.

Rand Smith started Maine Roasters Coffee about 8 or 9 years ago. According to Corriveau, Smith sold it to a group of local owners, lawyers and business executives, a few years ago.

Corriveau says the growth in local coffee is driven in part by the demographics of the Portland area and in part by the Internet, bringing coffee aficionados together. He says quality coffee started as a status thing and now people have acquired the taste. Maine Roasters Coffee has retail locations in Falmouth and Yarmouth and their roasting facility sits in an industrial area at the base of Munjoy Hill.

Corriveau gives a lot of credit to roaster Andy Grondin. Roasting coffee is a high art. Controlling temperature, airflow, and roasting time to create the flavor profile you desire is something that takes experience and attention. Grodin has been at it for years and says he’s still learning. Corriveau says, “It gets down to virtually seconds and you can change the whole flavor of the bean.” He compares what Grodin does with a roaster to what a race car driver can do with a sports car. Watching Grondin roast, he pulls out a scoop of beans and examines them closely every few seconds before deciding they are roasted to perfection. Then he opens the door and twenty-five pounds of smoking coffee beans pour into a cooling tray, where they are cooled quickly so the roasting is stopped at the precise moment.

Corriveau says that roast is one more key difference between quality coffee and caned coffee. “The longer that bean sits on the shelf without deteriorating is all dependant on how it is roasted, so (commodity coffee) is totally under roasted. It will be so heavy and acid that you’ll be popping Tums an hour after you drink it.”

Andy Grondin at his Roaster

Portland is just part of Maine’s coffee story. New shops and roasters are popping up all the time and all over the state. Wicked Joe in Brunswick, Carpe Diem Coffee Roasting in Berwick, Carrabassett Coffee in Kingfield, and Rock City Coffee Roasters in Rockland are just some of the companies roasting in the Pine Tree State.

No matter how you like it, brewed or espresso, with foamy milk or without, there’s a quality cup of coffee out there for you. What many people miss is the fact that there are so many different kinds of coffee beyond regular or decaf, light or dark roast. The differences in the flavor of, say a mocha Java and a Costa Rica are startling when you try them side by side, and if you’re just buying brewed coffee by the cup, the good stuff really isn’t much more expensive than the regular coffee. The next time you’re at the coffee stand, try something new. Like Nick Pellenz said, there’s a lot more to coffee if you want there to be.