Local roaster passionate about coffee
Some people don’t really wake up until after that first cup of
coffee in the morning. And Dmitri Fridman is one of the few who
provides the freshest beans in San Benito County, roasted locally
at his home in San Juan Bautista.
Local roaster passionate about coffee
Some people don’t really wake up until after that first cup of coffee in the morning. And Dmitri Fridman is one of the few who provides the freshest beans in San Benito County, roasted locally at his home in San Juan Bautista.
He and his wife, Marlene, run Vertigo Coffee from their home, and their blends can be purchased online, or at Windmill Market in San Juan Bautista and Marshall’s Market in Aromas. He even hand delivers the goods to local clients in San Juan Bautista each Monday.
Fresh beans should be used within 10 days of roasting, according to Fridman.
“Coffee is full of oils and oils go rancid,” he said. “I try not to let it go past one month. Once someone tastes truly fresh coffee it opens their eyes.”
This summer, Fridman is selling his coffee at the Farmers’ Market in downtown Hollister every Wednesday to give locals a taste of that freshness. Fridman has striking blue eyes and dark hair that seems slightly disheveled, and a slight accent that is hard to place. He dons a Vertigo coffee T-shirt at the market most weeks.
A lifelong love
Fridman’s fascination with coffee started early.
“I lived in Italy for a time when I was 17,” Fridman said. “I was just a kid then, but there was a coffee shop nearby that was always roasting coffee.”
Now he says his nose is so attuned to the scent of freshly roasted coffee that he often follows the smell when he is traveling to hole in the wall cafes that serve the real deal.
When he first moved to San Benito, he couldn’t find any restaurants or cafes that roasted their own coffee.
“I got tired of driving so I started roasting at home,” he said.
His first roaster was a small tabletop one that he could use for small batches. A couple years ago, he noticed a commercial roaster for sale on Craig’s list. It could roast up to 26 pounds at one time. He contacted the seller, but opted against purchasing it.
“I let it go and a year later it was still there,” he said. “It was fate.”
Fridman took classes at the West Coast Specialty Coffee Training Institute in Burlingame, with Robert Hensley, a man well known in the world of coffee. The workshops are four days long, with eight hours of instruction each day.
“I learned about coffee grading and I constantly meet with other roasters,” Fridman said. “It’s such an interesting thing to take these things that are hard as a rock and don’t smell like much. It’s like lead into gold.”
Fridman isn’t exaggerating. He had 16 varieties in his garage this week, which serves as storage, a roasting room and a tasting area for him and friends. The varieties come from all over the world – Ethiopia, Columbia, Yemen – and he offers almost any blend that a coffee aficionado could ask for. The beans sit on a pallet in sacks and they are a tan color with a slight hint of green on them when they are not roasted.
A delicate process
When he tossed in a couple pounds of Ethiopian mocha harar beans into the roaster, he monitored the temperature carefully as he explained how it worked. The machine is like a large popcorn popper, and Fridman said some people use modified popcorn poppers for home roasting.
The machine has a large funnel on top where the coffee is poured in when the temperature is close to what it should be – 360 degrees F for this batch – and when the heat is right, Fridman pulled a lever that dispatched the beans into the center of the machine, where orange flames glowed from the inside.
The beans were tossed around in the drum, and Fridman said, the air circulation is just as important as the heat to getting the right roast. The harar beans usually take 12 minutes to roast, and midway through, they turned a yellow color and had a grassy smell. A small drawer on the front of the machine allowed Fridman to pull a few beans out to check the color and smell.
Soon the beans were a dark, chocolaty brown and he pulled another lever to dump them into a cooling tray that disperses the smoke and circulates cold air to cool the beans quickly.
The whole time Fridman was roasting he dispensed tidbits about coffee – the origins of different blends, tips on roasting for different varieties and even information on how coffee is farmed, almost like a wikipedia entry devoted to the beverage.
“A lot of Ethiopian blends have a serious chocolate aftertaste,” Fridman said of the organic fair trade beans he roasted. “The term mocha actually comes from the coffee world. It came from Yemen, when coffee came from the Port of Mocha, and it translated into chocolate.”
A way to give back
Though Fridman’s business is still small – he and Kitty just started selling their coffee in the last year – he has already found a way to help local schools. His children, one in high school, and another who has already graduated, attended schools in the Aromas-San Juan School District so he came up with the idea to do a local blend for each school. He has completed the project with Aromas School and Anzar High School. A student at each school designed the label and he brought in a variety of blends for teachers and staff to try. Anzar’s label has a picture of an eagle and Aromas has a bulldog.
Profits from each bag of Hawk’s blend and the Aromas blend go back to the schools. Fridman is still working with San Juan School on their blend.
“I went to the local schools because I saw them struggling,” he said. “I thought this was a way to contribute.”
With all his knowledge and his discerning taste for coffee, one might assume Fridman guzzles the stuff. But he said he generally has two cups a day – one in the morning and one in the afternoon for a pick me up.
“I don’t drink a whole lot unless I get new samples in,” he said. “No more than two cups a day.”
Vertigo Coffee can be purchased at the Hollister Farmers’ Market on Wednesday during the summer; Marshall’s Market in Aromas; Windmill Market in San Juan Bautista; or online at www.VertigoCoffee.com.
