Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Kaldi’s co-owner Tyler Zimmer is a certified “Q Grader,” the closest thing to a coffee sommelier. As such, his palate is rarely questioned. Part of Zimmer’s job is to taste and evaluate (“cup,” in coffee parlance) 1,500 to 2,000 coffees per year, less than 10 percent of which ever see the inside of Kaldi’s 80-year-old roaster. St. Louis’ coffee cognoscenti wouldn’t have it any other way.
Explain how Kaldi’s came about.
Howard Lerner and Suzanne Langlois started Kaldi’s in October 1994, before there was even a Starbucks here. They were two journalists looking for a change, and the local coffee culture was beginning to develop, and they recognized that. They got into roasting a few years later and the wholesale business after that.
How long have you had a passion for coffee?
My family was entrepreneurial and wanted to do something different. I was always into food and tasting and I liked coffee, frequenting Kaldi’s and even Starbucks. Then, in 2005, we got to know Howard and Suzanne and struck a deal. I will admit that none of us had any idea of the complexities involved.
Explain the waves of coffee.
The first wave was the mass production and consumption of coffee, when coffee became mainstream—the Folgers and Mr. Coffee era. The second wave was when coffee—and better coffee—became big business; Starbucks was part of that. The third wave focuses on the appreciation of good coffee: its origins, different roasting styles, and coffee service. Kaldi’s is happy to be part of the third wave.
Is the cupping process consistent from country to country?
Ten grams of a specific grind of coffee gets put into a bowl with 6 ounces of 200-degree water. It’s steeped for three to five minutes, smelled, and then loudly slurped. That’s pretty much how coffee is cupped everywhere. The goal is to be consistent worldwide.
What’s the next big thing in the coffee business?
Across the country, it’s nitro cold brew. Adding nitrogen creates a creaminess and texture that you can see and taste. Two of our cafés are doing it now. We’re in the [research and development] phase of a larger-scale operation to supply all of our stores. There’s also a movement to combine different flavors and create cocktails, thereby taking coffee to the cocktail level.
Have there been any new innovations in the business?
We’ve installed reverse osmosis (RO) machines at the roastery and in each new café. Coffee and tea are 98.5 percent water, so any off flavor is apparent. RO systems strip out all the contaminants in water and all the minerals. Our RO machines allow us to add back in precise parts per million of the minerals we want, the ones that enhance the flavor: calcium, zinc, and so on. You can add too much or too little back in, so brewing water is a science as well. Certain coffee compounds cling to minerals in the water, so coffee brewed using dead flat water can taste flat.
Do all stores have reverse osmosis machines?
Retrofitting with those is tricky—it’s not a plug-and-play situation—so at present, only the Clayton store [on Carondelet] and the stores in Atlanta have them. Any remodel and every new store will have them. Water plays such a big a part in our quality and purchasing decisions; it’s important to have it taste the same across all stores.
Are flavored coffees growing or waning in popularity?
They’re no longer a growing part of the market. The industry is getting away from added flavors. We’d rather talk about and develop the flavors that are in the coffee—and how it’s grown and where it comes from—rather than added flavors that are not part of that process. We don’t want to alienate those people—Highlander Grogg is still a part of our business, and we brew it in several of our cafés—but flavored coffees are not something we’re leading with. We’d rather invest in things like better water quality.
How much time do you spend traveling and sourcing coffee?
I go on three to four coffee trips per year. This year, I went to El Salvador, Brazil, and Myanmar, which is an interesting story. In 2009, the country of Myanmar was pretty much shut off; we hired a political refugee from there and then a few more. Yet it wasn’t until 2012 that the trade sanctions were lifted. But they were still years away from having the infrastructure in place to export something like coffee. Through my connections, I was invited there and became one of the first people in the world to import the coffee. Literally, until this year, you could not get coffee from Myanmar. It’s one of the last undiscovered coffee-growing regions in the world. We took a pour-over set to one of the villages for tasting. It was the first time they’d ever seen one. I wouldn’t have had that ground floor opportunity were it not for the guys I hired.
Are there any other undiscovered places like that?
Cuba, but all of that will probably change soon. No one knows the quality potential there, though, so that could get interesting.
How many coffees do you taste on a trip?
During my last trip to Brazil, I cupped between 250 and 300 coffees, all of them from there. When you travel to one country and taste just their coffees, you can dial in on the nuances, unlike cupping a bunch of random coffees from all over.
What’s new in espresso machines?
Scales are now being built into the drip trays, so differing amounts of coffee and water can be used, which is a huge tool in evaluating quality. The newest machines have separate boilers for each group head, allowing the barista to dial in a very specific temperature—to within a tenth of a degree at the group head—which is beneficial because different blends and single origin coffees taste better at different temperatures. Blind testing was used to determine that temperature has an even a bigger impact on coffee flavor than pressure, which surprised a lot of people.
Have coffee roasters made similar technological advances?
They’ve definitely become more automated, but we like the manual aspect of our vintage machines, one is from the '50s, and the main roaster was built in 1937. They’re like manual espresso machines. Non-automated machines like that require more passion. The roaster is 100 percent in charge. You don’t push a few buttons, and it’s done; you have to be well-trained to know what you’re doing.
How much margin for error exists when roasting coffee?
The roast takes 12 to 15 minutes, and sometimes the sweet spot is as little as 10 seconds. If you miss it, though, it’s not like the coffee is going to be bad—it’s just not going to be as good as it could have been. That’s also the fun, challenging part of it. The passionate guys want to nail it every time.
How is Kaldi’s roasting process different?
Places like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee & Tea are known for darker roasts with smoky, chocolaty, and sometimes bitter notes. Most of our roasts never get to that point. We choose to highlight the sweetness that comes first: the round, ripe fruits, and caramel notes that people like, and balance that with acidity. Our goal is to highlight the different flavors based on the soil they’re grown in. Flavor is an inherent part of the bean, and we develop that during the roasting process. You can’t take an average coffee and roast it better to make it taste better, but you can take a great coffee, roast it poorly, and make it taste worse. The potential is in the coffee; it’s up to the roaster to unlock it.
Describe the barista training process.
Trainees attend a six-class program at the roastery and then can work at the stores, but it takes at least four months to become an apprentice barista and another six to become certified, which is when you can work by yourself without another certified barista present. New baristas don’t realize that it takes a year or more to become fully certified.
What’s your day-to-day function?
Managing production, quality control, and coffee purchasing, which is a huge part of the business. Tricia [Tyler’s sister and co-owner] is more involved on the café and retail side, Josh [Ferguson, Tricia’s husband] heads up new store development and the equipment end, and we all get involved with customer service, marketing, and menu development.
You’re a certified coffee grader. Describe that process.
It’s a certification given out by the Coffee Quality Institute. The goal of the Q grader, as they’re called, is to create common language between graders worldwide. There are several hundred of us in the U.S., and we all have to get recertified every three years.
How is coffee scored?
A 100-point scale is used: 10 points each for fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, uniformity, clean cup, balance, and sweetness. I score all the incoming coffees, as do our roasters, and it’s amazing how close the scores are across the different coffees—usually within a point or half a point. It’s different than wine, though: We don’t use the full scale. The best coffees in the world score 92 or 93, but even that’s deceiving. Your favorite coffee might score an 89; my favorite right now is an 85.
Throw out some numbers about Kaldi’s in St. Louis.
We have six cafés here now, with two more coming in 2017: one in the Barnes-Jewish complex and one on Vandeventer in the Gerhart Building. We have coffee bars in several Schnucks and sell a ton of bag coffee at retail. At the office level, we recently increased the pack size so that office coffee now tastes exactly the same as what we serve in the stores, which is important to us. We want those experiences to be identical.
How are you growing the company?
We’re adding two cafés in St. Louis this year, we added two in Atlanta last year at Emory University, and we may be expanding our reach there. Many of the university coffee bars here sell our coffee, too; as expectations change and the demand for single origin and higher-quality specialty coffee increases, we hope to open more doors at the university level.
Will any of the food offerings change this year?
One focus of Frank McGinty, our director of culinary development and marketing, will be menu development. He is adding new dishes and new ideas to the menu. A lot of people don’t know that Frank is also a fine-ding chef.
Kaldi’s has interests in Hawaii, too?
We have a sister company, Honolulu Coffee, and 12 cafés in Hawaii. We opened two [in 2016] and will open two in 2017. We just opened an 8,000-square-foot roastery and café that explains the history of coffee, especially in Hawaii, which is the only state that can grow coffee on any scale. I know we’re the only place in Hawaii that’s doing true third-wave coffee that we’re roasting ourselves. A lot of it’s from Kona, which is the largest, most famous coffee growing district there. A few years ago, we bought a 75-acre coffee farm there.
Why is Kona coffee so expensive?
Because of the demand, for sure, but it’s also because it’s grown on U.S. land, according to our labor standards, practices, and wage rates.
And Kaldi’s has a presence in Japan?
A lot of tourists in Hawaii—like 40 percent—come from Japan, so they’re a big part of our customer base. In 2012, we were approached by a gentleman who wanted to franchise Honolulu Coffee in Japan. He’s opened 25 stores there to date.
How have local coffee cafés changed over time?
There’s more precise brewing equipment today, from espresso machines to the Chemex-type brewers. On one hand, if you don’t offer a pour-over option, you’re not regarded as cutting edge. On the other hand, there’s also a simplification—coffee cafés that focus only on high-end, dialed-in batch brews every day and rotate them religiously to keep them really, really fresh.
How has the coffee-drinking process changed over time?
We’ve gone from drinking individual cups to coffee being a real experience, with two people in a café sharing a rare Kenyan coffee brewed in a Chemex. By raising expectations and making coffee taste better, we’ve also changed perceptions of how people should be brewing coffee at home.
With wine, people progress from sweet to white to red to heavier reds. Is it the same with coffee?
It’s similar. People start with mochas and lattes and might progress to more complex coffees, but they might also be happy drinking lattes all their life, so it’s not exactly the same. It’s not as linear.
Are coffee cafés different in cities with more advanced coffee cultures?
No, the coffee in St. Louis is as good as any city in the country. And the service at the café level might be better here. It’s interesting that Kaldi’s was doing things in 2007 that didn’t yet exist in New York and Los Angeles, although they caught up pretty quickly.
What’s new in the world of tea?
It’s a growing part of the beverage business and ours as well. Where I travel the world developing relationships with coffee farmers, Sarah Scarborough, our partner in Nashville, does the same for tea. We’ve added her loose-leaf tea blends to our product mix, plus a seasonal loose-leaf tea every quarter.
Do you really get more extractions out of loose tea?
Yes, but it depends on the type. Black teas are usually good for two [extractions], but our oolong can be brewed three or four times, for example. At the cafés, we’ll offer hot water a time or two more, which gets interesting because the flavor changes slightly with each extraction.
How big of a deal is chai?
It’s how most of India and Southeast Asia drink tea, and it’s a growing segment here. We tried to outsource the production to a co-packer, but they didn’t want to use our vendors for spices or the quality of tea that we wanted to use, so we took an unused room and decided to do get into full-scale, microbrewed chai production ourselves. All of the individual spices are organically sourced, and all the tea and spice blends are made in house. There aren’t many people doing chai like this.
Does tea have more or less caffeine than coffee?
A little less, but the compounds are different, so it might hit you differently. Some coffee drinkers will talk about the buzz they get from tea when, in fact, they’re taking in less caffeine.
Does Kaldi’s have plans for more coffee collaborations?
Our first collaboration was with Schlafly, a coffee stout. We’re also doing beers with Urban Chestnut, Ferguson Brewing, and a coffee whiskey with StilL 630. And as we move into 2017, we’ll have much bigger plans that we can talk about.
