St. Louis–based Goshen Coffee Roasters continues to rack up accolades.
For the second year in a row, Goshen received a Good Food Award, one of the most prestigious food and beverage awards in the country. Goshen is currently offering limited amounts of both coffees to the public. The set contains a 6-ounce bag of Bolivia Los Rodriguez Select Lots (a 2024 Good Food Awards winner) and a 6-ounce bag of Burundi Gahahe Cima Natural (a 2023 Good Food Awards winner). Both award-winning coffees are currently being roasted. Pre-orders are being accepted here.
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In addition, Tony Auger, chief coffee officer at Goshen Coffee Roasters, recently placed sixth at the 2024 US Roasting Championship, held during the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago from April 12–14. It marked an accomplishment years in the making—and, Auger hopes, a new chapter for the team at Goshen.
The Background
The path that led Auger to the podium began rather accidentally. When he first moved to St. Louis from the East Coast, where he grew up drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee from an early age, he worked at Iron Age on Delmar. The shop didn’t open until noon, so Auger spent his mornings at the Kaldi’s on Skinker, near Washington University’s Danforth campus.
“I’d go there every morning and have a couple of drinks,” recalls Auger. “Eventually, Kevin Reddy, now at Blueprint, was like, ‘You should try a pour-over. I tried one that he made for me from Colombia, and I could taste things in there that I never noticed before. Every day, I was putting cream and sugar in my coffee and had no idea. That was an eye-opening experience.”
It started what Auger describes as “an obsession.” Nearly every day, he would spend the first four hours of the morning in Kalid’s drinking “a bunch of Chemexes,” which accumulated a hefty weekly coffee tab. When his ex urged him to cut back, he found another solution: He’d work at Kaldi’s in the mornings. He hustled between the two jobs for more than a year but ultimately realized that he liked coffee a lot more, so he took a significant pay cut and became a full-time barista. “It was a great crew at Kaldi’s,” he says. “We had Kevin Reddy and Mazi Razani, now at Blueprint, and Matt Foster. We learned a lot from each other.”
Information for roasters wasn’t readily available years ago, so Auger experimented with correlations and creating profiles. He also began competing. In 2014, he placed third in the US Coffee Champs Brewers Cup Nationals. “I was shocked at how well I did, both regionally and nationally,” he recalls.
Auger began to learn more about green coffee, made with unroasted coffee beans from Coffea fruits. Kaldi’s already had a green buyer, so Auger found a job with Caravela Coffee, a Latin American coffee exporter that prioritizes the equitable exchange of green coffee. After five years of traveling for the new position, Auger began working at Goshen in a role that melded his skill as a roaster and his commitment to ensuring that producers are paid not just a living wage but also one that allows them to reinvest in their business and families.
Auger’s continuous drive to learn brought him back to competitions in 2022. When he started preparing, he found that there were many changes from the last time that he competed, in 2017. Most important, the roaster that’s used in competitions was different than any he had used. “It’s called a Stronghold,” he explains. “They are super unique, as you can adjust halogen heat, hot air, and bean agitation to make roast profiles.” So to prepare for last year’s competition, he drove up to Chicago, so he could practice for a couple of hours on the roaster.
The Competition
To prepare for this year’s competition (which was narrowed down to the country’s best 32 roasters), Auger flew to Houston with a handful of different single origins and spent three days roasting on a Stronghold. “I came up with a game plan for the different origins based on their moisture content and density,” he says. “I felt more prepared when I got to the competition, but oddly enough, none of the origins that I practiced with were being used.”
The US Roasting Championship competition begins with roasters evaluating green coffee beans and doing a sample roast. The next morning, they taste the coffee and develop the roast profile. They’re allowed to take notes while developing their profile but not allowed to bring them to the final stage of the competition. The last evaluation is based on the cup quality of their roasted coffee.
Following Auger’s sixth-place finish, he hopes that some of colleagues at Goshen will want to get involved in future competitions. “It really pushes you,” he says. “Luckily, we were able to bring a big team to Chicago, so they saw all these things and gained more knowledge of how the industry operates. I want them to see if you push yourself, you can learn, and it makes coffee a very rewarding career.”
Along those lines, Goshen also recently received a second consecutive Good Food Award. “In our never-ending quest for rare coffees, we asked the Los Rodriguez family if we could try out different varieties grown on their farms,” Auger says of its award-winning Bolivia Los Rodriguez Select Lots. “Their Java and Batian lots jumped off the cupping table, but when we blended them together at our secret ratio, the coffee became otherworldly. It might just be alchemy at its finest.”
And last year, it won a Good Food Awards for its Burundi Gahahe Cima Natural. “Cima yeast helps amplify flavors during coffee’s fermentation process,” Auger explains. “Coffee cherries and Cima naturally ferment together, then are moved to raised beds to dry for two to three weeks. The end result is dramatically complex, with big fruity notes that aren’t normal for coffees from Burundi but are guaranteed to blow your mind with each sip.”
