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From Bean To Brew: An Inside Look At Kamiak Coffee Company
The Palouse’s Coffee Roasters Reveal Why Specialty-Grade Coffee Matters
By Arlo Popa and Molly Zimmerman
Kamiak Coffee Company video providing an inside look at the roasting process and cafe industry in Pullman. Arlo Popa/Grounds For Gathering
Kamiak Coffee Company has delivered a unique experience by bringing specialty grade coffee from around the globe to Pullman residents since they opened in 2018. The roastery owners Grant Schoenlein and Tyler Kennedy sought to bring a new way of preparing, serving and even hand delivering quality coffee to citizens of the Palouse region.
“People like paying good money for good quality of things, and once you introduce them to something that's better than what they've experienced, they tend to stick with it,” Schoenlein said.
Kamiak Coffee Company sources a wide range of worldly flavors with coffee from farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Brazil, Peru, Columbia and Nicaragua. The specialty grade coffee that the business provides is
intended to have natural or unique flavors which generic coffees, that are highly roasted, lack. To obtain these flavors the coffee that the company sources must earn eighty points or more, out of one-hundred, on the standardized coffee evaluation process known as the Q-score.
“Some lighter Ethiopian coffees can produce some floral or fruit characteristics like what you would find in a wine. That sets us apart…” said Schoenlein.
Specialty grade standard is highly important of Kamiak Coffee Company and goes further than the flavor itself, it is also largely based on availability and the ethics of the coffee.
“Coffee can be a dirty industry," Schoenlein stated, "Its consumed at a high amount worldwide, and a lot of these farms and countries are taken advantage of.”
With specialty grade coffee you pay a premium that goes to non-profit organizations like, Fairtrade International and The Rainforest Alliance, whose goals focus on social, environmental and economic sustainability including fair conditions and wages for farm workers as well as women’s healthcare in developing nations.
“A lot of the coffee we buy is traceable to the farm. We're not buying commodity coffee…we are usually buying a very specific cooperative…or we are buying directly from a farm,” Schoenlein mentioned.
Once the raw coffee reaches the Kamiak Coffee Company roasters in Moscow, ID twenty to twenty-five pounds of espresso beans are placed into a roaster machine where the beans are dried at 320 degrees Fahrenheit then heated. In the final development stage, more complex flavors, colors and aromas are brought out and temperatures can reach up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Un-roasted coffee is super hard, like rocks, and smells very earthy…Once roasted it smells bright and fruity, it’s just the nature of coffee, which is pretty cool,” Kennedy, the company's Director of Coffee, said.
After the roasting the beans are hand delivered to various homes and wholesale business partners in the area. This unique business aspect that Kamiak Coffee Company is very proud of is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before 2020 nearly 90% of the business was providing coffee on a wholesale level. When restaurants and cafes were forced to shut down, Schoenlein and Kennedy wanted to maintain a position to stay in business and get coffee directly to the consumer. They have continued with it after receiving great community feedback and now operate home coffee deliveries as a weekly or monthly subscription service while resuming their wholesale coffee and keg cold brew deliveries to Pullman and Moscow businesses such as Birch and Barley, Cafe Artistia and the coffee shop Schoenlein and Kennedy operate together, Knead Cafe and Patisserie.
“Consider us the milkman of coffee," Schoenlein joked.
Kamiak Coffee Company’s mission statement has evolved as the business has grown but is now painted on the wall of their roasting room in bold, “drink differently” it reads.
“Don't always just go for what's cheap, because it isn't always good.” Schoenlein stated, “It might not be good tasting. It might not be good for the environment. It might not be good for, you know, humanitarian efforts. So think about what you're consuming and know that you are making an impact with what you choose.”