USA – Rolling Meadows man sharing his love of #coffee with Harper students

This fall, Harper College in Palatine is offering a class on “home coffee roasting and cupping,” the latter just a fancy term for “tasting.”

While wine tasting classes are a familiar concept, coffee tasting might be a novel one even for the most ardent Starbucks fans.

As for roasting, why should you spend $90 for a three-week class when you can just buy a coffee roaster and follow instructions?

For one, a machine won’t teach you how to select unroasted, or “green,” coffee beans, how to get different nuances of flavor or compensate for defects in the beans by playing with time and temperature settings.

Plus, a machine doesn’t have instructor José Lopez’s spark when he talks about his life’s hobby.

“From seed to cup, there is so much to share,” says Lopez, who lives in Rolling Meadows. “I want to teach people how to evaluate coffee and let them decide for themselves what they like.”

At-home coffee roasting isn’t just about drinking fresh coffee and loving the aroma that permeates the air, Lopez says. It’s a sound investment.

Home coffee roasters can run as low as $90, although fancier ones cost up to $1,000. “Green,” or unroasted, coffee costs as little as $1.50 per pound, compared to the $7 per pound average for roasted coffee, he says. Also, you can have fun creating your own blends, he adds.

Lopez, 38, says he “always knew coffee” while growing up in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, near the island’s coffee region, and interacting with local farmers since he was a child. After getting a degree in agronomy from the University of Puerto Rico, he worked in local corn crossbreeding programs and later as director of the local reforestation program.

In 2003 he was hired as an administrative consultant by a now-closed roasting company in Puerto Rico. The turning point was when he attended the Alimentaria food and beverage trade show in Barcelona, Spain.

“I saw that everybody was trying to push their brand (of coffee) saying ‘this is the best there is,’ but nobody knew anything about it,” he said. “The missing link was education, so I started thinking how I could capitalize on that.”

It wasn’t for another three years, until he moved to the Chicago suburbs, that he started developing his concept of “coffee tasting events,” which he registered as a service mark in Illinois.

During the free events, he gives presentations – coffees and roaster at hand – about the history of coffee, the coffee industry and home roasting. He also sells his own brand of coffee, Don Lopez Coffee, a Colombian variety roasted and packaged for him by Chicago Coffee Roasters in Huntley.

Eventually, he wants to establish his own business and offer coffee and barista classes. Lopez said he is in talks with Jewel-Osco, which he hopes will start selling his coffee out of its Illinois stores.

Lopez may be a coffee connoisseur, but he hardly comes across as a coffee snob. He has a soft spot for Caribou Coffee, and considers Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea’s brand the best that Chicago offers.

And even though he believes that flavored coffees in varieties such as hazelnut, Irish crème and French vanilla mask the beans’ real flavor – and often the defects of lower-quality coffee – he has no beef against those who drink it.

“People like different things; it’s personal,” he says.

Lopez’s coffee class will be 7 to 9 p.m. Thursdays from Sept. 10 to Sept. 24 at Harper.

This is Harper College’s first-ever class in coffee roasting, said Scott Cashman, manager of the personal and cultural enrichment program of the college’s continuing education department.

“We have an extensive set of wine courses, and we tried to do courses in tea, and we also have a lot of cooking classes, but this is a brand new one,” he said.

Source: dailyherald