People who roast coffee impress me. I once met a Cambodian café owner who had pounded a car fender into a shallow pan and moved the beans around, shaking it like a popcorn maker over the coals he’d set to smoldering next to the curb in Banlung, the capital of Ratanakiri Province. He could tell by the sound of beans cracking how far along the roasting was. A few months later, I was fascinated by a Tokyo café owner who fine-tuned a sophisticated German roasting machine. Like the Banlung man, he used his own senses to judge the progress of a batch of coffee even as he used the machine’s sensitive calibrations. I have a couple of home roasting machines that I relegated to the basement when I realized it should be left to the experts.
There are experts among us in Cambridge and Somerville. In this series I visited Yego Coffee in Somerville and admired its Rwandan coffees, and I frequent Intelligentsia on the Cambridge-Watertown-Belmont border for its roasts (though not local, the roasting it always fresh).
I prefer medium-to-light roasts, which display all the layers of flavor that get knocked out by dark roasting – which is easier because the goal is a uniform darkness, making it simpler to tell when the roast is done. Light roasting has become standard for specialty or third wave coffee, making the French and Italian roasts so popular in the 1980s and 1990s seem like an anachronism. Everyone has their preferences, but specialty coffee roasters usually try to roast light to bring out the distinctions in their coffee beans. Many hew to the “15-15-15” rule: Green (unroasted) beans can be kept 15 months; roasted beans 15 days; and ground beans 15 minutes before brewing. In short, we are well past the basic question of how “strong” we like our coffee.
This past week I visited two roaster-cafés and realized it’s been a while since I enjoyed these spaces. Sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to what’s right under our noses.
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Barismo owner Jamie Van Schyndel stands in front of the shop's cold brew system. (Photo: Carson Paradis) -
Van Schyndel pours a cold brew at Barismo. (Photo: Carson Paradis)
Barismo
This café on Broadway was always part of the Barismo roastery business, but I started coming here when it was called Dwelltime. “Dwelltime” can mean the amount of time the hot water rests in the coffee grounds or the amount of time a typical customer stays in the shop, among other meanings. The shop hasn’t changed much since 2013, when it opened in the location of the F.B. Hubley & Co. Inc. Auction Galleries, whose sign still graces the back wall of the café.
In the Dwelltime days I was sometimes a “camper” (someone who stays a long time, typically reading or working). Then, as now, social campers meet a friend, then another friend and hold a serial “salon.” The clientele is still from the neighborhood, and because it’s near City Hall and its annex, there are sometimes familiar political faces there.
My visit, during a recent heatwave, found me in a cool, almost noir, Barismo. On that day the shop had the dark calm, the grateful loneliness, of a Hopper painting. Even a nearby toddler whispered to her mother. The silence seemed to be resisting the banal heat of the day, and, carrying on the noir-ness of the mood, to be hiding a secret. Dark and cool like the cold brew.
And that’s a big Barismo story. Cold brew was new to these parts when owner Jaime van Schyndel began making this novel form of iced coffee. Cold brewed coffee means just that: coffee made by long infusion of grounds in cold water. It has been made that way for many decades in Japan, where it’s called mizudashi kōhī. The Hario mizudashi maker, a simple cylindrical pitcher with a mesh grounds container, can sit in your fridge after a brewing time of 12 to 20 hours at room temperature has finished.
One worker is charged with tending the 10 or so large brewing pots, concentrating the flavor. That liquid eventually goes into “nitrogen-flushed” kegs and mixed with water in a 1-to-5 ratio. He sets up the system three or four times per week. A station with spigots for drawing cold brew, nitro cold brew and other fuzzy drinks drew my attention.
All food is made in-house, and the butter croissant will be on repeat for me. Other items for purchase include jars of mole sauce, wild blueberry jam and curried zucchini pickles. Dwelltime used to serve special Chinese and Taiwanese teas, and there is still the Chin Suan Oolong that I loved and took time to infuse more than three times, experiencing its trajectory of flavor over several pourings.
I’m glad I took time to revisit Barismo.
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A bag of Hadeso is pulled off the shelf at Broadsheet. (Photo: Carson Paradis) -
The coffee bar at Broadsheet. (Photo: Carson Paradis) -
A selection of coffees found at Broadsheet. (Photo: Carson Paradis)
Broadsheet
Aaron MacDougall created Broadsheet from his interest in roasting. For years, he has worked on all the variables of it and developed a high profile in Massachusetts, providing the coffee for many of the cafés we frequent.
The shop, with its eye-catching neon C O F F E E on the huge windows, is in a neighborhood that has been a food destination for many years. Savenor’s, Julia Child’s favorite butcher shop, is next door (ask me for stories some time) and a Savenor runs the Acme ice shop on the other side of Broadsheet. Across the street is Lehrhaus, a Jewish restaurant and cultural center, Dali and the Wine & Cheese Cask. The Kebab Factory and Jamie’s ice cream-coffee shop are nearby.
Broadsheet, which is feet from the Somerville line, focuses on Cambridge-Somerville “hyper-local.” The chocolate on offer is from woman-owned Wild Child. Syrups and some sandwiches are housemade; others are from Dirty Buns (I recommend the breakfast bun with egg, sausage, tomato and harissa mayo). Pastries are from Seven Stars and Praliné. Milk and cream are from Thatcher Farms in Milton.
The shop reflects the importance of the roastery (formerly in an alcove off the bar area, now in Somerville). There are technical coffee books on sale, coffee equipment such as the Hario hand mill for a meditative grind of your own, Chemex items and Aeropress filters. The décor includes jute coffee bags from Brazil and Guatemala and elegant bathroom wall tiles.
The day I visited was exceptionally hot (have you noticed?) and the clienteles’ tattoos were even more visible than usual. I was also there at the empty stroller-set hour: Parents wheeling strollers that had contained children who’ve been dropped at daycare, now relaxing with coffee. The wedge-shaped room was bright and full of movement as people crossed the floor for napkins, picked up fallen items and switched tables.
The drip coffee – my test cup – was an excellent medium roast, and the cardamom bun (I loved its slightly underdone center) and ginger biscuit were unusually good. One of these visits I must deviate from drip and get something like a lavender or a black sesame latte or a nitro shandy, the kind of things that in Japan are called “coffee desserts.”
Watching the young men behind the counter, I thought about the skills needed to work with specialty coffee, which include running the espresso machines, making pour-overs, talking about the coffees and food with customers and proficiency in latte art.
As I left the cool for the steam outdoors, I was grateful for the oases our cafés are as they shelter and allow us to feel comfortable for a moment. And to ponder roasting beyond the effect of the enervating heat.
Barismo, 364 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge (8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday; 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to Friday; 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday)
Broadsheet, 100 Kirkland St., Mid-Cambridge (7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
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