Steve Smith is passionate about coffee. The Master Roaster for Fonte Coffee and its new Cafe & Wine Bar in Seattle is a maestro of the roast, a virtuoso of the blend. He has immersed himself in every step of the process from the coffee bush to your cup.
After a decade at Starbucks, he joined with Paul Odom to found a small Seattle roasting company entirely dedicated to the best possible product. Their volume is relatively small but that have a worldwide clientele (The Four Seasons, St. Regis Peninsula). In 2009, after offering their coffees only through direct order or Uptown Espresso, they opened a dedicated Cafe & Wine Bar downtown.
I met with Steve at his Georgetown roasting facility.
How did you get started with coffee?
I started in 1979. I graduated from Washington State University and lingered in Pullman. A friend of mine had moved to Seattle a year before and gotten a job with Starbucks, which was a little coffee roasting company with one store down in the market.
Was it called Starbucks at the time?
It was. But it was Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice Company. Shortly after [my friend] began working there they opened up another store. By the time I came on we were opening up a third store. And I started out in the tea department, unloading tea, blending tea, bagging tea. Occasionally unloading coffee from containers. And shortly got into the roasting program.
Did you come to that as a coffee lover?
I came to it as someone looking for a job. As I remember I started at $4.50 an hour. For me isn’t wasn’t so much a matter of always wanting to work in the coffee business, but rather "I’m interested in coffee and I need a job," but then it began to grow on me. I was fortunate enough to get in with a lot of really good coffee people, many of whom are still working there.
How has the way we drink coffee changed since then?
Even when I started in the late 70s, there was very little going on with coffees that were anything but supermarket, canned coffees. I remember when I was a kid living in Seattle, you used to have to go up to Vancouver B.C. to get decent coffee. A place called Murchie’s was the only place around. The founders of Starbucks were this group of friends--one of them would drive up to Vancouver and buy a bunch of coffee and split it up amongst the rest of them. Through that process they thought, wow, there’s a potential niche here.
This was at a time when Peet’s coffee in California had been up and going for a while. The founders of Starbucks looked to [Peet's] for guidance. So the original Starbucks concept looks a lot like the Peet’s concept: the color scheme, the way things are laid out, the products offered. That original concept just catapulted itself into the national consciousness, largely around the concept of milk-based espresso drinks, such that the whole concept of specialty coffee—the idea that there might be a coffee beverage that is worth three or four times what the going rate was for a cup of coffee, all of those ideas were originally placed in the national consciousness through the success of Starbucks.
And towards the end of the '90s and into this last decade, a lot of independents started to get into the business who were very interested in coffee and into the promotion of specialty coffee. And a lot of ideas about the relationship between coffee consuming countries and coffee producing countries, a lot of innovative ideas about how coffee is produced, how it’s roasted, how it’s brewed. So we're in this really dynamic period in the history of coffee in this country.
You said you got started in the tea department. Have you stayed passionate about tea?
Absolutely. Tea is interesting in that it comes to you as a finished product. It’s not so much that you’re producing it. There is some blending involved. And then it’s largely evaluating samples and making decisions on what teas to buy.
When you talk to tea vendors on the phone and you’re calling from the coffee world, they’re so mellow. There’s these long pauses. I imagine them breezing into work at quarter after nine, making a few pots of tea, and chatting about Buddhism, Taoism. Meanwhile, in the coffee world, we’ve bought 60 containers already—we’re going, we’re going. So it’s nice to have an interface with that.
Tea is a lot like coffee in as much as the final product has to do with the climate, the soil conditions, the way the tea’s been processed, the way it’s packaged. All those things come into play in the results in the cup. And people that we’ve been doing business with for a long time, it’s always interesting to see the little variations are going to be year-to-year. It’s very analogous to coffee.