Island Artisans – Artisanal Coffee Roasting in the Cowichan Valley

Today on Island Artisans I talked about Geir Oglend and his family, who own and operate Drum Roaster Coffee in Cobble Hill, in the Valleyview Mall just off the Transcanada Highway in the Cowichan Valley.

More and more coffee shops across the province are roasting green coffee beans into the little brownie/black nuggets we’re used to seeing get ground up for our coffee beverages. Coffee drinkers have a growing awareness of the quality of our ingredients and the realization that there can be so much variation available to us in the flavour of a cup of coffee or espresso depending on where the coffee beans come from, how they are blended AND how they are roasted.

Geir Oglend's coffee shop, the Drum Roaster, is about a five-minute drive away from me in Cobble Hill.  He just installed a brand new Diedrich drum roasting machine and have enclosed it in a special glass-walled room so you can watch all the action, and that’s where we chatted about Geir’s fascination with coffee. He was born and raised in Norway, where coffee culture and appreciation was much more developed at that time than in North America, and Geir admits he loved coffee from the time he was a little kid.

So this love of coffee turned into his career, especially when he traveled around Europe, saw people lining up to get into cafes, and realized there could be an economic upside to this.  He had a small coffee shop in Norway, then when he moved to Victoria in 1988, started a coffee shop and hasn’t looked back since then.

Roasting your own beans is definitely another layer of art added to the raw product. When he started up the first coffee shop, and then went on to found Serious Coffee, which is an expanding chain of shops here on the Island, he realized he just wasn’t getting the quality, flavour and the freshness of roasted coffee he was used to in Europe, so he started roasting for himself. And when he left Serious Coffee behind he still wanted to maintain control of that quality, so even though he has just one coffee shop now, he roasts every bean that gets turned into a cup of coffee in the shop.  Now, I’ve been to other roasters, and many of them use computer programs to control the roaster temperature and timing, but Geir will have none of that, he says the computer can't take into account the variations in individual batches of beans, or the humidity, and it can't listen to the beans.

Part of what Geir listens for when he is roasting is something called the ‘first crack’, when the beans reach a certain temperature and you can hear them start crackling.  He usually stops before the ‘second crack’, at a higher temperature, because he thinks that’s where the flavour starts to break down. But every different type of bean can get a different treatment of time and temperature to get it just right.

Geir has a flavour and aroma wheel for coffee that lists some 600 different aromas and flavours you may get from coffees, and he does bring in green beans from around the world, as much as possible they are organic and fairly traded.  And I just have to mention again that the Drum Roaster is very much a family business.  One of Geir’s sons, Carson, helps him run the place and creates marvellous latte art, and Geir’s wife Pat makes from scratch every morning, wonderful baked goods. The Achilles’ heel of my diet are Pat's orange coconut brioches.  I try to limit myself to one a week…