Elaine Richardson

Doug Zell discusses coffee the way others discuss wine.

"Did you taste it first?" he asks, reaching for a cup and pouring from a carafe his associate has just placed on the table inside Intelligentsia Coffee's 25,000-square-foot warehouse/office/roasting works at Fulton and Wolcott streets. Pouring liberally, he breathes in. "This is a coffee from New Guinea, so it should have sort of like a nice hoppy kind of nose," he says, taking a healthy drink. "If you think about beer, sort of like the Sierra Nevada pale ale, it's hoppy and then some nice carmely notes, too." Stopping for another taste, he smiles, "And it's sweet."

For Zell, coffee is much like wine, and as owner (with wife Emily Mange, who's on maternity leave) of Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters and Tea Blenders, at least part of his goal is to cultivate the idea that good coffee has a lot to do with where it's grown. "People talk about wines and their flavors, `and this is from Napa or Sonoma,' and I think the hope of specialty coffee is that there's this connection back to where it came from," Zell says. "The amount of work that goes into putting out one great pound of coffee is unbelievable. I think we take [coffee] for granted, but there's a growing appreciation of it, which is good, but it's a process."

And from its name (after the intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who met in coffeehouses for discussion), to its buying practices (they travel extensively to meet the people who actually grow the coffee they buy), Intelligentsia works to be part of that process. The quality of their efforts is acknowledged in the city's finest restaurants--Charlie Trotter's, Blackbird, Spring, to name a few--many of which serve signature blends (Intelligentsia Trotter's Blend, for instance), and in the numerous coffeehouses (in thirty states and Canada) and gourmet stores (Whole Foods was one of their first customers) that feature their products.

Zell admits they've come a long way since opening their store in 1995. The roasting works and wholesale business grew after visitors to the store (where they had a small roaster on site) began to request more--this year the company will roast 750,000 pounds. "It's cool that quality can actually work," says Zell, a native Milwaukeean who relocated to San Francisco, where he worked as a barista, started his own (now defunct) bottled iced tea business and paid a man working in a tiny Oakland shop to teach him the secrets of coffee roasting. "As an entrepreneur, you're always surprised when things go right. I think having the experience of my other business not working--you're always conscientious about keeping at it. I don't think we're ever going to coast."

In the last four years, not coasting has meant traveling--a lot. Zell is preparing for a trip to Guatemala, and says later this year they'll visit Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia and Indonesia. "You have to start with great green coffee, which is what it is before it's roasted. And that is getting more and more difficult because the world market [for green coffee] is very depressed," Zell says. "A lot of the farmers that were producing great coffee can't get paid enough for their coffee, and, as a result, their focus on quality is becoming diminished. So, what we're doing is actually striking deals at origin--for like a five-year deal--where everybody is happy. Where the farmer is well compensated and we get the coffee for a price that we can sell it and make money on."

Zell says that, in many ways, this gives them more control over the process, allowing them to remain "finicky" about quality while lending support to the industry. "We want the great coffee to be sustainable at origin, whether it's Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, Sumatra, wherever it is," he says. "We don't expect that we can get great stuff for a low low price. It's like cooking--you have to buy great stuff. You can't buy crappy ingredients and hope to get a good result."

But actually getting the coffee is just part of the struggle, then comes the roasting. "We have vintage roasters, built about 1950," Zell says, pointing out two large steel cylinders, attached to assorted tubes and gauges and staffed by two men who periodically pull out a scoop of beans to check their color.

"The idea to bring the heat up slowly, get the heat inside of the coffee, so it can develop from the inside out, so to speak," Zell says. "Everything's roasted to order and delivered fresh to you the next day."

But Intelligentsia doesn't stop there--they also provide brewing equipment and train customers how to use it. "If we do all these things right, but you don't know how to brew the coffee, you don't know how to pull the shots of espresso right, it's all useless," says Zell, who credits the company's forty employees with boosting their success. "So we want to make sure that people do that stuff right as well."

With restaurants calling every day to add Intelligentsia coffee to their establishment (Zell says they do about 30 percent of their business in restaurants), a thriving wholesale business and Lakeview store, the next step is to open more stores. "We want to have a number where we can keep it so it's great, so people are excited about seeing one of our stores open, not like, `Oh, another one.' That's where we want to land," he says.

Intelligentsia, 3123 North Broadway, (773)348-8058
www.intelligentsiacoffee.com

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