Summermoon Coffee

I work right off of South First Street. Every day when I drive down that street I see cool businesses that I want to go into. It is a cool street. I want to get into it. Sophie is what the people in the coffee shops call the area when they feel like using an affectionate term. Actually they only call the street Sophie when I'm in the coffee shops and I'm for some reason referring to myself in the third person plural. And my tone is not so much affectionate as it is reproachful at the thought another monosyllabic nickname for a street I like. But my point is that there are coffee shops on this street and sometimes I visit them.

Summermoon is the first coffee shop that I pass on my way home, but I hadn't ever stopped before because their name is too fanciful for my tastes, and because their sign, though cleverly designed as a coffee cup, is awful and gives the impression of a lemonade stand. Once I got over that and read the sign I saw that they roasted their own beans over wood. Then I stopped. Two reasons that this piqued my interest: if they roast their own coffee, it means that their beans are going to be fresh, the operation is going to be more localized; also, the idea of coffee being wood roasted sounds exotic and special.

Well, the amateurish sign isn't the only place where I squirmed over design. The interior design in the place had the feeling of a living room's atmosphere stretched over a business. It also had the feeling of someone trying to make something work. The sitting area is made up worn matching tables and the occasional garage sale pilfering. Where there isn't sitting room there are shelves packed with merch made in the area. The counter is barely visable beneath all of the local business it is supporting. But what Summermoon looses in appeal for cluttered decour, it makes up for in strong display of independent business ethos. Because if the inside of your store is ugly, then it means you don't have enough money to hire an interior designer. That's about as good as a middle finger raised at the business elite (at least according to Adbusters).

Eventually I got over my foibles and ordered a cup of coffee. My barista turned out to be the son in-law of of the man behind the operation. He was friendly and told me about their beans. Daddy In-Law had decided that he wanted to roast beans like they did a long time ago. A long, long time ago, as I learned. Infact, since the advent of gas and electric cooking people don't really use wood fueled fires to roast their beans, unless they have to. Unless they are in a place remote and inaccessible to the novelties of modern cooking. Like the people growing and harvesting the beans. And cooking like these people gives the coffee a symbolic connection both in place and in time.

The beans are not roasted on South First Street, but out in Oak Hill. The menu has pictures of the wood fired roaster in a bright open space with people in old timey clothes loading coal or beans. The space actually looks beautiful. I realized that one of the sepia colored men in the photographs was actually my barista after he told me that the roaster was not actually very old, though in the photograph its bricks appear weathered and beaten, and was designed and constructed by his father in-law, who I assumed was one of the other old timey men in the photograph.

The beans are roasted weekly, though he did not tell me the day. I got the last of a batch of Nicaraguan in a big cup for two dollars.

On two occasions I have had coffee that was roasted in the store. Once was in Philadelphia, and the other was in San Francisco. On both occasions I could not believe that I was drinking coffee. Coffee starts to go bad a week after it is roasted. Most mornings I drink coffee that comes out of a 7lb bag from Panama that I get deliveries of a few times a year and that takes up most of the room in my freezer. But on these two mornings I actually had to look into my cup and wonder what I was drinking, such were the flavors. What I drank at Summermoon was definitely coffee--not bad coffee, but coffee without any surprises. I have been warned against such expectations, though. Time and place have their stake in taste, and checking out a new coffee shop on my way home from work isn't exactly the same as waking up confused on the second day after the new year in San Francisco and wandering into a coffee shop still giggling about that thing that I still couldn't remember.

But time and place doesn't account for everything. I had hoped for something special out of wood fired coffee. If anything, the difficulties of roasting beans with a wood fire should require some technique. I was hoping to taste the effort of controlling the fire. At the very least, I had expected a more smoky flavor, or the flavors of some local wood, hickory or mesquite. But what I got tasted like a safe cup of coffee. There weren't many outstanding flavors, the blend was smooth, and the depth of taste didn't strain my taste-buds in the search for their end.

I tried again on another day, but the result was more of the same. Good coffee, but a roast that doesn't live up to its name.