Martin Diedrich: A Passion for Coffee

Just before Thanksgiving 2008, Martin Diedrich invited me to come by his coffee house in Newport Beach to sample his newly roasted coffees.

The name should be familiar:  Martin Diedrich founded Diedrich’s Coffee, the late, lamented chain of coffee shops absorbed last year by Starbucks.  Gladly freed from a corporate association, Diedrich has founded a new emporium, Kéan Coffee of Newport Beach.

Diedrich sees Kéan as a shop with a mission: “My goal is to raise the art of roasting and brewing coffee to that of a culinary art without pretensions. I want to provide the very finest coffee in the world to ordinary people who drop by for a casual cup or to buy a pound of beans, green or roasted on the spot.”

The first thing I noticed was the crowd. A line of customers stretched out the door and into the parking lot — on an ordinary weekday afternoon. The second was the simple décor. Nothing fancy, except for two live coffee plants happily growing in a sunlit window, one seven feet tall and very pretty, the other less than half its height, yet already bearing fruit.

Not everyone can grow coffee trees in California, especially indoors. They are notoriously temperature-sensitive and fussy about water. Diedrich, who was raised on a coffee plantation in Antigua, Guatemala, knows how. He even grows them outdoors in his backyard.  “The tall one is an heirloom Arabica variety called Geisha,” Diedrich says.

“The other is one of the new dwarf hybrids. I grew them from fruit I collected while scouting for coffee.”

The third and most interesting thing about the shop was a “cupping” — a formal sampling of coffees offered by importers — set up beside the two coffee plants. You don’t find cuppings at Starbucks.  The staff had arranged six varieties of coffee around a high, circular table, two cups for each variety, the grounds left at the bottom of the cups. According to Diedrich’s young journeyman roaster, Ted Vautrinot, all six varieties were grown on specific estates on Sulawesi, the oddly shaped Indonesian island formerly known as Celebes. Vautrinot roasted all six samples just minutes before in a big, shiny red machine made in Idaho by Diedrich’s brother Stephan.

Four tasters circled the table: Diedrich, Vautrinot, a young barista by the name of Devon and a guest. The four noisily slurped in spoonfuls of brew, the better to appreciate the aroma as well as the flavor. After each slurp, the spoons were dipped in the water glasses, and the tasters advanced to the next sample.  All four instantly decided on the winner.

And this very much explains both the similarity and differences between fine coffee and fine wine. It takes the finest beans, grown, processed and roasted with patience and skill to produce the finest coffee but, ultimately, coffee is a remarkably democratic drink. People know good coffee when they taste it.

Up from Ick

Once upon a time, coffee was coffee, a commodity like concentrated frozen orange juice. It came ground in a can or dehydrated in a jar and tasted pretty much the same, bitterly awful. Most people routinely burned theirs in a percolator. They also added lots of sugar and cream to hide the resulting acrid taste. Many people convinced themselves they didn’t like coffee. “It’s too acid,” they said, or “It tastes like rubber.”

These coffees are often made with beans from a species of coffee plants called Robusta whose beans are cheaper to grow but are considered inferior to the finer Arabica beans.

But change came to coffee, albeit slowly. The first change occurred about a half century ago when the makers of Yuban, a commercial brand, raised its price but actually delivered a better taste. Vendors realized that millions of people were willing to pay for better coffee, if they had a choice.

Then came Mr. Coffee of the 70’s, which proved to people that they didn’t have to burn the brew: they could just let it drip.  After that, of course, came Starbucks, which proved that people were willing to pay a lot more for fresh coffee made with quality beans that actually came from a specific country.

Eventually, tens of millions of people bought their own grinders and espresso machines of various degrees of quality — from cheap, hand-held bean choppers and pressure brewers to the more expensive burr grinders and pump brewers. But they still had to go to the store to buy already-roasted coffee, much of it months-old and of uncertain provenance. Even today, a product labeled “Kona blend” may legally have only one real Kona bean in the package; the rest may be from absolutely anywhere. Those other beans might be passable or they might be rotgut traded on the international market by the kiloton.

Enter the fresh roast

Slowly, coffee roasting machines like those made by Diedrich’s brother made their way to neighborhood coffee places. Those lucky enough to live near a neighborhood roaster choosy about beans know that real, freshly roasted coffee is discernibly different from packaged coffee.

How different is it? Put it this way: as I sat with Martin Diedrich for the interview, he served me a cup – plain, nothing special in it. I didn’t think it would be polite to get up for my usual spoon of sugar, but I had a taste, and for the first time in my life, I found sugar completely unnecessary. The finest coffee, freshly and professionally roasted, simply doesn’t need any. You can’t find that level of quality at Starbucks.

“Starbucks roasts their coffee at large, centralized facilities,” Diedrich says. “The coffee is then stuck in a distribution chain for six months or more — but you can’t preserve roasted coffee that long, even in vacuum sealed pouches.” According to Diedrich, green coffee beans last a long time, but roasted coffee has a shelf life of about two weeks.

“Roasted beans quickly lose their natural sweetness and grow stale. We won’t sell them if they’re over five days old. Besides, after two weeks, the oils in the beans turn rancid. That can upset peoples’ stomachs.”

Roasted coffee beans can be preserved a little by keeping them cold. Some people actually freeze them, but that’s controversial. Which is why true coffee lovers patiently wait in line at a place like Kéan, which roasts its own coffee every day, or they roast their own at home. But, no matter how fresh the coffee is, it won’t be any better than the beans that go into it.

Carl Diedrich’s Legacy

As it turned out, after the cupping of the six varieties of Sulawesi coffees, Diedrich chose not to buy any of the six tested that day. “Those were great coffees by all measures, but not extraordinary coffees. I go through 200 samples a year, but end up buying only 20.”

Diedrich learned the roasting business literally on his father’s knee. His father, Carl, was a trained engineer and owner of a small coffee plantation that specialized in high-quality product. The land’s rich, volcanic soil, tropical climate and elevation of 6,000 feet above sea level combined to produce the dense, heavy beans that produce the best coffee.

Unfortunately, coffee roasters would take his harvest, grown with infinite care, and ruin it by subjecting the beans to a quick and easy flash-roast.  “They would be burned on the outside, unfinished on the inside and the flavor would be ruined,” Martin recalls. “So he decided to build his own drum roaster right there on the plantation.” The machine pioneered the precise control of heat, airflow and timing needed to create custom “profiles” for various types of coffee, the kind programmed into every Diedrich roasting machine to this day.

Carl moved to Orange County and opened a small coffee retail business in Newport Beach in 1972. Four or five times a year, he would drive back to Guatemala in an old VW minibus for supplies of green beans from his 10-acre plantation. He quickly became famous as one of the finest, if not the finest, coffee roaster in North America.

His younger son, Stephan, went on to found Diedrich Manufacturing of Sandpoint, Idaho, which manufactures state-of-the-art, electronically controlled roasters, big and small, based on Carl’s technology. Martin Diedrich expanded the family retail business.

“By 2000, Diedrich coffee became one of the largest specialty coffee companies in North America with over four hundred stores,” Diedrich recalls, “but my ownership position in the company became diluted and my influence over its activities dropped correspondingly. It seemed like a death by a thousand cuts. I left the company in 2004. I walked away with very little to show for over two decades of work other than my reputation in the trade and in local community.”

Two years ago, in December of 2005, he opened Kéan, naming the shop after his son, now nine years old. “It’s a way of life for me. I opened the shop not only because of my passion for fine coffee but also because I needed to make a living.”

Is Kéan the start of another chain?

“I may open another store or two,” Diedrich says, “if I find the right locations.  But these days, my first ambition is to welcome my guests and to serve them the finest coffee in the world.”

by Stan Brin