HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — There’s no replacement for the classics, no matter how easy some tasks become. The folks at Kaffeeklatsch in downtown Huntsville would argue that the method for coffee roasting is one of those classics.
The soundtrack to the workday is a 1929 Jabez Burns Coffee Roaster. The thousand-pound machine transforms raw beans from all over the world into roasts customers can only find at this shop. The beans go through a rigorous taste test before they’re sold.
“We sample everything we buy,” Kaffeeklatsch President and Founder Grant Heath said. “Everybody who works here sits around a table and we roast and brew different samples and, from that, we pick out the one we like the best.”
For 48 years, Heath has manned the massive roaster, curating flavors that keep drawing customers back.
“You don’t want it to be too light, it can be very tannic and harsh,” he said. “You don’t want it to be too dark because you have a charred taste and all the beautiful flavors will be lost. Somewhere right in the middle is where we live.”
He learned how to roast decades prior to opening his Huntsville Business in 1977.
“My wife and I lived in California, before Starbucks, before Peet’s, I fell in love with the coffee in North Beach and the old Italian guys. I just had never tasted anything like that before,” Heath said.
He took what he learned and brought it home to Alabama. Though not from Huntsville, he hoped the Rocket City would be the right place to embrace his own version of the place where he had learned.
“Only in a place where people had traveled and had some exposure to, to really quality coffee like in Europe. [Huntsville has] Redstone Arsenal and people who did the traveling, and that’s made us want to open it here.”
He found a 1929 Roaster in New Orleans and had it shipped to Huntsville, even though he said it needed some TLC.
“We brought it through [the shop’s] plate glass window over there. Everybody wanted to work on it, and we had lots of engineers so that’s how it got done,” he said.
From there, the business took off.
“We say smell is our best advertisement. Sometimes people will wander in and say, ‘I just followed the smell here!’” Roaster Joanna Weand said.
Nearly five decades later, Heath has trained a handful of roasters like Weand to man the Jabez Burns. She said it took her about two years to truly feel confident operating it alone, but the extra trouble learning, was more than worth it.
“This is the kind of place that you don’t necessarily see in every city you go to, big or small, you know, it’s kind of a one-of-a-kind,” Weand said.
The roasts are so unique, customers keep coming back to the Kaffeeklatsch year after year.
“We have second and even third-generation customers, so that’s really satisfying,” Heath said.
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