Inside Winchell Mountain Coffee Roasters, in a warehouse on Factory Lane, Willis Rivkin waits for green, scentless beans to turn brown. He checks their color under a small lamp, listens for the popcorn-like crackle inside the roaster, and decides, by instinct, when the batch is ready.
Rivkin, 40, owns the Pine Plains roastery, where he and two employees roast about 2,000 pounds of beans on most days. The beans, imported from Nicaragua, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, are roasted, blended, packaged, and shipped to coffee shops and markets from Jacksonville to Tulsa.
Anybody can make a good cup of coffee, Rivkin said. All you need is good beans.
Rivkin has spent more than a decade mastering the craft, creating blends for morning coffees around the country from his facility across the street from Seymour Smith Intermediate Learning Center. Often with a Sharpie tucked under his New York Mets baseball hat and a pair of scissors in his back pocket, he enjoys not having a traditional desk job.
“I’m still very much a kid at heart. I like not having to wear adult clothes to work, not having to tie my sneakers,” Rivkin said. “That instant gratification of — you got your toy, you opened your toy, you played with your toy — it’s creative, it’s playful, it’s sort of like Willy Wonka’s world in here.”
The operation began with Rivkin’s father, Bob, who owned a restaurant in Lakeville, Connecticut, in the 1960s that served breakfast, sandwiches, burgers, and Schapira’s coffee, a family-owned, New York City-based roaster founded in 1903.
Over the years, the business owners became friends. When Bob was ready to move on from the restaurant, the Schapira family handed him the keys to their coffee business. He moved the roastery from Greenwich Village to Pine Plains in 1973, closer to his home in Millerton.
Willis Rivkin worked in Boston for a few years as a headhunter for a software firm before returning to New York to join the family business. He learned by watching his father work at the roastery and took over in 2009. He kept the Schapira’s name for wholesale clients and gave the retail side a new identity: Winchell Mountain Coffee Roasters, named after the hills he passes on his morning commute.
The building is part warehouse, part roastery, with two industrial-grade roasters that tumble beans in 120-pound batches, filling the space with a low, steady whir. A short flight of stairs leading into the open roasting room reminds Rivkin of walking down New York City subway stairs in the summer.
The roasters are old metal machines made by Probat, a German company. Rivkin’s father bought them shortly after opening the Pine Plains shop in the mid-1970s, and Rivkin still prefers them to newer digital models.
The roaster is a large drum, with three burners underneath that roast the beans at 510 to 540 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s like a washing machine,” Rivkin said. “The cast iron drum circulates the beans so they don’t get burned, only roasted.”
Raw beans are poured into an auger, slide into a metal tube, and enter the roaster, where they start to brown and release the familiar aroma of coffee. Thin, light layers peel from the skin of the beans as they tumble in the heat, and a chaff collector connected to the drum pulls them out as they float up from the rest of the batch.
Rivkin occasionally pulls out a sample spoon attached to the roaster to examine the color of the beans under a small lamp before sliding the spoon back into place. He also listens closely, tracking the first and second crackles while accounting for storage temperature, bean size, and the type of roast he is trying to achieve.
“If you cover my nose and cover my eyes, in theory, I should be able to get pretty close to a french roast just based on hearing the crackle of the beans,” he said, noting that different kinds of roasts have different tells.
“You’d have to wait and hear the first crackle. Then, you’d hear that second crackle start, it would get very intense and very loud and when it starts to subside a little bit, you’d let it out for a french roast,” he said. “If you were doing a Viennese roast, which is a little lighter than a french, when it hit that grand finale of the second crackling, that’s when you would let [the batch] out.”
After the second crackling subsides, the beans develop a flammable oil.
“The difference between a light roast and dark is about 30, 40 seconds,” he said. “The difference between a dark roast and call 911 because it’s on fire is another 30 seconds.”
After about 20 minutes, Rivkin pulls a lever to release the roasted beans into a round cooling tray with a perforated surface. A large fan keeps them in motion as they cool to room temperature. Without the fan, the beans would continue to roast even outside the drum.
From there, the beans pass through a destoner, which removes any pebbles or pieces of cement that may have entered the burlap bags during their journey to Pine Plains. The roasted beans are then collected in plastic drums and moved to a large tray for blending.
Some beans from South America and Africa have naturally occurring citrusy notes, Rivkin said, and are often used for light roasts to retain those flavors. A dark roast would extract more oil and burn away those notes. Those beans can then be blended with Indonesian or Nicaraguan beans, which have milder flavor profiles.
“The lighter you roast the coffee, the more of that natural flavor you get,” he said. “The longer you roast it, you start to lose that flavor and it’s often considered bold, robust, smoky. So you can play with the roast level and find that sweet spot.”
Walking past the warehouse shelves, Rivkin pointed to a bag of freshly packaged Tanzanian Peaberry.
“It has some zingyness, some acidity, and for some people, that’s a very appealing coffee,” he said. “For others, they would like that flavor but with something else mixed in it. It’s sort of like — I like hot sauce on something, I’m not just gonna have hot sauce on its own.”
The beans are sealed into vacuum-packed bags, packaged in colorfully branded 12-ounce paper bags, and placed in boxes on a conveyor belt that moves them closer to the shelves, where they stay until they are shipped the next day.
Rivkin works with graphic designers and artists to create distinctive packaging. He recently partnered with tattoo artist Darren Brass and Boston chef Jamie Bissonnette, roasting beans for their coffee brand, Shinchu, and packing them in intricately decorated bags designed by Brass.
Winchell Mountain Coffee Roasters also makes custom blends for clients. The Big Rock Blend is one of the Stanfordville market’s best-selling coffees, a medium roast with notes of honey, brown sugar, and lemon. The market sells about 36 bags a week, with sales doubling in the summer, according to manager Lorelei Christensen.
“I’ve come full circle with this coffee,” said Christensen. “I went to Seymour for middle school and it would often smell like coffee when we were out playing on the field, it smells very familiar still.”
Brand loyalty, Rivkin said, is the hardest part of running a coffee business. Some people regularly buy Winchell Mountain coffee, but it can be difficult to persuade others to change what they put on the breakfast table.
“You’re fighting a losing battle if you’re trying to convince somebody with some product that they’re currently happy with, that they’re wrong and they should try something else,” he said. “It’s like the only type of ketchup I’m gonna buy is Heinz. I don’t know about the other types of ketchups on the shelves, but if I go to a grocery store, I’m gonna get Heinz. I think a lot of people feel that way about our coffee.”
The most common misconception about coffee, Rivkin said, is the idea of an “espresso blend.”
“There’s no such thing,” he said. “You hear that a lot but espresso just is a type of grind and equipment that you put it in. It’s ground super fine, packed and then you do a shot of espresso.”
Still, Rivkin said he does not want the details to be intimidating. He starts his mornings with a fresh cup of black coffee and wants people to know that a good cup does not require elaborate equipment.
“Find a type of coffee that you like, make sure it’s ground correctly, and that you’re using the correct water and grind measurements,” he said. “With some good quality beans, even with a $10 Mr.Coffee [machine], anyone can make a good cup.”