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CHARACTERS IN COFFEE continued from page 33 ESPRESSO AND COFFEE: Josuma Coffee is known as both a roaster and an importer of Indian coffee. Dr. John attends to both sides of the business, pulling shots at Coffee Fest (left) and visiting farms like Kalledeyarapura Estate. Q:A: Q: A: Why did you start roasting? We started roasting because so few roasters carried Indian coffees, so we wanted to offer the roasted product. And over the last 20 years, we have grown fairly consis- tently—our revenues have grown a shade under 20 percent each year. The only year in which we did not grow was 2010 because of the recession. How did you develop Malabar Gold, your signature espresso blend? When you look at blending, you start thinking about the characteristics of espresso and of the various com- ponents that make up a blend. It occurred to me that I already had the various coffees that are ideal for making an espresso. That was a revelation to me because the conventional wisdom was that you needed coffees from different origins to make a good espresso blend. But it is simply that you need coffees of different types to represent different characteristics. It turned out that there were three countries in the whole world that produce the different type of coffees required to make a good espresso blend, and India hap- pened to be one of them. (Brazil and Indonesia are the others.) So I was able to create an espresso blend using only coffees from India. Q: 34 How do you run the roasting company with just you and your wife on staff? COFFEE ALMANAC 2012 A: We use a completely different model; we sub-contract almost everything. We have green coffee warehoused in various places. If we had our own warehouse, its capacity would have to be twice as large as our average need. And because the Southern Hemisphere produces coffee at a different time from India, we are burning our inventory at the warehouse as others are building theirs. The same idea applies to roasting. We have it organized very effi- ciently so that we only roast once a week. And even though I don't physically do the roasting, we take over the roasting plant when we roast. The roasters have been trained by us to roast the way we want, not the way they roast normally. So it's really custom-roasted. Q: A: Do you ever miss working in physics? Not particularly. Because frankly, coffee is the most fun I've ever had in my entire working life. First, we own the company, so we're not working for somebody else. Second, we are at a stage in life where we're not dependent on the coffee business to put food on the table, so we can pick and choose whom we do business with. There are a number of things beyond coffee itself that make it the most fun thing in my life. The coffee industry is still growing, and therefore, people are more willing to share than they would be if one's growth were dependent on another one's shrinking. Everybody can grow if they want to at this point, and that's a nice place to be.