Steve Myers likes his coffee fresh, even when the bean comes all the way from the lush jungle slopes of famous Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, East Africa.  "The Tanzanian Peaberry bean is world renowned for its orange and gingerbread taste and its bright body," Myers says. He is digging into a box of his latest shipment, spreading the small flat green beans in his open palm. 

"Peaberries develop when the coffee cherry forms into a single oval bean, rather than the normal two flat-sided beans." He says.  A big shiny new coffee roaster dominates the room and there are burlap bags and carefully labeled cartons of various colored coffee beans lining the walls. 

Steve has just roasted several pounds of a rich black bean that comes from a small estate on the southern most Indonesian Island of Java. Myers makes regular trips to port traders in New Jersey to select and buy beans from various farms around the world.  

"We deal only in what's called Fair-trade and Shared Planet beans." He says. "It's a little more expensive, but the growers I work with around the world have a guaranteed fair pre-harvest price."

The Wellsville Coffee Company's small roasting room is overwhelmed by an indescribably warm waft of spices and the deepest, richest coffee aroma you can imagine. These large black beans have a polished, almost oily caste to them, and the wonderful aroma lingers like an exotic perfume scent on your clothes and hands.

Myers scoops up a handful of hot beans. "That dark oily sheen will dry off the surface of the bean in about a half hour." He says.  "Then the beans can be bagged and vacuum sealed and shipped out." Myers is clearly in one of his favorite places on the planet. 

The company's customer base is small and growing and Myers takes good care of the coffee products he ships out. There is a very successful stock broker in Harrisburg, for example, who has Myers send out a pound of his fresh-roasted beans to all the broker's clients, every week. 

"What a great idea." Myers smiles. "His clients are my clients too, they certainly appreciate him, and they love my coffee." 

Myers says he avoids blends and trendy flavors.  "I don't do blends because it's just a way of diluting the quality beans, and I don't do a lot of flavored kinds of coffee either," he says. "We've got a few that I personally like, but we stick to the basics -- quality beans fresh from the world's latest harvests, roasted, bagged and shipped to the customer in a very timely fashion." 

The roasting process transforms the chemical and physical properties of green coffee beans into roasted full bodied coffee products. It causes the green bean to expand and change in color, taste, smell and density. The vast majority of coffees are roasted commercially on a large scale, but real coffee connoisseurs demand the small batch roasting to control freshness and the flavor profile of the beans. They're demanding but willing to pay a higher price for the quality. Most Wellsville Coffee Company small batch roasted beans average $10 a pound to the consumer.

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