The Solid Grounds Coffee Company

by Carla Laureano

  Melody rubbed her hands together almost gleefully. “There is something going on there! You, what? Have feelings for him?”

  Ana buried her face in her hands, hoping that those feelings weren’t written as plainly on her face as she suspected they were. “I don’t know. You know I’ve . . . been attracted to him . . . since we met. But I haven’t acted on it because frankly, he was a bit of a dog. And I didn’t think he was serious about me anyway.”

  “But now . . . ,” Rachel prompted. “He’s come back, seems to be a changed man . . .”

  “Ana and Bryan sitting in a tree . . . K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Melody singsonged.

  Ana picked up an empty Styrofoam cup and launched it at Melody’s head. The baker dodged it, laughing.

  “There was no kissing at any point. There was maybe a little hand-holding.”

  “Ooh la la,” Rachel said.

  “No, not ooh la la. It wasn’t even like that. We were talking, we had a moment . . . he took my hand. That’s it.”

  “Even better. Sharing moments.” Rachel waggled her eyebrows until Ana shot her the Look of Death. “Okay, seriously, though. I’ve always liked Bryan. Deep down he’s a good guy with a kind heart. And from what Alex tells me, he really has gotten in touch with his faith again. You know, before Vivian, he was this committed, one-woman guy. I don’t know what she did to him, but whatever it was, it messed with his head.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or a warning,” Ana said. “It’s supposed to make me feel better that he’s been damaged by past relationships?”

  “Haven’t we all?” Melody said wryly.

  “What are you going to do?” Rachel asked.

  “What is there to do? Nothing. Regardless of what I may or may not have felt in a moment of weakness, this isn’t a relationship that would make any sense. We’re friends. You know what would happen if we got together and then broke up. It would be weird. Alex would side with Bryan, you guys would side with me, and then it would be really tense. Totally not worth it.”

  “Unless it is,” Melody said with a smile.

  Ana kneaded her temples with her fingertips, already regretting her openness. All this talk about Bryan made her head hurt, and now her friends were going to be rooting for something that should never happen. That she’d never let happen. She and Bryan would go on like they had been going on. She would just ignore the fact that every time she remembered the feel of his fingertips on her neck and shoulders, it sent a shiver through her entire body.

  Because that was not helpful at all.

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Nothing’s going to happen. I’m not going to let it happen. It’s not—he’s not—what I want.”

  Rachel held up her hands. “Okay then. We’re sorry. We just happen to love you both, and we think it’s an interesting idea, the two of you together. You know, you’re not as dissimilar as you might think.”

  “Right.”

  Melody counted off on her fingers. “You’re both fitness freaks. You’re both super-smart even though he hides it sometimes. And you both really don’t like people to crawl beneath that armor of yours to see the real person underneath. His just happens to be the life of the party and yours is . . .”

  “Unapproachable. Yeah, I know. Bryan told me.”

  “And you let him live?” Rachel asked.

  Ana shrugged. “He’s not wrong, exactly. The only difference is that he seems to think it’s a problem and I see it as an asset.”

  Rachel and Melody exchanged a glance, but Ana ignored it as she shut down her laptop and shoved it into her bag. “I feel better now that I know I haven’t forgotten anything. Melody, you’ll email me as soon as you get the final confirmation on the tables and benches?”

  Melody nodded. “Sure will. But you didn’t even touch your soup.”

  Ana paused, having completely forgotten about her lunch on the table next to her. “Any chance I can take it to go? I want to pop in and see if the coffee beans got delivered as planned.”

  Another glance exchanged, but Rachel rose. “Sure. I’ll put it in a to-go container for you.” She picked up Ana’s dishes and headed back into the kitchen.

  Ana sensed Melody looking at her, trying to broach a subject while she packed up. Finally, she just turned to her and asked, “What?”

  “I’m sorry if we made you uncomfortable. Don’t stop talking to us, okay? When you guys didn’t approve of Justin, I stopped talking to you and I missed so much. I don’t want that to happen again.”

  Ana softened. Melody looked truly worried. She gave her a quick hug. “Trust me, I’m not going to ditch you guys because you want to set me up. We’ve been through too much together. But, Mel, just let me handle this, okay? I don’t need anyone getting more involved in my love life than I am.”

  Melody laughed and squeezed her tight. “Okay, just checking.”

  Rachel came back into the room and handed over a paper bag. “Your lunch to go. Let us know how things are going over there. I’m looking forward to trying the coffee.”

  “No more than we are.” Ana gave Rachel a quick, one-armed hug. “Okay, I’m off. Check in with you later.”

  Ana strode decisively out of the bakery and to her car parked in the alley, her resolve strengthened. No matter how great they thought the idea of her and Bryan together was, their very investment proved that it was a bad idea. Not that she needed any reinforcement for that thought. Her own experience had proven as much already.

  Chapter Nineteen

  EVEN KNOWING OBJECTIVELY that four thousand pounds of green coffee beans were small potatoes—mixed metaphor intended—compared to the big coffee farms, it still came as a shock to Bryan when the truck arrived and delivered his tiny pallet to his warehouse.

  Twenty-eight bags. Only twenty-eight.

  He lugged them to the climate-controlled room he’d had built specifically for bean storage and piled them on the bottom shelf of one of the units, realizing just how unprepared he was for this venture. Yes, he’d known that he was going to have to source beans from other farms for the roastery just to break even this year. But somehow, he hadn’t realized that his own would be such a paltry yield. When he’d worked with the roaster in Oregon, they’d had row after row of shelving units, all containing beans of different varieties and origins. They must have warehoused tens of thousands of pounds at a time or more. And they churned through them at a shocking rate.

  He was still standing in the storage room, the sinking feeling in his stomach hardening into a knot, when he heard the front door chime and Ana’s voice ring out into the warehouse.

  “Bryan? Are you here?”

  “In storage,” he called.

  She strode into the room, her hard-soled shoes tapping the concrete, and then stopped short. “Where are the rest?”

  “This is it.”

  “That’s four thousand pounds?”

  Bryan nodded slowly. “Twenty-eight bags.”

  “Somehow I thought there would be more.”

  He grimaced. “So did I.”

  Ana took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, it’s still four thousand pounds that we need to sell, right? And they have a limited shelf life, so we don’t want too many. It’s okay.”

  “Are you trying to reassure me or yourself?”

  Ana threw him a wry smile. “Both, I think. I just didn’t . . .”

  “Yeah, me neither. I think I’m going to have to move up that next shipment.”

  They exchanged a glance, and as their eyes met, he felt suddenly calm. It would be okay. They were in this together. Simply knowing that he wasn’t stuck out here by himself trying to make this work eased some of the tension from his shoulders.

  “What’s next?”

  “Well, I can do a very small batch in the sample roaster, but the drum roaster won’t be fully operational until tomorrow night. Assuming nothing got damaged in the disassembly or the move.”

  “Let’s do it then.”

  “Really?”
He glanced at her. “You want to hang out?”

  “Sure. You said it doesn’t take very long in the sample roaster. How long before we can cup it?”

  “It needs to rest between eight and twenty-four hours before we grind it. So we should be able to taste it tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ve got to drink someone’s coffee tomorrow, so why shouldn’t it be yours?”

  Bryan took a deep breath, the nerves coming back. He felt like he was about to on-sight a 5.14, not roast a few grams of beans. But this was the first test of whether he’d made a good decision in buying the farm, whether the beans were of decent quality. He hadn’t been there throughout the growing season; for all he knew, something could have veered it off course from the quality he anticipated.

  Ana was still looking at him expectantly, though, so he dragged one of the bags off the shelf and onto a nearby table, then carefully opened it. He scooped out a small cup of beans and then gestured with his head for her to follow him into the cupping room.

  “Can I see those?” She reached for the cup without waiting for his answer and took a handful of beans, turning them over in her hand. “It’s hard to believe that these turn into something drinkable, isn’t it?”

  “I’d venture to say that you’ve never tasted anything like this.” He forced a grin. “I’m just hoping it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”

  She dropped the beans back into the cup and gave his arm a squeeze. “Don’t start doubting yourself now.”

  Her touch sent a blaze of heat through his arm, which he tried to suppress. She was being supportive. She wasn’t flirting. Now to talk himself into actually believing that . . .

  The jitters continued as they proceeded into the cupping room, still sparsely decorated, but more appealing than the warehouse. A long countertop sat along one side of the room, holding a sink hooked up to a reverse osmosis filter. Beside it was the sample roaster, a small but heavy steel machine with two separate barrels. The difference between roasting on one of these and on the drum roaster was like the difference between a Zippo lighter and a flamethrower, so there wasn’t much parity between the roasting times and temperatures he’d get on this machine versus the big one. This was solely to determine the quality of the beans and to find any faults in the coffee itself. This was the science, the tangible part of the process. The roasting was the art, the intangible, what would determine if his product was fantastic or just mediocre.

  “Here we go,” he said. Ana stood a few feet away, close enough to watch but far enough to stay out of his way. He fired up one barrel of the sample roaster first to heat the interior before he put in the beans. While it was heating, he carefully measured the volume of his beans on the gram scale and made a notation in his notebook. As a matter of course, he’d measure them when they came out roasted to determine the moisture loss.

  When the readout on the display showed the barrel temperature was right, he poured the beans into the hopper with a clatter and flicked the lever to drop them into the barrel. Ana hovered in the periphery, even though there wasn’t much to see. As the beans moved through the roast, the smell changing from grassy to bready to coffee-like, Bryan pulled out a little metal sample tube to observe the beans every couple of minutes, scrawling notes on his pad each time.

  Then finally, the roast was done and he lifted a lever to drop the beans into the cooling tray.

  Ana edged closer as he stirred the beans with a wooden spoon. “Those smell amazing. This is, what, a bit past a city roast? That was only a single crack, right?”

  He glanced back at her, surprised. “You’re right. I find that South American beans taste better at a medium roast. You get the delicate flavors of the beans without the char. African beans, for example, hold up better to darker roasting because it intensifies and complements the flavors.”

  “Twenty-four hours, huh?”

  “Or eight. Depending on whether you want to come back at midnight.”

  “I don’t have anything planned.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” He studied her face, trying to determine if the usual straightforward Ana had chosen this moment to become a jokester. “You want to drink coffee that late?”

  “Now that you put it that way, I’m second-guessing the idea. But yeah. I’m not going to sleep until I know how this turned out, if the beans are any good.” Ana looked suddenly uncertain. “Unless of course you don’t want to come back.”

  “Oh, no, I’m going to be here the rest of the day. I’ve still got things to set up in the office and warehouse before the installer gets here tomorrow to put in the roaster.”

  “I’ve got things I can work on at home then,” Ana said, sending a flood of disappointment through him. What, was he expecting her to hang out with him for the next eight hours? “I’ll be back here about eleven thirty.”

  “You really don’t have to. As soon as they cool, I’m going to package them up. Eight hours or twenty doesn’t make much difference in that case.”

  “I want to.” She smiled. “I’ll see you later tonight.”

  Bryan watched Ana turn and go without a backward look, then absentmindedly reached for one of the roasted coffee beans and popped it into his mouth. It tasted good, but chewing on beans wasn’t the best indication of their quality. Still, the taste and maybe the caffeine gave him a little boost of confidence.

  He knew how to do this. He’d spent two months doing nothing but roasting coffee, after all. His farmworkers were experienced, the soil was good, and the climate had been favorable. There was no reason why this venture couldn’t be successful. Whether it would be as successful as his climbing career was uncertain, but all the signs pointed to good outcomes.

  Now it just remained to be seen if his confidence was proven out.

  * * *

  It was a stupid impulse that had made Ana agree to return to the roastery, but it was her word that actually had her climbing into her SUV and driving back for the grand reveal. She hadn’t been able to help herself. Once again, Bryan’s confident, jovial mask had dropped to show her just how uncertain he was about this whole venture. He needed the moral support. This was his redemption, his chance to show his family and friends that he could be more than the climber who got by on his muscles and his gregarious personality to do something stable, something of value.

  She got that far more than she’d like to admit.

  When she pulled up in front of the roastery, all lights were blazing, but the front door was locked. She rapped on the window with her car key, bringing Bryan running immediately from the back. He was dressed in different clothes, which told her at least he’d managed to get out of the shop for a little while, maybe to work out. Had she not killed herself with two sequential classes at the gym this morning, she might have done the same thing.

  “Showtime,” Bryan said brightly, flipping the lock again once she was inside. He worked a key off his key ring and handed it to her. “Here. I keep forgetting to give you a copy.”

  “Thanks.” She clipped the key onto her ring and then took a deep breath. “Are we ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be. Time to validate or crush all my hopes and dreams.”

  “No pressure, though.”

  He grinned. “None at all. Come on. I’m all set up.”

  And he was. He had the beans in a small vacuum-sealed bag, waiting on the countertop next to an expensive burr grinder like the high-end coffee shops used, along with the scale and an electric kettle. He flipped on the switch to get the water boiling and then immediately cut open the bag with a box knife.

  “This makes it easy to boil water for coffee,” he said, and Ana got the feeling he was just trying to fill the quiet. “I like to brew mine at 202, and water boils at 202 here, so there’s no testing temperatures or waiting. Straight out of the kettle makes a good cup.”

  She nodded, because there wasn’t much she could say once he turned on the grinder and its high-pitched buzz filled the room. He tapped the machine to get the rest of the gro
unds out and leveled them in the collection. Then he set one glass cup, followed by the other, on the scale to measure the precise amount of coffee in grams, then poured water from the kettle to the same weight. He clicked on a timer with a beep.

  “We’ll test at exactly nine minutes. And then we’ll repeat the process at a different grind, possibly, depending on the extraction.”

  Ana threw him a sidelong glance. “So basically what you’re telling me is that roasting and making coffee is best done in a lab.”

  “The perfect cup? Pretty much. But by fine-tuning our brewing process, we’ll know exactly how good the beans can be and then offer suggestions to our customers on how to best use them.” He looked momentarily abashed. “Obviously this has to be repeated on the big roaster. For now we’re just looking for general bean characteristics and faults.”

  “Which are?”

  “Harsh or off flavors mainly, faults from the growing or fermentation process. You can save some lower-quality beans by roasting them dark, which also can give you more consistency across suppliers, but at that point, you’re really tasting the roast itself and not the beans.”

  “So even if they’re bad, we can still use them by roasting dark?”

  He grimaced. “Worst-case scenario. Roasting a Colombian past full-city is tantamount to sacrilege.”

  “Noted. I don’t want to be struck by lightning over coffee beans.”

  Bryan cracked a bare smile, but she could tell his mind was still on the coffee. At the four-minute mark, he used a spoon to break the crust on top of each cup and removed the grounds and foam. He gestured for Ana to bend close to inhale the aroma.

  “Smells amazing,” she said, breathing deeply. “How much longer until we can taste?”

  He glanced at the timer, then clicked it off. “Five more minutes.”

  “That’s forever.”

  “Patience is a virtue.”

  “Not at midnight, it isn’t.”