DAILY GRIND
Coffee cafe expands in new location
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Trent and Troy Yost
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
Karen Peterson
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If you’ve gone to the Dobson Creek Coffee Company on Main Street and felt a bit of anxiety at seeing an empty shop, there is no need to worry.
The Yost brothers moved their shop to the north side of town, next to Stella’s Bakery and Total Home along U.S. Highway 93.
Troy and Trent Yost are still roasting coffee beans in the shop and making gourmet cups of specialty coffee but they are doing it in a much bigger location. The shop is about three times larger than the old one.
“We’ve got more room to roast coffee and our customers can spread out,” Troy said.
Regular customer Rocky Santorno easily found his way to the new location.
“I think this is the best cappuccino in the state,” he said, adding that the gourmet coffee the brothers make compares to other high-quality coffee around the world.
The coffee beans are brought into the shop in burlap bags weighing about 130 pounds.
“We import them from nine different countries,” Troy said, explaining that each country grows a unique coffee.
Troy looked at the flavor notes for the latest batch of coffee he was roasting and said that it would have a lemon, coconut cream and pear juice type of flavor. He said the process of picking out the distinct coffee flavors is much like wine tasting.
“Anyone can give a cup of coffee a description,” he added.
As far as those interesting flavor descriptions, Trent said that they often come from the way coffee smells. The list includes lime, rose hips, peach, soil, hazelnut, chocolate, cinnamon, and hundreds more.
“It’s like when you cut a tree down and you can taste it by the way it smells,” Trent said.
When the big burlap bag of coffee is opened up, the beans are tan in color. The brothers put the beans into a large red roasting machine, and with precise temperatures, the beans turn the dark brown color that people are used to seeing.
The brothers take a handfull of beans, grind them, pour hot water over the grounds, and work through a tasting process called “cupping” to make sure the batch of coffee has a consistent flavor.
“Every bean has a different profile,” Trent said. “We grind them up in tiny portions to get an overall picture of the million beans that were roasted. We want to make sure that we’ve got the best coffee.”
A bean — called a “cherry” while it’s on the tree — can go bad in several ways including growing, picking and roasting.
“The cherries can be over ripe or under ripe,” Troy said. “Handpicked cherries are usually picked just at the right time.”
And what does high-quality coffee taste like?
“It doesn’t have any sharp edges,” Troy said. “It will have a smooth flavor.”
The brothers and their one employee mix up several kinds of drinks in the shop for their customers, from iced blended coffees to conventionally brewed coffee. They also have food items including biscotti cookies.
Fifty percent of their business comes from selling black bags of coffee containing whole roasted beans. Many drive-through coffee shops purchase the coffee beans to make Dobson Creek Coffee.
Now that the brothers have more space, they are inviting students from the high school and anyone else to participate in open mic nights, and hoping to add more food items. More information can be found on their website at https://dobsoncreekcoffee.co/index.php.
