The Master Roaster Retires
A career in caffeine comes to a buzz

In John Gant’s house, books about coffee are piled on tables and chairs while burlap sacks of imported green coffee beans lie on the floor like stuffed pillows. A rare Victoria Arduino 1970s pure lever espresso machine stands at attention on the kitchen counter.

Recently retired as the master roaster for Gimme! Coffee in Ithaca, John has quite possibly roasted more beans than any single living person, combining a passion and a career that spanned the globe.

His list of accomplishments speaks to a tireless commitment to the craft. He’s a member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and has crossed continents as a roasting consultant, including for the Coffee Board of India. He’s a certified Barista Trainer, Espresso Lab Trainer, Golden Cup Brew Technician; has presented at conferences for the SCAA; has conducted SCAA sessions in Advanced Cupping and Sample Roasting; has an MBA and two post-grad degrees; has written articles about preserving the place of specialty coffee, roasting, sampling, cupping and varietals; and won first place in the SCAA/Gourmet Retailer Magazine Best Practices Writing Competition.

Equally important, he has many coffee trip tales about the killer rogue elephants of Tamil Nadu, the deadly falling avocados and golden finger-gobbling fish of Kona, the spider washroom wallah of Here Huckloo, the orchids in the coffee nurseries of Malinal and the other-side-of-the-road organic robusta cherry of Orissa.

His appreciation of coffee started in Seattle back in the 1970s, when the original Starbucks was a simple hole in the wall and people in the United States were just starting to differentiate good-quality coffee brews.

While working as an attorney in San Francisco in the 1980s John became fascinated by the coffee house culture and the conversations that took place in them. He rubbed shoulders with the famous, interesting and opinionated while sipping espresso and macchiato. His primary spot, Café Malvina in North Beach, was one of the original hangouts for the beat poets and was managed by a gruff Italian named Francesco Bruno, who never gave John more than a passing glance.

This changed in 1982 when John won a raffle at Malvina’s for a free Thanksgiving turkey. The win brought him some unexpected recognition.

“That made me a legitimate person in Francesco’s eyes,” he quips.

After receiving the free bird, Francesco offered John a private tour of the Malvina coffee roasting facility, located in an old warehouse. The experience, John says, “just knocked me out and made me realize that even though the café atmosphere is vital and stimulating, there is also a bigger world behind it.”

Seduced by the smell, he worked some part-time roasting gigs in the Bay Area not knowing that roasting was about to become his new career. A law firm in Anchorage, Alaska, offered him a position and he moved north to accept it. When he realized it wasn’t the right job for him, another opportunity knocked.

“I kind of fell in with these two guys who had a coffee cart down by the visitors’ cabin,” he says. “They were planning to expand into the coffee supply business, and they went on a buying trip for a roasting machine.

“I saw a chance to become professionally involved with coffee. I was fascinated with it and it seemed more fulfilling than what I was doing at the time. So I asked them to please consider letting me [roast the coffee]. They did, and I don’t regret that decision for change in my life.”

He honed his craft with years of self-education, training and trial and error, and eventually became a roasting consultant, traveling frequently to coffee plantations to instruct others on the nuances and techniques of the craft. In a permanent move back to the lower 48 in the early 1990s, John and his wife, Alice, chose the Finger Lakes because they had enjoyed visiting the area. On somewhat of a lark, he responded to an ad for a coffee barista at an internet café in Ithaca’s Collegetown.

“John walked in with a bike messenger bag on his shoulder and whipped out his sample roaster,” recalls Kevin Cuddeback, coowner of the café at the time. “Was this guy some sort of coffee encyclopedic angel?” He hired John on the spot as a barista pulling shots, saying that John “was magnetic on bar.”

In 2000, Kevin started his own coffee house on State Street in Ithaca, asking John to join him as a barista. When John expressed interest in roasting, Kevin found a used small-batch air roaster and had it shipped in from California. John fired it up in the back room of the State Street coffee house and, as Kevin recalls, “He was off to the races.”

Kevin named his new coffee house Gimme! Coffee. It was a new kind of neighborhood artisanal roastery, and John became the master roaster who would produce Gimme!’s high quality, carefully created roasts.

The creative collaboration of these two men took Gimme! to great heights. With a successful wholesale business and coffee houses in Ithaca, Trumansburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn, Gimme! has been lauded by foodies nationwide as among the best. Food & Wine magazine recently named Gimme! one of its “Top 10 U.S. Coffee Bars,” and the New York Press said “Hands, shoulders, ears and skull above any cup of coffee we’ve ever tasted, anywhere.” Even as appreciation and demand for Gimme! coffee soared, John still considered roasting to be a small-batch artisanal skill.

Ultimately, John would also prove to be a master teacher. He became a mentor for several young roasters in the Gimme! enterprise and the values he instilled in his apprentices reflected the basic tenets of the specialty coffee movement: Good goals, good greens, good grounds.

“It is a gift to be able to impart passion,” says Kevin. “And that is a gift that John has more than anyone.”

Earlier this year, John decided to hang up his roasting apron for good, saying simply, “I think my work here is done.” He recognized that he helped build something great and was ready for a new phase of life. During his career, John roasted well over 1 million pounds of coffee, much of it in the 34 pounds per roast, quarter-bag Sivetz convection roaster at Gimme!

In announcing his retirement, Kevin (now with the title CEO) circulated a memo to all Gimme! Coffee employees, heaping praise on the man he called Professore, saying, “His expertise was the company ballast.”

The beat goes on for John, and his coffee passion remains. Still roasting at home, he reaches into a bag of greens and rubs them between his fingers to check consistency and quality. He tosses a handful of beans into the roaster on the front porch and turns it on.

The machine whirs and the green beans make a hollow clanking sound inside the metal roasting canister. The smell of warm popcorn envelops the space. Over the din of the roaster, John describes the chemical and physical transformations that take place in the beans. Starches are converted to simple sugars, which caramelize. Aromatic oils, acids and caffeine weaken and change, and the characteristic coffee aroma of the caffeol oil begins to develop. The beans puff up and make loud crackling noises as they deflate and give up their moisture. John peers through his round horn-rimmed glasses and exclaims, “Look! The world of coffee!”

Back in the kitchen, he grinds the rich dark cocoa-colored beans and pulls a shot. The cup has good crema (the cinnamon colored froth on top), the aromas are diverse and delicate and the taste is sweet, tangy and peppery with a pleasant bitterness. It is elegant and acidic, not unlike fine Champagne.

Sipping a cup while listening to the Berlin Philharmonic, John speaks about the arch of his career and the role a coffee culture in America can play.

“I have this feeling if we’re going to save ourselves we’re going to spiral upwards, not downwards,” he says. “And in coffee houses there is a spiraling up of people, together, as they search for peace and grace in the right environment.”

“And we can get jazzed on caffeine in the meantime,” he concludes.

Trent Preszler is a PhD student in horticulture at Cornell University. He once tried living without coffee, but thought better of it.