Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Coffee
433
Intelligentsia Roasting Works
Celebrity Roast
Chicago, Illinois
Looking back, it's hard to believe that
Americans used to drink endless cups of
coffee
with no idea
which countries had
produced the beans. That benighted era
ended in the 1990s, when a crop of gour-
met roasting operations sprang up around
America. Suddenly java junkies could rein-
vent themselves as coffee connoisseurs,
attending “cuppings” (coffee's equivalent
of a wine tasting) and using insider vocab-
ulary to describe notes, shadings, vari-
etals, and ideal degrees of roasting.
While it's easy to mock the apparatus of
coffee snobbery, boutique roasting com-
panies rescued America from the era of
percolators and freeze-dried coffee crys-
tals. The best coffee is roasted right before
it's drunk. So local roasteries import raw
beans (technically called green beans,
though they're more gray than green)—
rather than letting preroasted beans sit
around losing flavor in warehouses, cargo
holds, and docks. By shortening the time
between roasting and brewing, they sig-
nificantly heighten the coffee's flavor and
complexity.
Opened in 1995, Chicago's Intelligentsia
Roasting Works is an artisanal coffee com-
pany, selling both single-origin coffees and
their own custom blends. Intelligentsia's
peripatetic buyers source beans from cof-
fee-growing nations all over the world—
Tanzania, Nicaragua, Honduras, Kenya,
Sumatra, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil—
working as much as possible with small
estate growers rather than wholesalers.
The company now supplies many of the
Windy City's top restaurants and operates
three coffee bars in town (3123 N. Broad-
way in Lakeview, 53 W. Jackson Blvd., and
53 E. Randolph St. in the Loop), and another
in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los
Angeles (3922 Sunset Blvd.).
As the business has grown, so has the
roasting plant, and Intelligentsia now
offers small guided tours of the facility one
Saturday a month. While most of us have
seen small roasters operating in specialty
coffee stores, those are nothing like
the towering cast-iron-and-steel roasters
at work in Intelligentsia's plant—one
51-pound (23-kg) roasting machine and
two 198-pound (90-kg) numbers, each a
different bright color, all hand-crafted in
the 1950s by the same German manufac-
turer, Gothat (the Mercedes-Benzes of
coffee roasters). As you walk past, you can
hear the beans crackling away inside the
roasting drum, releasing that divine aroma
that permeates the plant. Tour admission
includes a tasting session with plenty of
fresh brewed coffee or tea, plus a half-
pound bag of roasted coffee to take
home.
1850 W. Fulton St. (
&
312/521-7962;
www.intelligentsiacoffee.com).
(
O'Hare International (18 miles/28km).
L
$$
Homewood Suites,
40 E. Grand
St., Chicago (
&
800/CALL-HOME
[800/
225-4663] or 312/644-2222; www.home
woodsuiteschicago.com). $$
Hotel Alle-
gro Chicago,
171 N. Randolph St., Chi-
cago (
&
800/643-1500
or 312/236-0123;
www.allegrochicago.com).
