Surj from Clovis: A Chef Roasting Armenian Coffee in the Central Valley

My mom and my grandmother both made great coffee. That is the first thing I remember. And anybody who walked into our house got a cup. You did not ask them if they wanted one, you just made it. That was hospitality in our house.

My mom used to tell us about the old custom around it. In Lebanon back then, when a young man was interested, his family came with him to the girl's family. It was a formal visit, and the coffee was part of it. If the girl put salt in his cup, he had his answer. If she put sugar in it, he had a different one. Nobody had to say anything out loud. The cup said it. She thought that was funny and she liked telling it.

My aunt Lena. She read the cups and she was the best in the family at it. Very accurate.

I cook for a living. That is the whole difference. A roaster tastes coffee against other coffee. I taste it against breakfast, and against the second cup, and against whatever I had an hour before. In a kitchen you learn quick that a thing can be impressive by itself and still be wrong on the plate. Coffee is the same.

I am not after the loudest cup. I am after the one you drink every morning for a year and don't get tired of. So I taste it like I taste a sauce. I want it to finish clean. I want it to sit right. I want to want another one.

I was chasing the cup I grew up on. Dark, but not burnt. There is a difference and I think most people have stopped expecting it. Burnt is the shortcut. You push it too far, it comes out strong, somebody says now that is real surj, and meanwhile you have buried everything underneath it.

I threw out a lot of roasts. Anything that went bitter and flat at the bottom of the cup was gone. I kept going until the last sip was as good as the first one.

More times than I want to admit. It is not a setting you just dial in and walk away. I ground it and ground it and kept taking the burr grinder finer, a little at a time, until it came out as a powder instead of grounds. That is what Armenian coffee needs. If it is not a powder it will not sit right in the jazzve and you will taste that.

The smell when it hits the water. That is the first thing and you will notice it before you taste anything. Coffee that sat in a warehouse for eight months does not do that anymore.

The second thing is the bottom of the cup. Old coffee turns on you down there. Mine doesn't, because I roasted it in Clovis last week instead of overseas last spring. So my honest answer is it tastes like coffee. Which sounds like nothing until you have been drinking the other kind for twenty years.

Two things. First that it tastes like their grandmother's. That is the job.

Second that somebody here did it for them. We have been in this country a long time and we are still buying our own coffee out of a tin that came across an ocean. I never liked that. So I roast it here. I want a family anywhere in this country to open the bag and think, finally, one of ours is making it.

The cuppings at the roastery are still going every Wednesday and Thursday at 11 and 1, and those have gotten popular. The new thing is an Armenian coffee making class at the roastery. I want to show people how to make it in the jazzve the right way. I am waiting on the weather to cool off a little and then I will put it on the schedule.