An Interview with Roaster Hannah Layton
Hannah roasts on a 12kg US Roaster Corp roaster, made right here in OKC!
Working in a cafe, it’s easy to get a little tunnel-vision when thinking about coffee or the industry as a whole. That’s why we’re grateful for the partnership we have with our friends at KLLR Coffee. We love having a team of coffee professionals just up the road focused on roasting incredible coffees and resourcing us with coffee supplies and keeping our equipment in peak performance. More than that, we love getting to chat with them about what interests them in the industry!
We got to hear from KLLR’s Director of Coffee, Hannah Layton and chat about how roasting and buying green coffee affects how we think about the coffees we work with!
Thank you so much for being willing to chat with us, can you introduce yourself to our friends?
Hiya, I’m the Director of Coffee for KLLR. I’ve been with KLLR since we launched in 2017, and I’ve been in the industry for 16 years, mainly in cafes in some form of leadership. 5 years ago, I started to push to transition into roasting and green buying because I felt I had hit the ceiling of where my career could take me in the Oklahoma coffee industry and I wanted to continue my own education. I’m always pushing for forward movement and continued learning, which can be both a gift and a curse.
What’s the best or most interesting coffee you’ve ever tasted?
Sensory memories are very strong, and I’ll never forget an espresso I had from SOPACDI in the DR Congo many years ago that Elemental Coffee roasted. It tasted like chocolate milk and fresh lavender. I had never tasted an espresso that was so creamy and sweet while being so intensely floral.
From a cafe setting, it can be easy to look at a coffee only from the perspective of taste or chasing down specific qualities to make quick decisions about the coffees we like, but as someone who tastes a lot of different coffees all of the time, what makes a great coffee and a coffee that KLLR would roast?
As roasters, we want to create something that will be consumed by many people with different taste preferences. There are many ways to objectively assess quality, but there is a difference between quality and ‘great coffee’ because taste is subjective. There are too many variables down the supply chain that can change the taste of a coffee, even down to how a consumer brews at home. In my humble opinion, as long as there are no significant defects in the green coffee from either growing, processing, storage/transportation that I know will make it difficult to make a good cup of coffee, we’ll consider it.
We love how consistently delicious every coffee you send our way is! How difficult is it to find so many great offerings?
Hannah cupping with one of her importers at the Specialty Coffee Expo in 2019
We are lucky to work with quality importers who truly don’t get enough credit for how easy they make green buying on us and many others. Coffee is relational on every spectrum of the supply chain. There are quite a lot of conversations between us and importers before we receive samples to roast and consider for our coffee lineup.
There’s been a lot of conversation over the last year about the price of coffee, especially coffees sold based on the Commodity Price, but at the same time some of the best coffees in the world are being sold for hundreds of dollars a pound, with last year’s Best of Panama sell for over $1000/lb. Is the quality of coffee and the price of coffee really that extreme or is something else going on here?
I can only speak from what I’ve tasted, and I’ve never tasted a $1,000/lb coffee, nor have I tasted coffee sold for hundreds per lb. I have tasted coffees on the commodity market that deserve to be considered by specialty coffee buyers and sold on the specialty market where they can be paid much more for their product. In many cases, it’s about producers having access to specialty coffee buyers. I don’t believe quality and price necessarily go hand in hand when talking about such extremes, or even when talking about lesser extremes.
As someone who's making decisions about the coffees KLLR is purchasing and working with importers on one end and cafes and restaurants on the other, what do you think about when you're working with a coffee you love?
When we receive a coffee, I am extremely respectful of it and place a high value on it because I know on the backend how much labor and skill is involved in getting that coffee here. That’s my job. I don't let anything go to waste, and I also really really don’t want to mess up roasting it. Whether or not a consumer is aware of that labor and skill it took to get that product in their hands is moot to me. The message is the same, we just want to make good coffee
It’s easy to be cynical or pessimistic about a lot of things right now, but what excites you about our industry? Where would you like to see the coffee industry in 20 years?
A lot has changed over the last month [due to COVID-19] for coffee locally and globally, to say the least. I want to say to my friends and colleagues in this industry, we are strong and resilient, we don’t accept the status quo and that’s reflected in how we live our lives, and we are incredibly generous and empathetic people. We are creative problem solvers. Coffee is relational and we’ve made lifelong friends through the work we do that have become a part of our families. We help each other, and I’ve been so inspired and humbled by the response of importers, shop owners and baristas, and consumers who constantly show compassion and want to lift each other up.
My hope for this industry is we continue to mature, listen to each other and set aside egos, continue to create solutions to problems on the supply chain so everyone wins. And, best for last, I’d love to see more diversity across the board in cafes and roasteries!
While it’s not the same coffee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo Hannah had years ago, you can try an incredible coffee from Congo coming from Mpumbi Micro Station near Kalunga in South Kivu Province. This coffee comes to us by way of SOPACDI, the same organization Hannah mentioned, which is made up of over 5,600 farmers, roughly 20 percent of whom are women. The Mpumbi Micro Station serves 60 smallholder farmers. You can purchase KLLR’s latest Small Batch here or right here at Clarity!
