Sidecar Coffee Roasters Aims to Brew Passion into Cedar Valley Coffee Scene

Jed Vander Zanden talks about coffee the way some people discuss wine.

"This one has notes of berries," he said of one variety of beans. "And this one is crisp and tart."

Slurping a spoonful of freshly brewed coffee, he smacked his lips.

"You should hold it in your mouth for a moment," he said. "What's resonating? Is the body thin; is it thick? What's the mouth feel?"

For Vander Zanden, the owner of newly-opened Sidecar Coffee Roasters, these are vital questions as he seeks the perfect combinations of heat and coffee bean. His hope is to then sell those combinations, in the form of locally-roasted coffee, to the rest of the Cedar Valley.

"I think coffee can be really fun," he says. "It can be more than the thing you need to get up in the morning."

Sidecar Coffee Roasters, at 109 Washington St., is almost hidden behind Iowa Sports Supply. Vander Zanden doesn't intend it to be a retail spot, though he will occasionally be open for "drop-ins." Those hoping for a taste of what he's roasting can order from his website - still under construction - or check the Sidecar Coffee Roasters Facebook page for times to come by. He also hopes to sell to area businesses. He said the Octopus has already signed on, and the Hearst Center for the Arts plans to begin selling his coffee Dec. 12.

His biggest selling point is freshness.

"There are more flavor compounds in coffee than there are in red wine," he said. "But you wouldn't buy a $100 bottle of red wine, open it, cork it, let it sit on the counter for three months and then drink it. You shouldn't do that with coffee either."

He asserted freshly roasted coffee is best, and that it is hard for coffee to be truly fresh when it has been shipped and warehoused before sitting on a grocery store shelf, waiting to be bought.

"The minute you roast it, that clock starts ticking really fast before you lose the sweet spot," he said.

It was a quest for that sweet spot that got him into roasting his own coffee four years ago. He recently moved to Cedar Falls after his wife got a job at the University of Northern Iowa, and he said starting over in a college town seemed like the perfect chance to turn his coffee passion into a profession.

Demonstrating his trade, he set out six different cups of the same Brazilian bean, each roasted for a slightly different length of time. For those, such as this reporter, who are new to the finer points of coffee lingo, a tasting session such as this is called a cupping. For Vander Zanden, the steps and ritual of the cupping are precise.

First, he cupped his hands around his nose and each glass cup of beans, inhaling deeply. After grinding the beans, hot water was poured, a precise brewing time allotted. Next, he took a spoon and carefully scraped away the coffee grounds condensed at the top of the glass, while again inhaling deeply over each five-ounce serving of coffee.

"This is called breaking the crust," he said. "It's the first real sense of the coffee. You're tasting with your nose."

He then moved down the line with a spoon, slurping a taste of each incarnation of the brew.

"You can taste the brightness of this one over that," he said. "The brightness is the acidity, the popping on the back of the tongue."

In the end, he decided he liked the middle brew best - the medium roast. If he was going to produce a batch with this bean, he'd try to recreate that roast on the bright yellow roaster than stands in the corner.

"I love the coffee, but I also love the creativity and the process," he said. "It's really amazing how much what you put into the bean can impact the coffee."