Noble Coffee Roasting: All Heart

Worm has been revamped. You seem to like it. Now we’re sweetening the pot with guest beans from Noble Coffee Roasting, out of Ashland, Oregon. You will like these beans greatly, yes, you will.

As you know, we have a proclivity toward NOTES. Our guest roaster program managers, Otter and Canaan, have taken this to the extreme when utilizing these notes of which we speak to decide upon and most fruitfully interact with our guest roasters. In the case of Noble Coffee, this was appreciated.

“Otter and Canaan sent us descriptions that were spot-on, exactly the way we feel about those coffees,” says Noble’s founder, Jared Rennie. “We appreciate obviously legit coffee people tasting our coffees and appreciating them, I just want to say that.”

Oregon & A Beautiful Rogue

First off, the Noble folks are situated in the Rogue Valley, “a really beautiful place to live, a little gem,” says Rennie.

Before he founded Noble, but already in the coffee business, he had offers to work for various other companies, but “the hallmark of our company is that we really, really love where we live a lot,” he says. “Sure, we could have a bigger company in a larger area, but this place is so beautiful and it’s home base.” By the way: Rennie went to high school and college in the Rogue Valley. It’s home.

It’s also a much-visited tourist town and plays host to the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Noble lives and breathes in a main coffee house and roasterie (opened in 2009), and also slings beans from a “walk-in closet-sized” coffee bar serving espresso and chemex pours. They also do their thing weekly during the summertime at the local farmer’s market.

The. Core. Philosophy.

From there, it’s about the coffee. “We are the only coffee company in the world that blends the level of quality we do with the dedication to sustainability we have,” says Rennie, noting it can be the high-end kind of difficult to reconcile the two. He explains:

“One of my majors was international studies and I spent a lot of time in Latin America and have seen the way societies are affected by doing business with the United States and Europe,” says Rennie. “When I visit farms, I care about how what we are doing as a company affects not just the well-to-do folks, because in South America there is a small and powerful upper class, and one of the reasons I started the company was to make sure those folks at the lower levels are increasingly doing better.

“[I’ve] been a judge for the Cup of Excellence in Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Columbia; I’ve visited farms in Panama, Costa Rica and all the places I’ve just mentioned, and every time you go, you can figure out who the big dogs are, who are the people who care about quality social change, who just cares about quality, and who cares about both,” says Rennie. “I’ll be on a bus with coffee buyers from all over the world and they’ll say, ‘What a nice guy!’, and I want to say, ‘He’s also married to the daughter of the ex-president.’ The point is a lot of folks in specialty coffee are buying from people that are already really, really well off.

“What also happens is that those sorts of people are established and also conservative and kind of mechanized,” Rennie says, and focuses in on his subject. “What we know is that coffee is the number-two most chemically laden crop in the world that we consumer. Cotton is number one.”

Rennie and his team work to look deeper into situations and make decisions based on those facts. “We like to research and get into the entire situation,” he says. “Are there other animals on the farm or are they just mono-cropping coffee? How is the coffee itself being treated? Are the owners of the farm living a decent life? How are the pickers being treated? If it’s seasonal labor, where are they sleeping and what’s it look like? Their compensation? We want to find fantastic coffees and compensate the farmers accordingly, but it’s not just about compensation,” continues Rennie.

“This all happens once we’ve deciphered that the coffee is amazing,” he says, his voice becoming even more animated. “Number one, it has to be blow-your-mind, awesome, awesome coffee.

“It’s not true that it’s hard to find great coffee. [You] get out there, figure out who to talk to, and [there is] awesome coffee everywhere,” says Rennie. “The tricky part is to find awesome coffee, with a good story behind it, that’s sustainably produced.”

Obviously, what Rennie is talking about doing is harder than he makes it sound. There are reasons why. He was a high school Spanish teacher for eight years (his wife, Carolyn, is too). He judged his first Cup of Excellence in 2008 in Nicaragua, was on a large panel of experts and was the only one who spoke Spanish. He ended working as a go-between for multiple roasters striking deals with producers. People noticed and he got offers to work for top companies that were much appreciated, but Rennie knew Noble was his destiny.

Noble History & How It Works

Rennie begat Noble Coffee Roasting in his garage in 2007. He bought a Probat, started roasting coffees and giving them away, then got busy with wholesale accounts and residential coffee delivery before going through the aforementioned expansion into the current space.

Everyone on the relatively small staff at Noble can handle almost any position within the company at a moment’s notice. “We all do everything, right? I’m a barista, I work the bar, I roast, I cup.

“We don’t hire roasters, we hire bar backs, train them to be baristas and when they’re great baristas, we consider teaching them how to roast. Everyone here is multi-skilled, which is really cool,” says Rennie, noting that with such dedication comes a fair bit of pain. “We are so dedicated to these ideals, the core values I’ve set for the company (quality, service, sustainability), it’s unending,” he says. “It’s about uncompromising quality and dedication to service for our customers, employees, suppliers.

“It’s an unending quest,” he says, a noble one we think. Also, Noble Coffee is about gratitude: “My wife, Carolyn…this company wouldn’t exist without her,” says Rennie. “When I was teaching and had this dream, she was the one that said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s give it a go.’ She’s very supportive.

“Also, big props to Caleb Peterson, our wholesale manager, fantastic barista, and all-around good guy,” says Rennie. “Reed Bentley is doing most of our roasting now, is a fantastic barista and a wonderful roaster.

“Peter McCarville is our retail manager and he’s somebody I couldn’t live without. Also, Marjie Gosling, our director of sales. She’s the reason we have this relationship with Wormhole Coffee,” says Rennie. “She’s also a fantastic barista, has baked for us at times and generally does a lot of stuff.

“We have five key people and three of them know how to roast, and we’re all tasting coffees at the bar, checking the roasting–whatever it takes.”

And that’s what it comes down to, whatever it takes. Come try Noble’s beans at Wormhole Coffee all through this month of March in the year 2012.

Noble Coffee Roasting: award-winning coffee!