- Metric Coffee
- Probat roaster at Metric Coffee
Yesterday I ran an interview with Darko Arandjelovic and Xavier Alexander of Metric Coffee in Chicago, which just won a Good Food Award, given in San Francisco to artisanal food businesses of note. On and off I spoke with them for well over an hour, and a half hour of that was devoted to Arandjelovic telling me all the twists and turns of procuring and restoring a 1960s German-made, cast-iron roaster. Today it’s their pride and glory, but for the first year they owned it, it was the nightmare of their existence, a constant source of problems that required infusions of cash they didn’t have. At first glance the story—and I didn’t even include a whole section about troubles at customs, in which the roaster was nearly auctioned out from under them—is a powerful warning against ever thinking you would want to start a business like theirs. Yet at the same time their vision for coffee roasting their way not only kept them going but attracted other true believers, too. In the end, it’s a great little saga of the lives of entrepreneurs—and it makes you want to buy a cup of their coffee, in tribute.
The guy we find to buy the machine from, it’s his grandfather—or great-grandfather—I think his great-grandfather made the company. And we’re like, oh, the last name, he finds the product in Switzerland, he ships to Germany, we have the before picture, they can rebuild it—this is the guy we want!
We had to strip it down. And, you know, it’s [been running at] 400 degrees and it’s 50 years old, those screws are not coming out easy. [The garage owner] says, oh boy, if 5 percent of those screws are coming out, you’re lucky.
I don’t know, maybe because I’ve been in construction I feel like I can make anything. So I can keep a sense that it’s funny. But I learned a lot from him about patience, he gave me patience. I’m jumpy. I’m all, let’s do this now! He’s like, but let’s do it right, steady, good energy. We never fall apart.
