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Off the Beaten Track

While seeking treatment abroad, Uncle Bean came into con-
tact with coffee roasting by chance. Considering the challenge of
employment or entrepreneurship in the near future due, he decid-
ed to learn it as a useful skill. In five years, he learned both medium
and deep roasting off and on. “Roasting coffee beans is a visual job.”
Auntie Bean stayed by his side, recording key time points of roast-
ing, and then reading them to him after he finished practice. Over
time, he depicted a memory curve in his mind about roasting time,
and understood essential skills for a roaster, namely a basic knowl-
edge of roasting techniques, the ability to manipulate equipment
with precision, and the sense to create sensory flavors.
In addition to learning techniques, Uncle Bean followed
Auntie Bean to visit many different cafes and coffee estates. Aun-
tie Bean took his hand to draw on his palm, telling him all the
details about the environment, the functional partitioning of the
space, the color of the fruit on the coffee tree... By chance, they
walked into a coffee roastery in Hamburg, Germany, where the
space was partitioned for roasting, raw bean display, coffee vend-
ing, brewing behind the bar... What they saw here became the
standard for the ideal store rooted in Uncle Bean’s heart.
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In 2009, he rented a 280 m store in Lizeqiao in Beijing’s
West Third Ring, bought a 12 kg Germany-imported PROBAT
roaster from Shanghai, and opened a store with the bar at the front
and roastery at the back, one of the very first in China. The store
is named after his English name Horst, and the concept was de-
signed as “Art of Roasting, Artisan Coffee Roasting” based on his
understanding of roasting. The store is divided into three areas,
separately for roasting, retail and tasting. Here, customers can feel
free to try roasted coffee and take home freshly roasted beans.
With his experience in international trade, Uncle Bean had the
confidence to purchase raw beans from the origin. He hoped to
change the perception of consumers that “coffee is equal to Star-
bucks and Nescafe”, but the result was not satisfactory. “Our place
is next to a wooden floor store. The four staff in their store plays
mahjong over coffee in our place every day. We make these four
cups of coffee a day.”
Although the coffee didn’t sell well, Uncle Bean knew he
couldn’t rely on his previous experience since the coffee industry
changed rapidly in the last decade. One shall never stop learning
for roasting. In 2010, he went to Malmö, Sweden, to learn light
roasting. Unlike his learning in Germany and Switzerland, he was
more in the mindset of “learning something new” this time. As
he mentions, “the medium and deep roast in Germany and Swit-
zerland are more for the local taste. They may not really under-
stand what different roast levels mean. However Scandinavian
light roasting is very innovative.” After this journey, Uncle Bean
complemented his database of roasting methods with character-
istics of each well-known coffee places in Europe.

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