Java or Gelato, It’s Tasters’ Choice

So you think you’re the king of the coffee break, a super slurper of the rich brown brew that powers so many of us through the rocky hours of morning.

Well, it’s time for you to meet Jay Isais, whose business card--not to mention his life--would be the envy of any coffee cultist. Jay Isais, it reads, Director of Coffee.

Isais, 35, drinks coffee in the morning, just like the rest of us. He drinks it when he’s on a break, he drinks it because he loves it. And then he drinks it for a living--that special sort of discriminating slurp with the peculiar name of “cupping.”

While the average American buys some 13 pounds each year, Isais buys between 4 million and 6 million pounds. So far, he figures he’s purchased 30 million or more pounds of everything from Costa Rican Tarrazu to Guatemala Antigua, from the winey Kenya to the intensely floral Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.

Isais is the arbiter of taste for the nation’s No. 2 specialty coffee retailer, a firm called Coffee People Inc., whose main brand is the mall-based Gloria Jean’s Coffee and which just merged with Irvine-based Diedrich Coffee Inc.

Coffee, says this passionate partisan when he’s had a little, “has a spiritual significance that transcends anything else, even wine.” Just think, he exhorts, about the daily morning ritual for the specialty coffee drinker who knows what he likes:

“Coffee drinkers get up in their bathrobe. They grind it. They sit in the same chair. They drink from the same mug. . . . Coffee is more meditative than a glass of wine. It prepares their spiritual being for the day.”

All that and it tastes good too.

Isais’ job is a three-part endeavor that begins with sourcing and buying--tracking down the best 0.5% or so of beans grown in so-called coffee country (the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn); ordering enough to last a year (it’s harvested once annually) and making sure his more than 300 outlets aren’t stranded in the crucial winter months when supplies are short and American appetites are strong.

“The most critical part of my job is the actual selection of the coffees,” Isais says. “If you believe that coffee can only be ruined and not made any better, if you don’t start out with the best, it’s impossible to make it the best.”

Getting those best beans involves tramping through coffee plantations and milling operations in far-flung, rugged mountain regions, of knowing the microclimates that create great coffees, the same way specific soil and climate conditions make great wines. Isais, for example, takes one long trip a year to a different country whose coffees his company specializes in.

“All of Central America has different coffees from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side,” Isais says, “and the general rule of thumb is that coffees from the Pacificside are better. That flies in the face of what people said earlier in the specialty coffee renaissance.”

When coffee began to heat up a decade or so ago, it was marketed generally by country of origin. You’re buying Colombian coffee, and it tastes like this. For the novice coffee aficionado, that made it easy to bond with and a lot less mysterious.

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Today, however, coffee drinkers are far more sophisticated, and so are most specialty retailers. What was nuance before is common today: “The premise that all Colombian coffee tastes the same is absolutely absurd,” Isais says, by way of example. “Colombia is a huge country with many microclimates and opposing crop years from one end of the country to another.”

The next part of his job is roasting the beans, which sounds simple but cuts to the heart of most specialty coffee purveyors. Berkeley-based Peet’s Coffee & Tea, for example, takes great pride in deeper roasts than most of its competition.

At Gloria Jean’s, Isais says, “the philosophy is to roast the coffee to its potential so the coffee can be exhibited and showcased, not the roast.” He figures he’s roasted more than 10 million pounds of beans, a process he views as a sort of sacred trust, a delicate “compromise.”

“We believe that if you’re going to go out and pay an extra dime a pound for a coffee that’s truly exceptional, by taking that coffee to a darker roast we’ll mute some of the delicate characteristics the coffee had in the beginning,” he says.

Tasting is actually part of both buying and roasting. Every batch of beans that makes it through the doors of the Castroville plant--and many that don’t--find their way across Isais’ discriminating palate and down the drain of his tasting room sinks.

Tasting means basically sniff, slurp and spit, and what Isais looks for in the process are characteristics of each of the beans. Gloria Jean’s, he says, buys good enough beans that he does not taste for defects.

Yes, the company flavors many of its coffees--a practice that causes purists to turn up their noses. But even those brews have to start with a foundation of good beans, Isais says.

“In our opinion, specialty coffees should not be defective,” he says. “It’s not part of the program. I know how to recognize defects, but we’re looking for clarity and purity and how that coffee embodies what our expectation is for each specific origin and region.”

Kenyan coffees, for example, are among the most acidic on Earth, a quality that enhances other flavors in the beans as well as adding brightness or sparkle.

Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, he says, “has a very creamy mouth feel, almost a buttery flavor on your tongue. The most unique thing is it’s probably the only coffee in the world with a lemon-like citrus quality to it.”

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Gary Goldstein, spokesman for the National Coffee Assn., estimates there are probably a couple of hundred men and women in America who make their living tasting coffee. Every importer, roaster and retailer, he says, needs someone to check the quality of the coffee ordered, especially in the fast-growing gourmet coffee sector.

The process, Goldstein says, is amusing. “You have two dozen little cups of coffee that you pour boiling water over, and you slurp it up through your nose,” he says. “Then you spit it out. It’s incredibly noisy and disgusting, and that’s how you know what the coffee is like in its pure form. You usually put on an apron to do it.”

Most coffee tasters earn between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, Isais figures, depending on experience and the size of the company for which they work. Experience, of course, is key, for there really is no official school to attend to learn the coffee trade. Most learn the business by doing it.

Jim Reynolds, vice president of coffee and tea at Peet’s, started roasting coffee in 1973 for Starbucks when the current behemoth had only two stores. “We didn’t know what we were doing very well,” Reynolds says. “We were learning a lot by tasting what we roasted.”

Isais’ training was in business and electronics. He got his first job in the coffee industry in 1984, when he was hired as roaster and plant manager by a family friend who started independent Hillside Coffee in Carmel Valley, Calif.

Training others--particularly the men and women who run Gloria Jean’s franchised operations--is the final component of Isais’ singular job. He runs coffee tastings and workshops that stress proper brewing and coffee care.

“Coffee is an extraordinary thing,” he muses. “It’s touched by and influences so many people. I feel it’s my responsibility to make sure people understand and appreciate that.”