e at Speeder & Earl’s opened our doors in June of 1993. Several billion coffee beans and a couple of hundred thousand lattes later, we’re still here, roasting and brewing some of the finest coffee in the Northeast. Over the last decade we’ve expanded our business, but we still focus on quality and customer service. We roast all of our coffee in batches of less than 25 pounds and take the time to educate our customers about the subtle nuances of various different beans (there are a lot of them – we roast over 20 varietals from around the globe).
Before our coffee leaves the building, it must pass before the discerning eye of roaster and company founder Jeannie Vento. The matriarch of this family-owned-and-operated business strives to put a perfect roast on every bean, knowing that a great cup of coffee begins not only with a great bean, but a great roast. Generally speaking, very light roasts such as an American Roast are lacking in body and overwhelming in their acidity. Unfortunately, many volume roasters will roast all of their coffee this way to avoid the weight loss associated with roasting: the darker the roast, the lighter the weight of the bean. On the other end of the spectrum, very dark roasts such as the French Roast and the Italian Roast are often bitter and generally lack the complex acids that give individual coffees their unique flavors. All that being said, most specialty roasters will tell you that different coffees find their “sweet spot” at different points in the roast, although quite often this falls in the Full City range – right before the bean begins to show oil. We at Speeder & Earl’s have spent years perfecting our roasts; now if we could just perfect ourselves (grin).
