MudhouseCoffee.com

Kyle Jeffries

over 8 years working at the Mudhouse

Interests

Benny Goodman’s trios & Quartets

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by G. Garcia Marquez

The Large Hadron Collider

Alice Munro

Critical theory (what the hell is baudrillard all about anyway?)

The Minus 5

“Cache” M. Heneke

Riding my bike

Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee

Thelonious Monk

beer (Goose Island IPA or Mueller Beer's 'Mudhouse Stout')

Pavement (the band)

David Foster Wallace

"Singing in the Rain"

anything by Marjane Satrapi

Nels Cline (Cryptogramophone work

not Wilco)

(almost forgot) PRINCE!

'Gravity's Rainbow' (it's cult status worried me at first. but it really a fascinating book and a wild ride)

Post Archive

A little about me...

Master Coffee Roaster
7 years at Mudhouse

The scene is a bright, hot August day. A timid breeze prods the torpor, but does not dispel it. In the Mudhouse’s storefront roasterie (housed in the John O. Williams Building, a quirky one story strip of store-fronts built circa 1937 and flaunting vibrant Deco ornamentation on its façade) I sit just three feet from my Ambex YM-15 drum roaster. The bean temperature is at 371 F, the moment of “first crack.” When things really start to happen. When coffee starts to happen. The Ambex radiates heat like certain beautiful people radiate love and good nature, causing me to periodically blot beads of sweat from my brow with a paper towel. The roaster churns twenty five pounds of SHG Nicaraguan beans with a sshhuk sshhuk sshhuk, which results in a polyrhythm against the crystalline Country-Pop of the Jayhawks issuing from a boombox in the corner. The roasterie walls are, say, fifteen feet high and painted a rich terra cotta. The two massive plate glass windows that are the front of the store allow me to exchange nods with the passersby on their way to the bus station, or back to the office from lunch. Not infrequently one will poke their head into the open doorway and say, “I can smell the coffee down by Jefferson.” Two blocks east. When the wind is just right, you can smell the roaster’s exhaust at my apartment. Eight blocks south. The rich, smoky aroma does not please everyone, but it has been a fixture of Downtown for nearly eight years now. The minority of people who don’t love it at least recognize that it belongs. It is part of the vibe of this revitalized and resurgent old downtown. And it is something that I take an acute pride in furnishing to our community.

The beans are still sshhuk sshhuking in the roaster, like a heartbeat at about 100 bpm (a touch of tachycardia from too much caffeine?), and I can remember the first batch of beans I roasted solo. I have been doing this at least five days a week for over three years now and it is still a kick. The bean temp is now 438 F, and a quick peek at the trier confirms what I can smell: this batch is a beautiful Full City roast and ready to drop. The beans are crackling furiously as they spill out into the cooling bin with a billow of fragrant smoke. Of the eighteen burlap bags (“gunny sacks” to the old hippie who takes the empties off my hands) lined against the south wall I choose a Kenya AA for the next batch. What a big, gorgeous bean. Easily my preferred brew. I will roast around two thousand pounds of coffee this month. And the next month. Countless people, friends or strangers, will pop in to mention the smell. Everyone whose life takes them to Downtown regularly has likely tasted the coffee I roast here. I feel like a vital part of a community doing what I do. And while it’s technically a job, it doesn’t feel like work.