Local brew
By Bill Lascher 06/12/2008
Bourbon Tree Roasting Company
Ventura
477-0063
www.bourbontree.com
Unlike most areas of its size, it’s somewhat hard to find a good cup of coffee in Ventura County. Sure there are hundreds of coffee joints and you can’t drive a few blocks without running into a Starbucks or a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (not to mention its 30,000-square-foot roasting plant in Camarillo), or even a Peet’s here and there, but this just isn’t coffee country.
Enter Kevin McCurdy and Daniel Sullivan. The two partners launched Bourbon Tree Roasting Company in 2003 to focus on crafting and selling high-quality coffees from its Ventura headquarters.
“We love it,” Sullivan says. “It’s just a never-ending learning curve. Me and Kevin are just perfectionists, so it’s just an area we can really continue to perfect.”
Bourbon Tree is mainly a wholesale operation but it also sells its coffee to individuals from its Web site (located at www.bourbontree.com). If you don’t feel like brewing it yourself, it’s for sale in Ventura County at Full of Beans in Ojai and Ventura, Caffrodite in Ventura, Santa Paula Coffee Company, Camarillo’s Fine Sconehenge Café and Bakery and Ojai’s Garden Terrace.
I first tried Bourbon Tree’s coffee when I stopped by my mother’s law firm for a visit. We sat down for a fresh cup from her French press and I instantly noted the thick, rich taste of the coffee, contrasting it with the watery Joe I tend to find at the coffeeshops around my Downtown Ventura office. My first guess was that the coffee tasted so good simply because of the proportions and preparation chosen by my mom when she prepared the coffee, but she gave the credit to the Bourbon Tree roasts they’d been buying for a few months (instructions on properly preparing the coffee from the Web site didn’t hurt).
Bourbon Tree’s beans are no bargain, with 24 varieties ranging from $13.95 to $15.95 a pound (including shipping and handling). On the other hand, as my Mom pointed out, that’s cheaper than going to the Starbucks down the street every day for cups of inconsistent quality.
In fact, McCurdy says, even though they’re a small roaster competing against big chains like Starbucks and Coffee Bean, small coffee businesses actually have those companies to thank for expanding appreciation of coffee.
“They made people realize that there was more to coffee than their regular brands you get at the grocery store,” he says. “There’s an upside and a downside to damn near everything. The downside is Starbucks is on every street corner. The upside is they’re on every street corner (and so is Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and especially Peet’s). Each one of those expanded stuff just like Robert Mondavi or Earnest and Julio Gallo.”
References to the famed winemakers aren’t the only comparison between Bourbon Tree’s business and viticulture.
“It has so many of the same characteristics as far as cupping or tasting wine,” Sullivan said.
Every week, Bourbon Tree prepares unique batches of coffee based on customer orders and specific weather circumstances at the time of roasting. Sullivan and McCurdy pay close attention to temperature and barometric controls, making fine adjustments depending on the circumstances.
“All those kinds of things factor in,” he says. “If you try to pick a number — which a lot of roasters do — depending on what the weather is, it can make the roast go faster, so we’ve really paid attention.”
One of only two roasters in Ventura County, the company got its start after McCurdy and Sullivan befriended each other at Sullivan’s previous businesses, Cucina D’Italia and Django’s, a coffee shop on Ventura Avenue.
Sullivan wasn’t as interested in running a coffee shop as roasting his own coffee. Despite plans to start roasting at Django’s, pollution control officials warned him he could be at risk for nuisance complaints from neighbors concerned about the coffee roasting scent, so Sullivan moved on to help form Bourbon Tree, located in Ventura’s industrial area.
In doing so, he and McCurdy have committed themselves to the art and science of coffee roasting over expansive growth of their business.
“What we want to be known for and what we’ve really stuck to is we really cater to local business and fresh-roasted coffee that we roast to order,” Sullivan says. “We’ve had opportunities to go with distributors but on the downside it would sit in warehouses.”
McCurdy said even though Bourbon Tree has clients from as far away as Moab, Utah, the company works best with local clients because of the cooperation they can find doing business.
“We started trying to make local coffee for local coffee shops,” he says. “I think we do a really good job of taking care of our clients and keeping them happy and working with them on stuff.”
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