Is there any anything more rousing, aromatic and inspirational than that whiff of your first cup of coffee in the morning? I sometimes go to sleep, frankly, and fantasize about my first cup of Joe that will welcome me to a new day.
But I always wondered: how does all the incredible coffee get to my kitchen table?
Sure, we all have our preferred methods of making coffee: a French press, or a percolator (my style) or a drip-coffee maker. But what about the source - and how do coffee beans become this incredible, magical pleasure that is a tradition among the current 400 billion cups consumed every single year?
Fairway Market invited me to visit their Coffee Lab, in Brooklyn, NewYork. As I quickly discovered, all that magic I enjoy every day is truly a marriage between art and science.
Benny Lanfranco grew up both in the Dominican Republic and the United States, where he lived in Queens, and can boast about parents with roots in Italy and the Dominican Republic. As a young boy, Benny was very curious, and happened to befriend another young boy -and then his entire family- who owned a coffee farm.
Little did this inquisitive young energetic boy realize his obsession with coffee in all its forms would morph into a career as a well- known coffee expert, with a cool nickname to
match: Chef Benny. “Everything about the coffee farm, fascinated
me,” said Lanfranco. “We grew up drinking coffee. After school I would go to the farm. I learned all about the coffee beans, and the process.”
Fairway has a very exacting system of who they purchase their coffee beans from, and Lanfranco is truly the gateway to all those aromatic coffee beans you smell when you peruse their large coffee department.
Before you ever get to sniff the beans - from a hearty dark roast to a lighter version, or any one of their numerous flavored beans, you can bet Lanfranco has already spent hours in his Coffee Lab, located in Brooklyn, doing everything possible via science and also his own fantastic experience - to decide which beans make the cut, and make it to your coffee pot.
His Coffee Lab is unique, since he designed it. There are no chairs, but plenty of space in a circular table that moves with Lanfranco, as he does the painstaking work of testing coffee beans, from their smell to the color to the taste, before they make that final cut to be a Fairway Coffee.
Follow our photo timeline, and the intense work involved in choosing great beans for your perfect cup of coffee.
