My eye is fixed to the pressure gauge as my right hand tries to move the lever that controls the flow of combustible gas as gently and precisely as possible. The problem is that the lever is astonishingly sensitive, the tiniest movements setting the needle on the gauge flickering and even bouncing as I try to hold the flow at the correct setting.
In front of me, the coffee beans – green, and looking almost like desiccated peas when we put them into the roaster – are rapidly turning dark brown, but brown enough? Am I going to end up with a cup of tasty, warming coffee or will what I produce taste like rancid old socks?
Jolanta Turowska, the head of quality and sustainability at Java Republic, is standing next to me, carefully monitoring the state of the roast. What Turowska doesn’t know about coffee – and in particular how you properly roast the raw beans into something that makes a tasty cuppa – probably isn’t worth knowing. Equally, I’m only operating the smallest roaster in the building, designed for small batches to test the quality of a shipment, and not the two massive roasters in the centre of the room, which can handle as much as 150kg of beans at a time. The one I’m using, which looks almost like the boiler of a scale model railway locomotive, can handle one kilo, or thereabouts.
Even Java Republic’s big roasters represent only a pinprick in the vast global coffee industry. The popularity of a bought cup of coffee (latte, espresso, Americano, cappuccino, whatever you’re having yourself) has exploded over the past two decades. Remember a time in Ireland when choosing your coffee meant picking one of Maxwell House or Nescafé? Those days are long gone, and the coffee shop industry is worth more than €1 billion each year in Ireland alone.
There is, of course, a cost that comes with all of this, and not just the occasionally shocking price of a cup of coffee. According to research by University College London, growing and shipping a kilo of “green” coffee beans from Brazil or Vietnam triggers 15.33kg of CO2 emissions. That figure, says UCL, can be reduced dramatically by using less fertiliser, managing water and energy use more efficiently during milling and exporting the beans by cargo ship rather than by aircraft, all of which together brings the emissions down to 3.51kg per kilo of coffee.
On that basis, a single cup of espresso has a carbon footprint of between 0.06kg of CO2 to 0.28kg, and that’s without taking into account the emissions of roasting, packing, shipping, grinding, boiling and so on.
Those are the emissions that Java Republic is trying to tackle. The Irish company, now in operation for 25 years, has become familiar to many even though it only has two retail sites of its own – one at the factory, not far from Dublin Airport, and another in Dublin city centre. The proximity to the airport is pretty apt, actually – if you’ve ordered a coffee on board an Aer Lingus flight in recent years, you’ve been drinking Java Republic’s beans.
Java’s managing director Jeff Long told The Irish Times that the company has already made great strides in bringing down its CO2 levels, but equally much more needs to be done. “We didn’t wake up suddenly last year, and say, ‘let’s get cracking on this’ – our carbon reduction plan has been in place for a long time, and this building we’re in is actually carbon-neutral,” Long says.
Some of that carbon neutrality is built in, and some of it has been achieved through offsetting (a somewhat controversial process, but one that Long says is carefully monitored by EcoAct, an offsetting specialist, for its veracity), but there remains, for now, one big carbon sticking point.
“We cover about 85,000km around the country, and currently most of our fleet is diesel powered,” he says. “We have two electric vans, and two electric cars as part of our fleet so far, and currently our goal is to move to a fully-electric fleet by 2026, if the infrastructure is there, which we are currently finding a challenge. Actually, we’re finding so far that our two biggest mileage drivers are now running electric vehicles. We’re also looking at HVO [hydro-treated vegetable oil, a form of biodiesel] for some of the larger vehicles.”
Diesel for vans and cars isn’t the sticking point, though. The coffee roasters are. They run on natural gas, and right now there just isn’t an alternative to that fuel. “Hydrogen is very expensive at the moment, so it’s not a practical solution,” Long says. “There are companies that supply electric roasters, which use induction heat, but the problem is that the maximum size of those roasters, that we’ve seen so far, is only 15kg, so that’s not doable. I think hybrid roasters will come first, the ones which use a mixture of gas and induction.”
[ Here’s how the cost of your ‘expensive’ cup of coffee breaks downOpens in new window ]
The current roasters – the oldest of which is knocking on for 20 years old now – use gas both to heat and roast the coffee, and also to fire up “afterburners” which make sure that there are no localised emissions of tiny fine-grained particles in the air around the factory. The best thing to do for now, says Turowska, is to make these as efficient as they can be.
“We got together with our gas supplier, because we are not allowed to touch any of the gas equipment ourselves. So we had those guys on site for a number of weekends, trying to work out exactly how much gas we needed to roast a kilo of coffee. The spreadsheets for working that out were very complicated. We worked on both the roasting gas and the afterburner gas, and we were actually able to achieve a 32 per cent reduction in the amount of gas we were using per kilo. I was really proud of that, because we did it without any extra investment in equipment, it was just about getting the whole team involved and being smart enough to identify that we didn’t have to keep doing everything the same way. We could be better.”
Turowska said that the next CO2 reductions job is to replace the afterburners. There is new technology entering the coffee roasting industry – including a water-cooling “vortex” system – which could eventually replace gas-fired afterburners, and while Java Republic has looked into using such as system, as yet it’s too immature. Turowska is hopeful that this won’t last much longer.
According to Long, the CO2 reductions plan stretches back up the supply chain too. “We work with farmers in Colombia, for example, where a portion of each purchase that we make goes back into the industry to encourage sustainability, whether that’s with fertiliser use, crop rotation, energy use,” he says. “In Rwanda, we’re working with as many as 650 individual farms, and some of the money that we spend there goes into more efficient washing stations, patios to dry the coffee out, lots of things to make the process more efficient. And we never, ever buy coffee from reforested land.”
In the roastery, I can finally shut off the gas valve and open the little door on the roaster that allows the beans to tumble into a small bag. A combination of my dumb luck, and careful supervision by Turowska, has produced a bag of dark, rich, brown beans which, when I grind them later on at home, turn into a gorgeously tasty cup of coffee. Roasting your own might not be the most environmentally efficient manner of making a cup of Joe, but it’s better than a serving of freeze-dried.
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