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By JOEL ELLIOTT
Staff Writer 11/23/2007

Some of the first few flakes of the year are falling outside, sliding past the high, round windows of the mostly-vacant factory building. Inside, any body heat that escapes parkas and hats makes a beeline for the 20-foot ceilings, leaving the bodies that produced it shivering where they stand on the rough shop floor.

But hidden in a back room where, decades ago, CMP workers spent their days welding metal, Bolinder stoked the fire beneath his coffee roaster until it approached 400 degrees. Feeding it with maple and ash wood that he had cut himself, he feverishly checked gauges and pulled walnut-sized scoops of Guatemala Huehue Tenango coffee beans from the drum to sniff them.

He is roasting his weekly batch of coffee, but it's no ordinary coffee, he says as he tweaks his Italian-made, elk-sized roaster.

Roasting coffee with a wood-fired roaster is better, for one, because it "is traditional," he says. "A thousand years ago, coffee beans were being roasted over wood fires in Ethiopia, so this is pretty old-school."

But the biggest reason for Bolinder's preference for wood-fired roasting goes to heart of the most important aspect of coffee drinking: taste.

"Coffee has more flavor components than wine," he says.

Bolinder says the style of roasting used by most companies, especially large ones, burns the beans, so that the taste that many people associate with coffee is actually charred bean material, not the natural flavor of the coffee oil. Roasters who heat with wood fire take great care to bring the beans to the precise temperature that brings the coffee oils to the surface of the beans, stopping short of charring.

Wood smoke circulates through the roaster, coming in contact with the beans and contributing to the flavor. Taking the slogan "We burn wood, not beans," Bolinder says that the wood smoke replaces the more common, but less traditional and less desirable flavor of charred beans. Matt's Coffee is certified by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and Bolinder points with pride to the fact that wood fire cuts down on petroleum use.

Wood-fired roasters like Bolinder's Italian-made one are hardly the industry standard today. While they are more common in Europe, fewer than five percent of roasters in the United States are heated with wood, according to Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade association for the specialty coffee industry.

Rhinehart discounted the idea that a wood-fueled fire has any effect on coffee's taste, attributing the difference rather to the care that wood-fired roasters typically take to prevent scorching the coffee beans. In his opinion, using wood to fire a roaster "has no tangible benefit."

Still, he said, "I think that roasting coffee is an art and a science," he said. "And like all good crafts, it's the manifestation of the art in the hand of the artisan, and the science of that's behind the design and performance of the machine. I would never say there's only one way to roast coffee."

But Dustin Karnes, owner of Austin, Texas-based Summermoon Wood Fired Coffee, bristled at the suggestion that wood firing has no effect on taste and alleged that Rhinehart's statement was influenced by the fact that his association is dominated by more traditional coffee roasters.

(Rhinehart said his association counts at least a dozen members who use wood-fire roasters.)

"It's been challenging to go up against the established coffee makers," Karnes said of his small company. "A lot of people are intrigued by the concept and like the taste."

Here in Waterville, Bolinder is probing a niche that he thinks has gone unexplored in Maine and northern New England. Since his coffee beans have a shelf life of about two weeks, he sees his primary market area as being the state of Maine.

He is one of the first tenants in the Hathaway-Lockwood Mills-CMP compound being developed by Paul Boghossian, but it is a temporary situation. At some point as the development progresses, Boghossian said he will probably find another property somewhere in Waterville for the roaster, suggesting that a retail coffee shop featuring Bolinder's coffees would fit into his plans for the site.

"(Bolinder) has seen quite a bit of interest in the Portland area," Boghossian said. "It's an interesting niche he's trying to fill. I've had some of his product, and it's quite good."

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