Disclaimer: The Lantern’s “Best of OSU” polling was conducted via social media and should not be considered statistically representative of Ohio State’s extended student body.
It looked like a mechanic’s garage, with two large garage doors that sat open, allowing the fall breeze to waft inside — and yet, it still smelled of coffee.
A row of large trash bins lined the lofty warehouse’s interior side, but rather than garbage, each was filled to the brim with roasted coffee beans. Down the center of the warehouse was a wide aisle lined with palette upon palette of tan burlap bags, all painted with brightly colored tropical birds and stamped with the names of different countries like Guatemala, Kongo or Ethiopia.
The garage — located at 112 S. Glenwood Ave. — is the home of Stauf’s Coffee’s main roastery, where head roaster Tommy Goetz said he has been roasting coffee for the company for over 20 years.
Goetz said after graduating from Ohio State, he began looking for job opportunities and decided to work as a manager at Stauf’s in the meantime. Little did he know, the coffee company would set him on a career path he’d never want to stray from.
After working as a manager for a few years, Goetz said upper management asked if he wanted to roast coffee for a living, to which he quickly responded yes.
“I have a passion for coffee. There’s always something to learn about it, especially with what they’re doing with coffee these days,” Goetz said. “I mean, what a gift; I get to do what I love, and, actually, I don’t think I could ever leave because I’d probably go through major withdrawal.”
Even after two decades, Goetz said the job — and the coffee — never gets old.
“When they’re grinding coffee in the morning, when I come in, my mouth still salivates,” Goetz said. “It’s like one of those memory things that is just like, ‘Oh my gosh, that smells so good.’”
After his morning cup of coffee, Goetz said it’s right to work. The roasting process begins when Goetz dumps unroasted beans into the metal funnel at the top of the Probat — a large machine consisting of a coffee roaster, convection oven and dryer. Of the three Probats Stauf’s has in its facility, the machines are capable of holding 5, 12 and 40 kilograms of beans, respectively.
Goetz said one of Stauf’s most distinct qualities is the wide range of beverages it offers to customers, sourcing beans from nearly 30 different regions around the world, such as Brazil, Sumatra, Java, Guatemala, Ethiopia and more.
“If they grow coffee there, there is a chance that we have had it at one point,” Goetz said. “That is what makes us a little different from other roasteries, is that we have a large variety to choose from, which also keeps me on my toes.”
Once the beans are loaded into the Probat’s drum, or main roasting oven, Goetz said they are left to roast for between 10-20 minutes.
“It’s [a process] called pyrolysis,” Goetz said. “The beans go in at a certain temperature and they roast for a certain amount of time depending on what kind of bean it is, what we want to do with it and what’s our atmosphere like. Is it a cold, dry day or a hot, humid day? That actually affects how the coffee roasts because there’s moisture in the air, and coffee is a magnet for moisture.”
Goetz said when beans are in the Probat’s drum, their sugars, fats and proteins begin to break down, producing carbon dioxide — a process that brings the beans to what roasters call “the first crack.”
“You’ll actually hear it. It sounds like popcorn in the actual drum, and that is usually a good tell of where we are at time-wise and temperature-wise,” Goetz said. “It tells us if we need to slow down the process or if we need to hurry up the process.”
Goetz subsequently pulls and twists on a small knob, also known as a trier, on the face of the Probat. A small tube filled with a handful of coffee beans comes from the lever, which Goetz said he looks at from time to time throughout the roasting process.
“What this is showing me is what the coffee is doing in the machine,” Goetz said. “It’s so that I don’t have to stick my head in there; it just shows me a little sample of what is going down.”
Following the first crack, Goetz must make a decision. He said taking the beans out of the drum to cool immediately after the first crack results in a light roast coffee, but leaving them for longer will create a medium or dark roast coffee.
“After the first crack, after the sugars are done caramelizing, they’ll start to carbonize. What that means is they’re going to break down more and produce more carbon dioxide, and in doing so, you’re going to hear a second crack. Because the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go, it is going to shoot out of the surface of the actual bean itself,” Goetz said. “Depending again on what kind of coffee it is and what we’re doing with it, we will either kill the heat and drop it and we’re done, or we let it continue.”
Once the decision has been made and the beans are finished roasting, Goetz said he lifts the lid on the oven, causing the beans to spill out of the main drum and into the cooling tray, which rapidly chills the beans.
“Even though it is done roasting, we need to let it sit because we kind of screwed them up molecularly, so the sugars, fats and proteins have to go back together,” Goetz said. “If we drank this right now, we’d have a flat, gassy cup of coffee. It would just taste like nothing.”
After four minutes in the cooling tray, Goetz said the beans sit in the facility for at least three days before being packaged and distributed to Stauf’s retail storefronts, online customers or one of the nearly 300 wholesale accounts that purchase coffee from Stauf’s, including food-and-beverage establishments like La Chatelaine, Jackie O’s, BrewDog and more.
Emma Hunt, a barista at Stauf’s Grandview Heights location, said her work begins once the beans are delivered to the store. She said each barista is extensively trained on the types of beans and roasts the store sells in order to be able to help customers pick out the right coffee for their individual taste.
“Throughout your training when you are making pour overs, you are tasting that coffee, you’re sipping on it, just trying to pick up on flavor notes and smells and pinpoint what you can learn about them. Then, you try and match it back to the country or roast that it came from,” Hunt said. “Because we do that, we get to know each coffee bean individually, and they’re all pretty unique, so it is easy to pick apart which coffees you’re tasting, which is fun.”
Olivia Balcerzak, who worked as a Stauf’s barista from 2016 to 2021 before becoming the company’s social media manager, said the importance of learning about coffee goes beyond learning beans’ specific flavor profiles.
“I think it’s really important that we know the story behind the coffee, why we chose to get it from that location and the uniqueness that comes with it,” Balcerzak said. “I know we carry a lot of Guatemalan and Ethiopian coffee, and our roaster and our owner have gone to those farms and met those individuals, and I think the fact that they share that with us and we’re able to share that with others is really cool. It not only gives context to the coffee, but it also gives credit where credit is due, and I think that has always been really important to Stauf’s as a brand.”
Balcerzak said though Stauf’s isn’t the only Columbus coffee shop to roast its beans in Columbus, it has still become a mainstay of the city’s coffee scene — being voted the “Best Cup of Coffee” by The Lantern’s readers during 2024’s “Best of OSU” polling.
“There are a lot of really good roasteries and really good coffee shops in Columbus, so it isn’t that Stauf’s is the only one doing that in Columbus by any means. Columbus has a really good coffee scene,” Balcerzak said. “To us, the thing that is so special is the reach, which I think in part is due to how long we’ve been around and how much nostalgia is tied to different locations.”
Despite its community-oriented approach to coffee, Balcerzak said the company has expanded to allow customers to purchase coffee beans online and have them shipped across the country.
“People continue ordering our beans and getting them shipped out to Florida and California because that’s the coffee that got them through college or got them through their first kid,” Balcerzak said. “For us, being around for so many years gets you so many people who keep coming back.”
In order to keep up with the demand Stauf’s Coffee receives in Columbus and around the country, Goetz said he and his roasting partner Rich Benson roast roughly a half-ton of coffee beans every day.
“We definitely work a lot because of the amount of coffee that we have to produce,” Goetz said. “We’re kind of a staple of coffee in Columbus. We’re very consistent in what we do, and I think that’s what people appreciate about us. You know what you order from us, what you’re going to get.”
More information about Stauf’s Coffee, including hours for each location and how to place online orders, can be found on its website.
