Cool Beans - Talking Coffee with Jack Coleman
1 April 2021
At The Open Art Fair we celebrate excellence in all its forms. We want the fair and all our future events to have great art but also great and careful food and drink. Here we begin an occasional series called the FoodPhiles where we dig deep into one person’s approach to food. We hope you enjoy Chapter 1.
Thomas Woodham-Smith
Thomas Woodham-Smith is an art dealer and advisor, and our Fair Director.
Jack Coleman at work.
Image courtesy of Coleman Coffee Roasters.
These days a cup of coffee isn’t just a cup of coffee, many like to take the experience to another level. It isn’t unusual to hear the taste and character of what for some is merely a ‘cup of Joe’ talked about as if it were a fine wine. In the world of coffee it is no longer rare or even peculiar to be talking about flavour ‘notes’, fruitiness, nuttiness, even strawberries and cream.
Back in the day there was instant coffee and coffee served from vast samovars in cafes. A tap at the bottom would supply endless indeterminate hot black liquid, described on the menu as coffee. This drink can still be found and it can be delicious in its way but it isn’t really coffee.
In days of yore, craftsmen served an apprenticeship. They provided master craftsmen with labourers for the cost of room and board. This time-honoured practice has nearly disappeared, and for many good reasons as exploitation was rife, but the experience of learning on the job rather than through books or classroom tuition is not without value.
Jack Coleman is a coffee bean roaster and retailer; very much a man of our times but in an inadvertent and idiosyncratic way steeped in the ancient apprenticeship tradition. He buys the beans, coaxes them to the perfect colour and then bags them up to go to shops, cafes and homes. Legend has it he got the bug for coffee at the age of 10 when he was living above the Monmouth Coffee House in Covent Garden. Shortly after he moved with his mother to the wilds of the Black Mountains where she, a founding partner of Neal’s Yard Dairy, set up a biodynamic farm, Fern Verrow. There he was immersed in the world of looking at produce in a detailed and holistic manner. Allowing the food to express itself rather than coercing it into some sort of spurious flavour. This attitude of nurturing without forcing is also relevant to Jack himself who has eschewed formal education for a life of physical, practical study where you learn by doing or making, not completing a course. Amazingly, though this journey began many years ago, Jack is only 34.
He started his money-earning life early. At 12, in Herefordshire, he was working in his local pub pulling pints. Perhaps his first watershed moment was serving his headmaster? He then returned to London aged 16 where he honed his barista skills back at Monmouth Coffee running their coffee stall in Borough market. But he did not just sell, he could not resist burrowing into the machine and fiddling with the temperature gauges and analysing the impact on the coffee taste. He took no notes, he just remembered, creating a taste album in his head. He decided to cross over from skilled server to manager/entrepreneur. I think this was not because he was particularly driven, it is more because he saw what was needed to make the ideal coffee and he wanted to do it. This is an artisan’s ambition. He wants excellence more than an empire. The timing could not have been better too, London had a burgeoning coffee scene springing from the influx of Antipodeans. Jack cites the Flat White in Berwick Street as being particularly influential.
From running the stall he moved to working with startup Fernandez and Wells and taking control of their coffee. His job title for them was one word - coffee. He then bought from a friend, who was living on a barge, a broken coffee roaster. He was offered it for free but he insisted on paying for it because he did not want the gift to become an obligation or worse he might have to give it back. The machine was an Austrian 1950s machine romantically named an Otto Swadlo V3; a classic of its age and a perfect machine to roast experimental 3 and 4 kg batches. Asking Jack what his secret is makes him cagey and guarded. He justifies himself by saying all roasters are like this. It is the big secret, the cunning mystery, how you reach your flavour goal. I guess, jokingly, that he sets the timer and turns the temperature to the right degrees and off he goes. He laughs darkly at my naïveté.
The Otto Swadlo V3.
Image courtesy of Coleman Coffee Roasters.
In 2010 he took the plunge of setting up on his own with a stall at the foodie paradise set under the arches at Spa Terminus and later he took on and sensitively restored a 1950s shop in Lower Marsh. Coleman Coffee Roasters was born.
Currently he is passing lockdown at his mother’s farm. We chat as he smokes a quantity of deftly constructed spindly cigarettes. His dog makes an occasional visit in front of the camera. His shop is shut and his cohort, the very charming Rakan, is quietly overseeing roasting in London; he is the only other one inducted into that precious secret. Business continues but business life is tough at the moment.
The choice of beans is interesting, he does not believe in Fair Trade for its own sake, he avows that food should taste ‘right’. This is the biodynamism speaking. His analogy is to cheese where he says a good full flavoured cheese won’t taste right if the animals and the workers are not being treated properly and fairly.
It has to be admitted at this stage that I drink Jack’s coffee. I have done so since 2014. I live for coffee and have invested in grinders and espresso machines. It is money well spent. As Jack puts it, the machine is the camera and the grinder is the lens. He only produces four coffees, a Brazil, a Guatemala, an Espresso blend of the previous two and a decaffeinated. His coffee for me tastes of coffee, freshly ground it offers up an intense aroma and my machine makes a thick coffee with a rich pale brown crema. I only drink the Brazilian, which is not at all bitter and when I drink it it seems to magically conjure up a feeling of ‘home’ or even ‘safe’. Jack manages to fashion a consistent flavour from bag to bag but he changes the supplier of the beans two to three times a year.
If you ask Jack if he would like to be considered as an artist or part of a lifestyle movement, he will say that you have missed the point. I initially assumed he would wax grandiloquent on the subject of his beans and his roast but actually he would rather not. He wants no fuss, no essay, no pretentiousness - he just wants coffee to be food and really delicious.
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