You can smell Vista Clara from outside, even when the roaster is empty.
The aroma of coffee permeates everything around you as soon as you open the door to the unassuming Snohomish facility, tucked away in an industrial strip mall. In a front window, glossy tropical vines creep toward the ceiling. The handful of vibrant red cherries on each plant are the only giveaway to their crucial role in the coffee business.
Dave Stewart pinches one cranberry-colored fruit off a coffee plant and squeezes it delicately at the stem. Among the green pulp that shoots out are two tiny beans the same shade of pea soup.
“Here’s where the money is all at,” Stewart said. “For every coffee tree, it only yields about a pound of these each year.”
The coffee plants, of course, are not in their natural habitat, happy as they are in the sunny office window at Vista Clara Coffee Roasters. Here, in the soggy Pacific Northwest climate, it takes them about 10 months from flowers blossoming on the vines to producing these little gems of future coffee potential.
In the sunny valleys of Costa Rica, it’s more like six to eight months. But they are no less precious when they’re finally plucked, always by hand.
Stewart discards the two green beans from the coffee cherry he’s just picked — he’s got all he needs in the back, piled up in burlap sacks each containing 70-plus pounds of the finest coffee beans Nicaragua or Sumatra or Costa Rica have to offer. Instead, he pops the shiny red fruit in his mouth. Sweet in the vegetal way of a red bell pepper, it tastes nothing like the caffeinated brew to which it gives rise.
“Not saying you’d want to grow these just to eat the cherries,” Stewart said. “But they’re sure high in antioxidants. Good for you.”
Stewart has been roasting, brewing and selling coffee in Western Washington since Starbucks was no more than a twinkle in the Pike Place Market’s eye. If you’ve ever enjoyed a latte out of a red cup labeled Seattle’s Best or been grateful to stumble across a cart or a drive-thru offering a cheap caffeine fix just when you need it most, chances are you have Stewart to thank. A legacy spanning six decades and countless shots of espresso continues out of Stewart’s Snohomish roastery, and it shows no signs of slowing anytime soon.
Seattle’s best — and first
Were you a fan of Betty White’s work in the 2010s TVLand sitcom “Hot in Cleveland?” You might have Stewart to thank for that, too. In Vista Clara’s front office, a signed picture of the Hollywood legend expresses her gratitude to Vista Clara for providing delicious coffee to the show’s craft services department.
It’s all word of mouth, Stewart said, that have made his roasts beloved by both television icons and Snohomish County locals in the know. Since starting Vista Clara 16 years ago, business has primarily been in the wholesale market, supplying small coffee stands and the like with bags of beans to be ground and brewed as they see fit.
One of those long-running supply relationships, with a chain of coffee stands in Montana, bore fruit last year with a new roastery in Butte that will help meet Vista Clara’s wholesale demand and allow Stewart to pass along invaluable coffee knowledge to the next generation of roasters. He suspects he’ll never fully retire from the business, though.
But a sizable chunk of sales comes from folks simply seeking a fresh, quality brew to make in their own kitchens, Stewart said. Walk-ins often stumble into the roastery, undoubtedly lured by the delicious smoky-chocolaty-sugary scent of freshly roasted coffee, and purchase one-pound bags of Stewart’s blends to take home. At $11.50 a pound, Vista Clara is one of the more affordable options for locally roasted coffee, and those in the know invariably keep coming back for more, Stewart said.
“It’s the freshness and the consistency, for sure,” Stewart said. “You know what you’re getting here, and it’s always going to be fresh and high-quality. That’s what’s made us the best-kept open secret around here.”
If the head roaster himself is in — which he almost always is, along with his small staff — he’ll ask you how you plan to brew the blend. Drip machine? AeroPress or moka pot?
Depending on your answer, Stewart will whisk your bag of beans to the back and fine-tune the grind settings to set you up for coffee success. A finer grind for espresso makers, coarser for cold brew. You could do it yourself easily enough by guesstimation, but Stewart is a font of institutional coffee knowledge. You’re in good hands.
Stewart’s coffee empire began in 1969 with The Wet Whisker, a Coupeville ice cream shop that soon branched out to roasting coffee when his brother Jim brought back an ancient 25-pound roaster from a shop in Los Angeles. The shop eventually expanded to 12 locations around the region, including one at Pier 70 in downtown Seattle that put the brothers smack in the middle of Northwest coffee history.
At first, Wet Whisker was only selling beans roasted in-house, not serving brews themselves. The Pier 70 shop carried one home espresso machine priced at $120, a steep ask in 1970s dollars. Stewart recalls that they only ever sold two machines.
“It was completely unknown at the time unless you’d been to Italy and seen how they were doing espresso there,” Stewart said. “Seattle was only just coming around to the idea.”
The game was so new, in fact, that industry espionage wasn’t unheard of. Stewart and his brother were cleaning up the shop late one night when three faces appeared in the big front windows — the three founding partners of Starbucks, sizing up the competition.
As coffee became a bigger part of their business, the Stewart brothers changed their name to reflect the new game. At first they went classic, calling the operation Stewart Brothers Coffee — which shortly thereafter became Seattle’s Best Coffee. The original Wet Whisker on Whidbey still remains, going by the name Kapaw’s these days.
Espresso culture steadily picked up steam through the 1990s, giving rise to herds of quick-serve espresso carts flocking on downtown Seattle sidewalks under the Seattle’s Best Coffee name. That was when it really hit the mainstream, Stewart said, and the rest is history.
Before long, there was even a coffee drive-thru in small-town Snohomish. Now known as the Java House, it’s still there today.
“That was when I really knew we’d made it big,” Stewart said. “When you see loggers in their full gear stopping for an extra-shot mocha with nonfat foam on their way home from work, you know you could reach anyone.”
A modest empire
Starbucks bought out Seattle’s Best Coffee in 2003, and the brand is now owned by international conglomerate Nestle. You can buy SBC-branded coffee pods for your Keurig machine at Walmart now, and you can order a caramel macchiato on practically every other block as Starbucks has expanded worldwide. Stewart’s coffee empire has remained more modest, and he prefers it that way.
He still gets hands-on with nearly every batch of beans that goes through the roaster. Most of the roasts he developed back in the day were single-origin, providing Stewart with an immense body of knowledge on the characteristics of coffee from each growing region, how each batch can be influenced by the degree of rain received or the soil in which they grew.
These days, Vista Clara’s most popular blend is the aptly named Signature Blend. It’s carefully composed of beans from Central America and Indonesia, hewing closer to the more chocolaty side of the flavor palate than fruity. Stewart measures out five-gallon buckets of beans from each bag, one from Nicaragua or two from Sumatra, and dumps them into the gleaming red roaster.
The roasting setup occupies a room. The pale green beans will make their way from the hopper where they entered to a roasting chamber heated to 450 degrees, emerging 16 or so minutes later in shades of rich brown to black. Not too black, though — Stewart likes his blends in the medium-roast range, a relative rarity in the dark-roast-heavy Northwest coffee scene. The lighter roast allows for more complexity of flavor, Stewart said.
When they’ve reached the perfect degree of toastiness — the expert roaster can watch their progress through a small porthole into the roasting chamber, and can even take out a scoop to check them more closely — the beans will emerge into a massive roasting pan, where they’ll be turned and tossed by a spinning mechanism to rapidly cool them.
Most of Vista Clara’s roasting is done on Mondays and Tuesdays. By Wednesday and Thursday, they’ve made their way to customers.
Open a bag of the Signature Blend and you’re hit instantly by the sweet aroma of the beans’ natural oils. The fresher they are, the sweeter they smell, Stewart said. As the beans age, those oils can go rancid, lending your brew a bitter or metallic taste.
But that’s the beauty of espresso, Stewart said. It’s all personalized. You can grind your beans all at once if you’re planning to chug through pots of coffee, or you can delicately process only what you need for one expertly tailored cup. You can add milk and sugar and syrup and foam, or nothing at all. Stewart’s own go-to order is a double short, also known as two shots of espresso over just the tiniest bit of hot water, or sometimes solo.
“The shorter, the better,” Stewart said. “But I’m not here to tell you how you like your coffee.”
Sound & Summit
This article is featured in the spring issue of Sound & Summit, a supplement of The Daily Herald. Explore Snohomish and Island counties with each quarterly magazine. Each issue is $4.99. Subscribe to receive all four editions for $18 per year. Call 425-339-3200 or go to soundsummitmagazine.com for more information.
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