For David’s “Business Envy” series, he’s looking at careers he could have pursued if he wasn’t a radio host.
In this installment, it’s all about the perfect cup of joe. Graffeo Coffee in San Francisco has the best bean, to David’s taste. He’s speaking with Walter Haas III, the grandson of the Haas family behind the Levi Strauss & Co. brand — who purchased a majority stake in Graffeo Coffee Roasting Co. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: I thought a startup guy like you, a professional businessman, would be working on the high floor of an office tower. I went into Graffeo a couple months ago to get some beans, and there you were. What’s your day look like? I mean, like, well, what are you doing over there?
Walter Haas: So, I bought Graffeo, which is San Francisco’s oldest coffee roaster — it’s been around since 1935 — about a year and a half ago. And basically, you’ll find me doing almost every job besides roasting, because we leave that to professionals.
Brancaccio: Now, I’ve been using Graffeo’s coffee since I was a young reporter at KQED in San Francisco. Now there’s a place in Rome, Italy, that might be its peer, but in the U.S., I’ve never had a better bean to my taste. What do you think the secret is over there? There’s some kind of magic going on.
Haas: Yeah well, there definitely is a secret. And that is all coming from my predecessor, the former owner, a man named Luciano Repetto, who inherited the business from his father, but in the late ‘70s, decided to, from scratch, rebuild our roasting machine. And he invented a new roasting process called fluid bed roasting, which he had been perfecting and had perfected over the last 41 years. And so, what you’re tasting is thousands of hours of tinkering with a roasting process to make the world’s greatest coffee.
Brancaccio: I have always said about Graffeo’s, right? You go in there and you sell three things and three things alone. There’s no copies of Yanni CDs for sale. There’s no piles of New York Times, no stale scones. You just got your light, your dark, and your decaf. I mean, you gonna start selling tchotchkes and T-shirts? What’s the idea?
Haas: We have swag, but you cannot buy it. We give it away. But you bring up a great point, we do not sell anything besides beans. In fact, we don’t even sell coffee. Graffeo only sells the beans, for which we encourage you to take home and make yourself. That’s a remnant of my predecessor’s belief that you can only do so many things well, and that’s why he picked dark, light, decaf. That’s it.
Brancaccio: Now you can, in our system of capitalism, husband a brand without wanting to scale it intergalactically large. I mean, is that your sense?
Haas: Look, I think my job is part business building and part custodianship. And so, we’re taking a real old school company and giving it fresh life without losing its soul. We are never going to compromise the integrity of our roasting. And so that, in itself, limits us to some extent as to how much coffee that we can create.
Brancaccio: How do you, Walter, make your coffee? What’s your technique?
Haas: I try a lot of different ways, but my secret is anything with a metal filter that includes a French press or a moka pot, I believe, creates a more richer flavor, because you get more of the oil coming into it. And so that’s my preference for coffee.
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