In 1978 I was in theArmy ROTC and on their marathon runningteam. I was recruited not for my fighting abilityor potential to lead men into battle, but becauseI could run. We trained for and ran 26.2 mileraces around the country. One of our ritualswas to get up early in the morning before a raceand drink cup after cup of coffee….bad coffeetoo. We did it so that we’d have a better chanceof cleaning ourselves out before the three houror more commitment to the road. In hindsightit probably wasn’t the best thing for my per-formance, but remember those were back in thedays when “training” meant simply running (or riding) as many miles as youpossibly could every week.Fast forward thirty years, and maybe because of the content of the formersentence, my knees can no longer hold up to the 220 pounds I’ve become, so Iturn to riding bikes again. This is something I’d done first back in the eightiesduring a recovery period from a blown knee I’d suffered during the Chicagomarathon in 1982. I knew it as a form of exertion less traumatic on my spin-dly little legs than running.Over the years, I’ve gotten fatter and slower, and performance is no longer anissue to concern myself with. Today, it’s mainly a matter of surviving thetraining rides. So, I figured what do I have to lose from developing a snob-bish view of the coffee I consume. I’m a dark roast, drink-it-black, pre-heatthe mug please, drinker. It’s all twisted up in my mind because while thecoffee is better, more expensive certainly and righteous as all get-out,(organic, fair trade, no aphids were killed here, etc.), it still serves the samebasic purpose for me before mounting the bike for a long ride in the country.Caffeine is of course one of the active ingredients in Ex-Lax after all.This is all meant to convey to youwhy we should have a story on this fixed gear bicycle-specific website about acoffee company in the first place. The connections will get clearer as you readmore, I promise. So, while in Minneapolis I decide to SMS Admin back at FG-HQ to ask for a local assignment. He suggests that I stop by the folks at PeaceCoffee and take a look. “They’re great folks,” he says, “supported us the firstyear of the symposium.” You may remember Andy Lambert and Brad Wil-son and their colorful Peace Coffee van from the 2005 symposium.I’ve got my bike with me this week strapped to the back of the Saab. I get itoff the rack and wander around this city I lived inmany years ago. What a change! There’s suddenly arich and diverse bike culture here. When last I livedhere, I rode my clunky mountain bike from my homein south Minneapolis to my job at MPR in St. Paulabout ten miles each way every day. At that time, Iwas a quirk of nature; big yellow GoreTex-clad thingin white leather military surplus mittens making hisway across Grand Avenue in all kinds of weather.BTW: I’m still riding that same Schwinn High Sierratoday…..fixed of course.Today, there are bike riders and bike shops of allsorts at every turn. Fixed gear rides chained to street lamps and parkingmeters, single-speed contraptions zooming this way and that. I even saw aguy calmly riding a six foot tall-bike through the city streets like it was nobig deal. He looked down on me from his welded-up perch with feignedinterest. I am not that quirk of nature any longer, not here.I find the new Greenway Rail Corridor andquickly head from downtown to the Peace Coffee warehouse operation on21

Ave south. It’s a quick and smooth ride adjacent to the new light railsystem. If you’re looking for Peace Coffee though, beware. There’s no bigsign announcingthe presence ofthe company.It’s housed in amodern buildingthat I had tocircle a fewtimes beforefinding a couple of card-board signs hanging in awindow. It’s not a retailestablishment. Thebuilding itself begins totell the story of Peace Coffee before I even get in the door. The name onthe building is EcoEnterprise Center and it’s a project of the Green Institutewhose mission is "sustaining the environment and our communitiesthrough practical innovation.” The roof of the building is unusual; what’snot covered in solar panels is covered in plant material. It houses manybusinesses of like mind; foundations, community service agencies, non-profit organizations and commercial companies. All of these tenants seemto share a common vision of sustainability.To find Peace Coffee, on the other hand, I could’ve just followed my nose.Coffee is one of those smells that intoxicates even the unsuspecting amongus. I remember when I was a kid in the Bronx, I hated the thought ofdrinking coffee; didn’t touch it until my first late night cram session atcollege. But, whenever my mom opened a can of Medaglia D’Oro brandcoffee on the kitchen counter, I begged to stick my nose down in the can.The power of the olfactory sense is truly amazing!As I round the back of the building, stilllooking for a way in, I get a strong whiffof the burnt and bitter aroma of roastingcoffee beans. It comes in wafts, once sub-tle and then overwhelming. I know I’m inthe right place. The scent jogs my mem-ory of some twenty years ago, when Istopped by guitarist and songwriter Da-kota Dave Hull’s house near the WestBank neighborhood of Minneapolis for a

L stGears

Bicycles and other freewheeling ideas

Reviews and inspiration from the bicycle kingdom

Bill Palladino

Staff Writer - Fixed Gear Gallerywww.fixedgeargallery.com Blog:www.lostgears.blogspot.com Email:lostgears@gmail.com

HEAVY PEDAL—Peace Coffee Delivers

MAY

2008

WHY COFFEE? FINDING PEACE:SEEING MINNEAPOLIS:

cup of coffee. He introduced me then to the wonders of roasting your own beans on the stovetop using an old omelet pan, there’s nothing quite likeenjoying coffee while the beans were still hot from the roaster. The entire kitchen filled with acrid grayish brown smoke. When I started to cough andtears began streaming down my face Dave said, “Ah, must be about ready.” The experience, the aroma, and the taste of the coffee were unlike any-thing I’d had before, and they’re embedded in my memory.On the Friday I visit, the Peace Coffee production facility is humming withactivity; people roasting, and bagging, and shipping, and counting. Natalie Ryno, Peace Coffee’s delivery coordinatorgreets me with a big smile and gets right down to business showing me the facility. First stop is the center of theiruniverse… the big roaster. By now, many of us know what these looklike….mysterious chrome and metal contraptions designed to take raw greencoffee beans and, using hot air, roast them until they’ve reached a predeter-mined degree of dryness and color. It’s the length of the roast and the tem-perature that turns the green beans into the brownish black – sometimes oily -critters we’re used to tossing in our grinders. The degree to which you roastthe beans determines the characteristics of the final cup. Coffee aficionadoswill tell you that in the lighter roasts you taste the qualities of the beans andwhere they were grown. In the darker roasts, you taste the eccentricities ofthe roaster. The latter style we coffee snobs refer to as “burning” or “over-roasting”. It’s what America has grown to appreciate as quality coffee thanksa great deal to Starbucks. These days, however, things are changing. There is a new advent of estate growncoffees that, much like great vintage wines, bear the flavorful trademarks of the regions where they aregrown… a Terroir of sorts. This requires more of a masterful touch as the beans are transformed from green tobrown.Those who can appreciate the gentler aspects of a cup of Joe are more likely to brew a light colored fragiletemptation resembling strong tea, rather than the thick black sludge my untrained palate prefers. And theparallels to wine continue here as these exotic roasts are often described with rich prose, “Hints of berry remi-niscent of a good Sunday morning jam and the type of freshness imagined only in a mountain cloudburst.”Yeah, whatever, just don’t leave the Mr.Coffee plugged in too long and I’m all good. I’m happiest with a littlebrass pot of Turkish coffee that requires the artful application of my teeth to strain out the layer of grounds left in the bottom. Fact is, no matterwhat I think, more and more people are discovering the pleasure of the real flavors buried in coffee beans. Here in Traverse City the localthe roaster, is Ryan Seibold. He’s watching a bigbatch of coffee beans as it exits the 450 degreeroaster. He calculates the time over temperature necessaryfor each individual roast with the help of a simple spreadsheetgraphing program. Ryan is the equivalent in our analogy to thewinery’s vintner. He keeps an eye on the coffee as it morphs from a tastelesshard green pea to something so elegant and valuable that wars have been fought overit. The beans come out of the shiny beast with a loud and pleasing swish, ending up in theround tray in front. Here the beans are cooled quickly so they don’t keep cooking. Ryan stops midsentence to reach down and grab one errant black overdone bean out of the hot swirling batch. Hesays, “That’s left over from the last roast. You see those, you pull ‘em out. That could ruin a cup ofcoffee.” Mind you that was one bean out of a 40 pound batch! Ryan is ever vigilant; just the rightkind of person for this important job. Before the first batch is done cooling down, Ryan is alreadydumping several five gallon buckets of raw beans into the top of the roaster again. When the origi-nal batch reaches its cool-down temperature he then unleashes the batch into a big tub with another resounding whoosh. This cycle continuesthroughout his entire shift. (See the blog for some nice video of this process.)Also moving around the shop floor are Meagan O’Brien, Liz Wawrzonek, Anna Canning,and K

eith Tomlinson

, all busily filling orders of fresh roasted beans. I won’t bother listingtheir titles here as it seems fairly inconsequential. Everyone I saw had their hands in multi-ple aspects of the operation. In short their jobs are to take what Ryan has metamorphosedand parcel it out into smaller batches; some in loosely packed five pound bags, some invacuum sealed one pound sleeves. Each gets its proper label and is sent on it’s way to thecustomer. For a some short videos on the coffee roasting process visit the blog athttp://www.lostgears.blogspot.com. The first thing that stands out upon walking intothe production area of Peace Coffee is the tall wooden racks holding the burlap sacks ofgreen coffee beans from around the world and the plywood hoppers that help the staffmore easily access the beans. The second thing, and I stress this because it doesn’t neces-sarily have anything to do with coffee, is the prevalence of bikes everywhere. Take a lookat the photos. In almost every shot, there’s a bike somewhere in the frame, leaning, hang-ing, lying on the floor, some meant for leisure, some for labor and others simply for decora-tion. This is first-nature to these people. It’s not secondary in any way. Biking is a clearlyroaster, Higher Ground Trading, offers monthly"cupping" events. These are the exact equiva-lent to wine tastings.Standing next to Natalie, andmore significantly next to

SMELLING THE GOODS:BIKES NOT CUBICLES:

worry myself with the peculiarities of vanity any longer. I thought it worth mentioning only in the guiseof his job as a bike delivery guy. It’s got to have some healthful impact on him. I’d be interested to see theoutput of a watt meter on Josh while hauling one of the big loads. I’d imagine the results would be im-pressive. Josh is prepping to head out on a delivery run across town. He uses the company mountain bike in com-bination with a large aluminum trailer. The trailer, made by the fine folks at Bikes At Work, Inc. in Ames,Iowa, is a simple and steady behemoth. Visit them athttp://www.bikesatwork.com/. The trailer usedby Peace Coffee has two 20” wheels about midway throughits oversize aluminum frame members. This leaves some-thing of a tongue weight on the rear of the bike. I asked Joshabout that, thinking it might be a negative attribute. “No.”He said, “I need some weight there especially in the winter.It allows for more traction in the snow.” (Did he just saysnow? These are hearty people in Minnesota!) On any givenwinter day I feel I’ve accomplished something just to ride mybike the five blocks to the brew pub. Somehow I’d imaginedthis delivery process as a quaint little operation doling outsmall quantities of coffee beans to back porches around thecity, maybe a hundred pounds or so for a trip. Josh laughs asI suggest this while quietly lowering the third tub of baggedcoffee into the coffin sized trailer. I realize too late that I’m way off base.“This is a pretty light load….about 150 pounds,” he says. “A good load is more like 400 pounds at a time!” What suddenly comes to mind are theweb images of bike riders in third-world countries carrying crates and boxes and cages of chickens; serious utilitarian efforts, not a novelty at all.Along with the tubs of coffee is a clipboard with delivery locations and invoices. Josh dons his helmetand cleated shoes attaching the trailer’s Gimble to the hitch on the bike with a spring-loaded pin. Thisis on the non-drive-side rear triangle of the bike and serves to allow the trailer tongue to float andmove freely as the bike shifts and turns. (Josh’s ride is an old Bridgestone MTB donated by the firstbike delivery guy - check out the photo of the trailer carrying an entire retail coffee display!) He alsocovers the trailer with a tight-fitting red tarpaulin. Then he walks the whole thing towards the innerdoors of the warehouse easily, if awkwardly, opening the door and moving the whole contraptionthrough it. Now he mounts the bike and makes his way down a long hallway to the garage doors andexits.I catch up to him at the front of the building and togetherwe find the east-west running Greenway Corridor thatbisects the central neighborhoods of south Minneapolis. It’s an old Milwaukee Road railway right ofway with its grade some fifteen feet or so below street level. This section of the Greenway was firstopened to the public in 2000 with constant expansion and improvement in process. Old concrete rail-road bridges cross the trail every few blocks providing a beautiful repetition of structure as you lookdown the length of it. Many of the factories and warehouses along the route have been renovated intotrendy condos, or more commonly brand new condos have been built to resemble old warehouses. It’san architectural inside joke; the equivalent of tossing “salt-peanuts” into the middle of a jazz tune. Joshsays he likes using the trail for deliveries as much as possible.understood part of the culture of working here. And I guess that’s really what’s brought me here and what still holds our attention at the fixedgear gallery.Natalie coordinates the deliveries around the Twin Cities by van and by bike.It’s important to note here that the van is powered by bio-diesel. Peace Coffee presents a clear and concise messageabout the way it uses energy on several fronts; the neighborhood it chooses to reside, the building within which itoperates , the people it hires, the sources of its raw materials, the way it delivers and prepares products, and the effi-cacy of who benefits from its profits. As someone who works with businesses of all types every day, this is a rarething indeed.The bike / trailer deliveries are mainly commercial and office accounts including café’s, grocery stores, health foodstores, and the like. All bike deliveries are limited to within about a twenty mile radius of the warehouse. Nataliegoes on to say that each bike delivery person gets about two to three routes a day, making it a good workout for mostpeople. She says that the riders deal with most weather situations in the north with ease. About the only thing thatmakes them whine is the wind. “They can deal with any kind of climate, any kind of thing Mother Nature wants tothrow at them but the wind. That’s really hard to deal with.” Josh Lavelle is thin, athletic, and has a wry smile betraying a deeper and more complex sense of humor than he is want to admit. It’s that healthysort of look people get when they’re in the middle of something rich and expansive. Worry not; I’ve got far too many miles under my saddle to

RIDING THE TRAILER: