Steamroller Coffee
7/1 Clarke St, Earlwood NSW 2206
First objective when you move homes outside of the actual physical moving is to find your new local supplier of caffeine. On my quest through the streets of Earlwood I intended to try coffee at every café before eventually committing to my long term supplier. I walked along the main business hub on Homer Street before some sort of barista sixth sense took over and pulled off of the main road and into Clark St.
I noticed a small café neatly tucked away behind all the other shops, there was a coffee roasting machine onsite, jackpot.
Once upon a time I worked at a café. At said café I was presented with the award for “Biggest Coffee Snob”. A slight exaggeration when I recount my many polite and educational conversations with “coffee normies” but a somewhat warranted one.
I learnt a fair amount about coffee during my time in hospitality and I would try use said knowledge to determine what type of coffee I would order when out and about. I would ask baristas a simple question “what roast are your beans?” from which I would expect the answer to be either medium or dark, maybe even light. A medium roast meant I’d go for a long black, dark roast meant a cappuccino.
That’s how I imagined it in my head anyway.
Before I continue I feel like I need to make a little disclaimer. Inquiring into the roast (or roasts) that a café utilises is not a coffee snob level of curiosity, it’s not even a gateway inquiry that leads into said snobbing. It’s a simple question that I’m confident even packaging on beans bought at supermarket would contain the answer to. While the answer is simple, the information it conveys will tell you a lot about what you’re drinking, a good example would be if you ordered a hot chocolate and it was made with white chocolate, technically still a hot chocolate but a very different beverage to what you were probably expecting.
Now I asked the question concerning roasts many times and never got an answer that made me think the barista had even understood what I’d asked. Some baristas would tell me the brand of coffee, others would just shrug confused at the complex equation I had presented them with but none would ever tell me the type of roast.
Eventually I’d stop asking and just order a long black, embracing the potentially bitter taste of a dark roast knowing life was just as bitter for allowing such injustice’s to thrive in the coffee snob capital on this plane of existence.
It’s a sad situation that I think speaks volumes of coffee culture in Sydney, we all like to pride ourselves as coffee aficionado’s here but I find the majority of our ability to “appreciate” a good cup of coffee comes from our ability to recognize the aesthetically pleasing shapes found in latte art.
That would be like asking a chef at a fancy steakhouse where they source their meat from and having him point to a generic supermarket down the road. That would be like ordering a medium rare steak only to have the waiter shrug in confusion at the request. That would be like receiving a well done steak despite having your heart set on not eating burnt rubber and being happy because the chef cut it up and assembled it into a mini house, like architecture was his passion but he could never bring himself to follow his dreams.
But I digress.
I’d given up on being informed about my coffee and I find myself at Steamroller Café. There’s a coffee roasting machine, buckets of beans roasted with strategic precision, tupperware on the wall filled with single servings of single origin…nay single estate beans, a fancy cold drip coffee contraption and what I came to value most, chill staff that know their shit.
Having forgone my questionnaire long ago I order a long black with faith, for the first time in a long time. When I sip it the taste is void of dirt and overwhelming bitterness, instead there’s a complexity to it and it’s smooth.
Going through the various single estates on offer I was treated to tasting notes of chocolate, caramel, spice and fruit. All appreciated but not as much as being able to rest easy with the knowledge that my once thought to be complex equation has been overshadowed by some of the true complexities that coffee is capable of producing.
Plus it’s nice knowing my coffee stands on its own as an enjoyable beverage despite being devoid of sugar and milk.
I initially thought that simply having their own roaster made the coffee good automatically. However following chats with the baristas and one of the three owner’s James I was made privy to the true complexities of roasting your own beans or at least the complexities that they have taken into consideration from initially sourcing the beans to serving the coffee and everything in between.
Each bean from each region from different altitudes from different estates comes out unique, a different size, shape and water density. To bring each yield of beans to their optimal flavour means a separate roasting method for each yield before blending in order to achieve the desirable roast overall.
You could say that beans, water, wages, electricity, rent and such are factors that determine the value of a cup of coffee but if I’m honest the close relationship forged with the estates supplying their beans and the expertise they’ve developed which has culminated in the simplification of a complex process is something truly rare.
After years of confusing baristas with my complex equation of medium vs dark roasts my world stood completely shattered, for once I was the one out of my element and that’s value I truly appreciate, so much that my stamped loyalty cards remain uncashed and attached to the hard copy of this article.
