Java Journey
When Geoff Watts took a job as a barista, little did he know that brewing in his growing passion for coffee was a thirst for social justice
By John Lux
Geoff Watts has always been driven by a love of learning. First it was his fascination with German literature. Then the romance of West African drumming. And now it’s coffee.
“I’ve always been a little obsessive when I find something I really love,” said Watts, 32, green-coffee buyer for Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee. “With coffee, there’s also an element of educating our customers as you learn more. The customers return the energy you put into it.”
Watts studied German at Naperville Central High School, and his taste for its literature sent him to study in Vienna. He finished up at the University of California, Berkeley, with a double major in philosophy and German. “I came back to Chicago in the summer of 1995, fresh out of school,” Watts said. He was walking dogs, making $12 an hour. “It was quite enjoyable, working from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” but it was hardly Watts’ idea of a career.
While he didn’t know it at the time, his next job was to become his life’s work. A husband and wife named Doug Zell and Emily Mange, both then 26 years old, were opening the first Intelligentsia Coffee store at 3123 N. Broadway and were hiring baristas. “I met Doug and Emily and we hit it off right away. They had just returned from the Bay Area, too, but I hadn’t known them there,” Watts said.
Zell had given the tea business a try on the West Coast but couldn’t make a go of it. Watts said Zell attributed the failure to lack of control — too many important steps had to be outsourced. Zell was determined to do it right this time. He started with a single retail store with a small roaster and picked his staff carefully. Watts, it turns out, was a good pick.
“I was fascinated by the business. You can exercise a lot of influence over coffee. For someone interested in creativity it was a great outlet, whether you’re making drinks or roasting coffee beans.”
Watts started at the bottom, mopping floors, prepping the store to open, and then making drinks and serving customers. “Doug did all the roasting for the first five months, then he trained me and I took over the roasting.”
“The first years were really difficult,” Watts said. “Doug and Emily didn’t pay themselves. We started roasting after hours, from 11 p.m. till 6 a.m., then I’d take a short nap in the back and come out and start serving drinks. Doug and Emily and I were working 70 or 80 hours a week.”
For the first several months the team sold their coffee only in the shop on Broadway, but then some customers asked about buying the coffee for their own restaurants. “We were fortunate that one of the chefs from Charlie Trotter’s … persuaded the restaurant to take a look at Intelligentsia coffee. That opened a lot of doors to other restaurants.”
After two years, Watts realized that he was at a crossroads in his life.
“I loved what I was doing with coffee but part of me wanted to move out West again and devote more time to music,” Watts said. “Doug and Emily wanted to keep me around and offered me equity in the business. I ended up becoming a 20 percent partner. Who would have guessed?”
Watts threw himself further into the business. Single and living in Bucktown, he now travels seven months of the year. (“If I had had a wife, I wouldn’t have her any longer.”) When he’s in town he tastes 30 or 40 different coffees a day at Intelligentsia’s plant on West Fulton Street.
“You can get extremely romantic about specialty coffee, the way wine lovers feel about wine,” he said. “Drinking a great coffee is a sensory experience, and it takes a lot to impress me. Coffees I thought were great five years ago …”
He no longer spends much time on West African drumming, especially since his mentor left Chicago. “Ten years ago music was my biggest passion, but coffee is now at the forefront,” Watts said. “If you really want to do something, you want to reap all you can from it. You have to be monogamous to that thing.”
Watts’ intensity also brought him to new places as he dove deeper into the coffee business.
“It started with a passion for roasting and seeing what can be done with green coffee beans. But over time that passion shifted to working with the farmers. The question was: How can we affect the quality of these beans before they ever get to us?
“That’s when the whole world changed for us,” Watts said. “We saw that not only could we have an impact on our customers here … but at the same time have a measurable impact on the producing side, to see that the people we were working with really benefit from the business.”
The partners made their first trip abroad in 1998, to Guatemala. “That opened all of our eyes,” Watts said. “We really hadn’t known how many things happen on a farm that affect the ultimate taste of the coffee. We tasted coffee harvested on different days, coffee from different zones on the farms. We began looking at the growers not simply as suppliers, but as partners.”
Intelligentsia found one its most satisfying partners, the Las Brumas cooperative in Nicaragua, through the Cup of Excellence program, an annual competition funded mainly by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Hundreds of coffees are entered and the best go to an online auction where roasters bid against each other.
“Nicaragua has hundreds of thousands of small farmers working in anonymity,” Watts said. “All the different coffees are mixed and homogenized into bulk lots and there’s no incentive to sell your coffee based on its merits.” With Cup of Excellence, the best stand out.
Watts loved the taste of their coffee and went to visit Las Brumas, the source of Intelligentsia’s Flor Azul coffee. “It looked like a small Eden,” he said. “It’s a cloud forest, cooler than other areas. This place is off the grid and they were so pleased to be discovered. They’d been working in coffee their whole lives and were proud to explain their work.
“They live with very close to nothing. No running water, no electricity. The kids rarely went to high school. Now that they have a relationship with us, the money is much better, and in fact, the daughter of the co-op president is now going to college, the first from the community to do so.”
Making growers’ lives better is not only satisfying, but it’s also good business. “Quality will not happen in conditions where people are suffering, when they don’t have any incentive,” Watts said. “An unhappy person isn’t able to put in the energy to make good coffee.”
