intelligentsia tour

This weekend we went on a tour of the Intelligentsia coffee roasting facility. This was on the Chicago bucket list– a list that A. graciously made up of urban things to do before we say goodbye to Chicago. Because someday we may miss this urban decay of a city.

I have to admit, the tour was kind of cool. Intelligentsia is a local Chicago coffee roaster- they sell wholesale but they also have cafés (several in Chicago, and one in L.A.).

We arrived at the nondescript door of the facility and stepped inside to a lovely aroma-filled open warehouse. There are stacks of large bags full of coffeee, three huge coffee roasters, and nice natural light. Everyone got jacked up on the sample coffee available before the tour.

The coffee roasters are slick. The whole process is pretty much done by these large machines, which look like custom cars, or large versions of those beautifully colored vintage mixers/blenders that everyone has in their kitchens nowadays.

The humans are in charge of monitoring the temperature and rate of roast, and constantly checking the color of the beans - they start out green, turn yellow, orange, then dark brown (atleast the columbian roast did this.) The way the coffee roaster person handled the roaster reminded me of how a projectionist relates to his/her projector. The machine becomes your companion and you can identify every sound that comes from it as language that you've learned to interpret.

Everyone on the tour gets to take home a 1/2 pound of the coffee that was just roasted. Mmmmmmmm. Yum.

One thing A. and I discussed as we walked home, was how beneficial Intelligentsia's "direct trade" practices were as opposed to "fair trade." Apparently, by cutting out the middle man (in this case the fair trade coffee regulatory body) they are able to give farmers better prices. However there is no hard proof of this, because they are not part of the fair trade group, hence the problem. A. likened this to benefiting from a system that you're not supporting. I'm unclear on the workings of fair trade, so I'm abstaining from a position, but I'm a bit suspicious of the claims of direct trade, which must result in higher profits for the company.

Anyways, it was nice to see another part of the city and to explore a local business. As we walked back up Damen to catch the Blue Line, we marveled at all the ugly condos that are still waiting for some real estate boom to happen. When they demolished the Horner projects, developers must've thought the area would instantly become hip. For now, the area is a strange neighborhood made up of mostly cement block buildings in a "SoMa-esque" area of Chicago.