Yost roast is toast of town
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A friend said that when the Yost family came to visit for two weeks they brought six coffeepots, three French presses and “I don’t know how many pounds of coffee.”
So it stands to reason that growing up in that family would turn Trent, 27, and Troy, 22, into coffee connoisseurs.
Though they’ve lived in the area for five years, the brothers just recently started their business. Since August 2010, they’ve been roasting coffee beans in Charlo and marketing the coffee under the name Dobson Creek Coffee Company. Rich brewed coffee scents the air in their temporary facility, with burlap bags of coffee beans sitting front and center.
The two young men bought the company, including the Dobson Creek name, a Diedrich coffee roasting machine and blend recipes from friend Eric Holdeman.
Paralyzed in an accident at age 20, Holdeman became a coffee roaster after his accident and sold the business when it became too much for him and his family. Dobson Creek ran right by Holdeman’s house in Idaho, hence the name.
“The only thing we changed was the address,” Trent explained.
Troy and Trent buy coffee imported from Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Panama, Peru, Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi, Sumatra and Tanzania. They also have a water-processed decaf Guatemalan coffee. The coffee arrives in burlap sacks on a pallet wrapped in plastic, ready to roast.
When it’s picked, coffee looks like a cherry. That “coffee cherry” is pulped, leaving two halves of coffee bean. The bean halves sort of look like miniature pecan halves.
They roast six pounds of coffee at a time, which will end up being five pounds, since one fifth of the coffee’s weight drops due to moisture loss. After the beans are weighed, they’re poured into the roaster and roasted between 16 to 18 minutes. Darker roasts spend the same amount of time in the roaster, but the heat is higher. The coffee smells like popcorn when it’s roasting, according to Troy.
When the beans “hit first crack” at 430 degrees, they crack and pop like cranberries boiling. The inner shell of the coffee bean cracks at 430 degrees, and the Yost brothers finish or “dump” a medium roast at 430 degrees.
When the roasted coffee is dumped into a cooling tray, air circulates around the beans as a rotary arm stirs and moves them.
When the coffee cools, the Yost brothers weigh and package the beans in bags with a one-way valve that keeps household air out of the precious beans. Some of blends the young men prepare are Dobson Creek or Bust, Night Rider Blend, Espesso Blend, House Blend, Logger Blend, Mountain Man Blend or Holiday Blend.
The Night Rider Blend has an interesting story behind it.
“A big man with a bushy red beard, a flat-crowned hat pulled low over his eyes,” Holdeman wrote, would knock on his door at night to buy some Night Rider Blend. His horse would be standing ground tied in the shadows. Sometimes, Holdeman wrote, he wouldn’t see the Night Rider. Instead he’d find a twenty outside and be missing two or three pounds of the blend from the bin marked Night Rider Blend.
So far the Yost brothers don’t have any night rider customers, but about 85 percent of Dobson Creek Coffee Company’s sales are mail order. They ship coffee in the distinctive black bags with old-time labels to customers who got hooked on the coffee when Holdeman owned the company as well as friends back in South Dakota and clients as far away as Georgia and California.
So far Dobson Creek Coffee Company keeps the brothers busy roasting, packaging and shipping coffee a day or two a week. The rest of the time they work with their dad, Sid, at Yost Insulation and Dry Wall.
As far as which coffee tempts these caffeine hounds, Trent said his favorite coffee is Kenyan.
“I don’t know if I have a favorite,” Troy noted. When pressed, he said coffee from Yemen is his favorite even though it’s expensive.
Dobson Creek Coffee is available locally at Stella’s, Total Home and the Ronan Café.
To order some coffee or buy an air pot, coffee grinder or Dobson Creek Coffee Company coffee mug, please email yostroast@gmail.com or call 406 261-7141.
