A Small Ithaca Roastery's Award-Winning Espresso and Its Plan to Stay Nimble

Copper Horse Coffee may be among the newest roasting operations in New York State, yet that didn't keep it from claiming the America's Best Espresso title in 2015. A major reason is the experience of its head roaster. Jesse Harriott, who roasts for and co-owns Copper Horse Coffee, spoke with us about the victory at Coffee Fest in Atlanta and what he expects it to mean for the small-batch roastery in Ithaca.

Your win is impressive—congratulations. What espresso did you present?

The Enrique Torres Colombia comes from a four-hectare farm in the Tolima region, an area of Colombia that was difficult to reach in the past because of guerilla activity. It is a high-altitude, fully washed coffee with notable natural sweetness and complexity. Enrique picks ripe cherries, pulps them, ferments them for 20 hours, and then dries them mechanically. That care at every step, in my view, gave us a really superb coffee. We sourced it with help from our friends at Café Imports.

What did your competition preparation involve?

I collaborated with John Letoto in Houston. Having a genuinely talented barista who is also a roaster helps a great deal, since we both speak the same language. I needed to smooth out some edges in the coffee and build its body and mouthfeel, so we spent a few weeks making sure we had it dialed in. I would roast a batch here, mail it to Houston, he would pull shots and send feedback, and I would adjust my roast. . . . By competition time, it was a heavy, syrupy espresso shot that still retained plenty of complexity. Really, winning the Best Espresso Competition requires being good at what you do, but the key for us was preparation and practice.

You and your business partners, Kristian Woodall and Caleb Scott, launched Copper Horse Coffee less than half a year ago with help from a Kickstarter campaign. What does a win like this mean for such a young business?

When we won, I was in shock and could only give John a big hug. I came home the next week, and it didn't really change my day-to-day; I was more concerned about catching up. But it gave us some momentum. I've even shipped coffee to a customer in Sweden. It's something we can put on a bag and let people know we put in the time to win this award. It also matters a great deal to me that the win is something we can celebrate with the people who backed our Kickstarter campaign and believed in us from the beginning.

Ultimately, for me it isn't about beating the other guy. It's about the fact that we worked at it and are sharpening our skills as we grow and learn. Barista competitions, latte art competitions, roasting competitions, or any other kind—they aren't what you do every day, they operate by their own paradigms, but they make you better and inform what you do.

How do you plan to build on this success? Where do you hope to take the business?

We aren't looking to get tremendously huge. We have an online business, a retail business, and a wholesale business, and we're looking to reach a sustainable level serving markets that want small-batch coffee—people who want custom-tailored blends and specific estate coffees. That's my whole goal: to be agile and fill niches. Bigger companies feel like a cruise ship you have to turn, and that takes a lot of time. We're this zippy speedboat. That's how I envision our little roastery.