Roos Roast Coffee is an independently owned coffee roasting business that has a single cafe.  They also sell at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market every Wednesday and Saturday.  They have several employees.  However, on Wednesday September 25, 2013, Brian Barch, one of the coffee roasters, was helping with sales.  He usually sells on Saturdays but he goes in on Wednesdays to see how sales are going and to try the coffee.

At their stall, Rebecca Thomas and a co-worker were selling Roos Roast coffee to customers while their boss was out on a burrito run. The bags of coffee beans were set up very orderly and precisely and each coffee had its own custom design on the front. “People will often come and they’ll get Roos Roast and Lobster Butter Love to share with their families.” said Barch about a few of their most popular coffees.

Roos Roast Coffee Works is a cafe that is located in an industrial area of Ann Arbor near Thomas’ house. That was part of Thomas’ attraction to the job. She first started in the cafe about a year and a half ago and now once in awhile gets to sell roasted beans at the market. Working at a stall at the market can be a cold, stressful, busy job: Hard customers, lots of people waiting, your hands freezing. But for Thomas it’s a fun job. “I love working market,” Thomas said. “I mean it sucks getting up at five, but it’s a lot of fun being out here getting to meet cool people.”

The roasting process is surprisingly quite short, about 15-20 minutes.  Coffee is roasted several days of the week, and multiple batches are done a day because each batch only roasts about 20 pounds of coffee at a time.  Their beans come from all around the world, primarily from equatorial area where the climate is right for growing coffee.  Most of their coffee comes from an importer called Royal Coffee.  Roos Roast Coffee tries to use mostly fair trade, organic, and very high quality coffees.  Coffee comes in 110 to 150 pound bags.  For a given order Roos Roast coffee might order nine to 24 bags depending on how busy they are.

“You can think of coffee beans kind of like varieties of apples, where each variety of coffee bean, depending on what type of coffee plant it comes from or what area it was grown in and what altitude, soil, and climate, each bean has a slightly different flavor even though they’re all coffee and so we work to blend..two or three types of coffee with flavors that compliment one another,” Barch said.

In a college town like Ann Arbor the students are a huge part of the workforce. They work in many different jobs and places that help support the community and the economy as a whole. Rebecca and Brian are good examples of this. They’re also good examples of how the Farmers Market impacts the young and old in Ann Arbor, providing jobs, a place for farmers to sell, food, culture and the chance to learn something new from the unique people every day it’s open.