D  e  s  e  r  t   E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e        January 2008

Spilling the Beans

For Las Cruces coffee roaster Bernie Digman, coffee is a calling.

By Jeff Berg

"It should be 197 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude," Bernie Digman instructs. "The temperature really makes a difference, and NEVER put a cup of coffee on a heat pad."

This is Digman's first note of advice about that chalice of coffee you are about to drink. Digman, the founder and operator of Milagro Coffee y Espresso in Las Cruces, is the first to admit that he is a coffee geek. "Really geeky," he confesses, without missing a beat and without pretense.

"Coffee geek" Bernie Digman checks the aroma of roasting beans. (Photo copyright 2007 Ken Stinnett.)

Indeed, his coffee obsession has more or less replaced Digman's other life interests, such as drumming, playing the banjo and riding his vintage motorcycle. Coffee has not, however, curtailed his experimentation with producing biodiesel fuel from cooking oil.

It would seem that "cupping," the term for those who sample coffee for a living, could be a full-time endeavor.

Digman has been completely immersed in the business for only about 10 years. But that is long enough to begin to give him a good education on how the "cherry" — he explains that a coffee bean is actually the pit of a cherry-like fruit — should be handled from start to finish.

And he's learned the importance of aroma. The small area in his store that is used for roasting is a cacophony of smells. It is here where green coffee beans from all over the globe wait to be roasted in Las Cruces' finest and only real roasting operation. Large burlap bags of different selections clutter the room, which also houses Digman's personally selected teas, along with various other important parts of his business, and his employees' personal belongings.

"Freshly roasted coffee should be treated like fine wine. It's an acquired taste," Digman says as he sips from a cup of coffee of his own making.

Digman was born in Albuquerque, grew up in Farmington and later came to Las Cruces to attend New Mexico State University. In 1972, he was drafted, but because of an obscure and little-known law, he ended up not really being drafted. Nonetheless, he did enlist with a friend under the "buddy system" and, as he puts it, "enjoyed a paid vacation in Germany" during his enlistment.

A return visit to Europe brought him some espresso experiences, which later carried over to a Laundromat business that Digman owned in Albuquerque. He bought a used coffee machine to enhance his patrons' clothes-washing experience, which eventually brought him back to Las Cruces as a full-time coffee man.

"When I came here, I realized that my retail experience was not very deep, so I hired a consultant." He still relies on a consultant at times, and points out some of the difficulties that anyone will have when trying to open a business in Doña Ana County. "Look at the average household income for Doña Ana County," Digman cautions.

He believes that selling only coffee is not something an independent business should do. He relates a story about a visit to a now-defunct coffeeshop on a busy street in Las Cruces. At one time the only such place in the city, it is now long gone, probably because it tried to make a go only on joe and, oddly, out-of-date magazines.

Digman's menu presently carries nine kinds of coffee drinks along with 13 other assorted beverages, sandwiches, smoothies, gelato (which is also made on site), a daily soup and pastries. By the time you read this, Milagro should be serving its own freshly baked goods, with a plan to serve specialty breads in the near future. Devoted bread-heads will note that it has been impossible to find REAL bread in Las Cruces since the unfortunate demise of Bountiful Bakery in mid-2007. Las Crucens' loss, however, was Digman's gain, and he has hired the master baker from Bountiful to work with him on this new project.

Digman's knowledge of all things coffee has also led him to install a special water filtering system. As he explains with a wince, the Las Cruces city water is not coffee friendly.

It has been more than 500 years, at least, since Arabians and Abyssinian people discovered the stimulant effects of coffee. The Arabs would make a form of tea from the pulp and dried leaves; the Abyssinians were a bit starker in their use, as they simply crushed and ate the coffee pulp.

It took another 600 years or so for the rumor to spread that the aroma was something to enjoy when the coffee seeds (cherries) were roasted.

Around 1500, just a short time before the invention of wireless Internet, coffee pots started making appearances in Arabian coffeehouses. It took another 100 years and thousands of miles of travel before coffee made its way to Europe. Despite appeals to ban coffee as a "Muslim drink," Pope Clement VIII in 1600 ruled that it was OK for Christians to quaff coffee. That opened the way for the first European coffeehouse, which opened in Italy in 1645, and eventually for Starbucks. In 1663, the taxation-minded English began leveling taxes on the new beverage, accompanied by the licensing of coffeeshops.

Subsequent attempts to grow coffee in France and Florida failed dismally; it can only be cultivated in more southerly climes. And it wasn't until 1900 when a German figured out how to remove, inexplicably, the caffeine from one of the world's favorite drinks.

Coffee has long been the beverage of choice for soldiers; Napoleon considered a shortage of coffee as serious as a shortage of ammunition. It is also a favorite of moviemakers: Think of how many times a character in a film will absently offer another a cup o' java when not offering a shot of booze.

Health benefits are frequently mentioned for coffee, from reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes, to cutting the likelihood of acquiring Alzheimer's, to decreasing the odds of gout in men over 40. Coffee is also a primary dietary source of boron, just in case you were worried about that. Downsides include sleep and anxiety disorders, possible risks in pregnancy from high caffeine consumption, and a negative effect on cholesterol levels from coffee brewed the French-press way.

Bernie Digman is of course as particular about where his coffee comes from as he is about the roasting and brewing process. He has used the same broker, located in southern California, for 10 years, and that broker's family has been in the business for about 100 years.

As he is explaining all of this, a slightly frantic employee hurries into the roasting area and excitedly announces, "We're out of espresso (beans) and a customer is waiting and wants to know how long it will take!?"

Not the least bit fazed, Digman reaches up to nab a burlap bag of beans to start the roasting process. "A few minutes," he answers with the air of Cup of Joe Cool.

He weighs out the appropriate amount of beans on a nearby scale, noting that everything is weighed when it comes to coffee, tamps them down slightly, and pours the beans into the hopper of the Diedrich gas-fired coffee roaster. "It's kind of like a cement mixer. It has paddles in the drum and works with convection, conduction and radiant heat."

The hopper spins the beans — no more than 25 pounds at a time in a normal situation, but only 18 pounds per batch in Las Cruces because of the altitude. Digman announces that the roasting temperature will be between 418 and 460 degrees Fahrenheit, and that the roast will take between 9.5 and 13 minutes.

The employee comes back to the roasting area to announce, with a sigh of relief, that she has located some beans, and that all is well. The same waiting customer sneaks in the back of the roasting room to gently taunt Digman about the perceived lack of product. They joke back and forth briefly before Digman continues with his description of the roasting process.

He notes that it is sort of seat-of-your-pants kind of process, but the roasting will be a blend of clues, such as knowing in your head what you want it to look like, color and aroma. To that end, there are charts on the walls of the roasting room with any number of different kinds of beans depicted and listed, along with some of their "bouquets," such as "pepper," "maple syrup," "fresh butter," "cucumber," "pipe tobacco" and "potato."

"Some roasters are all automated, and some are good and all are very sophisticated," Digman says. He hasn't gone that route yet, and seems to prefer this type of "hands-on" operation for his store. Digman has taught two former employees the ropes on how to roast coffee properly, and is currently teaching one of his store managers the method. It is an art he is not willing to train everyone to do — only those who demonstrate "the feel," so to speak, to do it properly.

"We don't keep any beans for more than 10 days," Digman adds, "so everything is dated when it comes in. It works well, and what little we have left over goes to places like El Caldito Soup Kitchen." (See the December 2007 Desert Exposure.)

If you want to get Bernie Digman to raise his eyebrows in terror, just mention the term "pre-grinding." He delivers a short lecture on that scorned process, which includes the loss of aromatics and how the resulting product will have "bitter tones." Coffee needs to be treated like wine, he reminds, and coffee has the same "language" as wine.

"This is a new crop. It probably takes three weeks to get here from where it was grown," he adds, pointing to the beans.

When it comes to his beans, Digman is not sold on the idea of organic coffee or the new rage for some stores and specialty grocers, "fair trade" coffee. As for the former, he asks how a roaster like him can truly know if the coffee is truly organic? What is the true traceability? How does one account for, among other things, the possibility that it was contaminated in shipping? How does one know that someone wasn't slipped a few bucks to have their crop "certified" organic in some distant Third World country?

He's even more dubious about "fair trade" coffee. Digman concedes that the principle behind "fair trade" is a good one: a fair price for everyone involved in the process of getting a product to a consumer. With coffee, fair trade often goes hand in hand with coffee plants that are shade grown, an idea with several benefits, mostly surrounding ecological preservation. But Digman is not convinced that the "fair trade" principle is being utilized appropriately by everyone involved, arguing it involves too much paperwork for all.

Digman watches the spinning beans go around and around in the hopper. He says, "Who wants a great dining experience followed by an $8 dessert with a three-cent cup of coffee?"

Back out in the coffeeshop, Milagro's somewhat pricier than three-cents coffee is being enjoyed by an early morning book group, students frantically working on assignments that are probably due in 10 minutes, any number of folks engaged in casual or animated conversations, a couple of artistic-minded sketchers, and even NMSU President Michael Martin, who's come in to grab a cup and a brief chat with some friends before heading off for another day of bureaucracy bashing.

Milagro always features a small exhibit of work by a local artist. Empty burlap coffee bean bags also dot the walls as decoration. The space is narrow and shaped almost like a giant ladle. Two comfy old couches are placed near the front windows, and customers need to navigate bags of coffee beans and other supplies as they head farther back into the Internet-friendly caf.

The employees are led by Beck Rosnick, the only Australian coffeeshop manager in Las Cruces, who seems to be in four places at once — waiting on customers, making drinks, taking notes, and helping to keep her co-workers upbeat and laughing. Rosnick has been working for Digman for several years, and she currently is training to be a roaster herself, a rare thing in Las Cruces.

The Arabs, one can only conclude, got it right centuries ago about the importance of coffee and the places it is served — how it can be a drink for mulling over, waking up or companionship. As an Arabic poem put it, "O coffee, thou dost dispel all cares, thou art the object of desire to the scholar."

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