In a home near Government Street that seems to span an entire block, Joey Tipton and Johanna Warwick roast and package small batches of coffee.
As 225 Dine reports in a new feature, brown paper bags stamped with the name of their growing brand, Pickle Block Roasters, can be found at shops like Tim’s Garage and local events like White Light Night and Ogden Park Prowl.
Pickle Block Roasters does not make pickle-flavored coffee. The husband and wife micro-roasters have given their homes pickle nicknames since living in a former pickle factory years ago. Pickle Block is a nod to their current home, where their coffee-roasting pastime became a business last year.
Tipton, an independent contractor and adjunct professor at LSU, became interested in roasting in 2011. He learned about the process online back when he and Warwick, an LSU photography professor, lived in Boston.
“We would roast it and be like, ‘Oh, that tastes great!” says Warwick, referring to their earlier batches before Tipton began experimenting with different roasts. “Now, we’ll do five or six roasts for each bean and taste the different flavors based on the different temperatures. It’s more refined, knowing what we’re looking for.”
Each batch begins with a bag of green coffee beans from a wholesaler in California that specializes in farm-to-gate coffee. Similar to fair trade, farm-to-gate means the wholesaler meets with coffee farmers, chooses which farmers to work with and determines fair prices, Warwick says. Every three months, Pickle Block Roasters orders 50 pounds of one kind of bean. “Once that’s gone, we move on to another bean,” Warwick says.
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