Try to hold these two images in your mind. A young Mennonite man who spends workdays with his father, Michael, installing and adjusting control panels for aerators in catfish ponds in Noxubee County.
Now picture that same young man with several friends on the streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a trendy neighborhood coffee house on say, Amsterdam Avenue or West 126th Street.
After six months of church volunteer work in that city of towering skyscrapers and unrelenting noise, after many cups of coffee in its coffeehouses, the young man, enchanted by the warm glow and sense of belonging he experienced in those places, came home determined to recreate the experience for his community. A community scattered amid catfish ponds, vast fields of cotton and along gravel roads.
Meet Andrew Yost, 24, who four years ago, traveled to New York City with his church, the Church of God in Christ Mennonite, to work in a food pantry and a hospital. During their down time, Yost and his friends walked the city streets, occasionally taking respite in a coffeehouse.
“It was something to break up the day,” he said.
Along the way, the young electrician developed a taste for good coffee.
Not long after he returned home, he began his search for an espresso machine. He found it in New Orleans on Craigslist.
He set up the machine in a room — what had been the “rec room” for Andrew and his three brothers when they were kids — over the metal building on Boswell Road he and his father use for a shop and declared it a coffeehouse.
RBT Coffee. Yost credits his mother, Cheryl, for the name; the letters stand for “Roastin’, Boastin’ and Toastin’.”
So far, so good, but for two hiccups. People started showing up at all hours wanting a drink, and he was spending a lot of money on coffee.
He solved the first problem straightaway by setting hours: 7:30 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month or by appointment. That’s right, open one night a month.
Yost educated himself about coffee roasting by reading online and corresponding with other Mennonite roasters around the country, in particular one in Idaho.
He built a roaster that uses forced air blown up through a heating element into a stainless steel cylinder that holds about six pounds of green coffee beans. The apparatus sits in a corner of the shop lost among the overflowing tool drawers and implements of the electrical trade.
Yost records his roasting profiles on a computer connected to his roaster (His screen saver is a night shot of the Brooklyn Bridge).
Coffee is anything but a uniform product, and it is the coffee roaster’s challenge to find the combination of time and temperature to maximize the potential of a given coffee bean.
It can get tedious, Yost says. “Coffee roasting is one of those subjects the more you get into it the more there is to it.”
Fortunately Andrew comes from a family of heavy coffee drinkers, a kind of built-in test market. It should come as no surprise that they are enthusiastic about his new avocation.
For much of the interview, Andrew and I, in overstuffed chairs, sipped Americanos amid the living-room-like decor of his coffee house. A fire flickered in the faux fireplace; the dim light reflected off the chrome of his espresso machine. While you wouldn’t mistake the setting for the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it seemed distant from the gravel roads and metal grain bins just outside.
“I enjoy people and this was a way to get good coffee myself,” he said.
Some nights only a handful of people show up at RBT; other nights the place is packed, he says.
Google “RBT Coffee Noxubee County” to see the website Andrew designed for his coffee company. And, if you happen to be in that corner of Noxubee on the first Thursday of the month and in need of a caffeinated beverage, you’re in luck.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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