Best Coffee Beans '95

Best Coffee Beans

STAFF PICK: Wilde Rose Coffee Company
8 N. Fifth Ave.

THE 21ST CENTURY is fast upon us, and it comes bearing a cup of hot, steaming coffee to every Tucsonan. Such is the heady vision of Ron Rose, one of the few people in the Old Pueblo to earn his keep by roasting coffee beans for the local market. Several mornings a week you can find the 62-year-old retiree from the clothing industry in his tiny storefront in the Hotel Congress, the Wilde Rose Coffee Company. There he ladles scoops of green coffee beans, imported from plantations in Colombia and Costa Rica, into a well-worn Diedrich roaster, a contraption that looks and sounds like a cross between a pottery kiln and a cement mixer. He roasts 400 to 600 pounds of beans a week, happily scorning the computerized roasters of larger competitors.

"This is a craft," Rose says. "I use the age-old methods of judging sight, smell and sound to roast my beans. Those are things no machine can pick up."

As the beans sizzle and crackle at a merry 425 degrees, Rose expands on his vision of a Tucson drenched in top-drawer coffee. An unabashed practitioner of coffee messianism, he has nursed a deep passion for coffee for more than 20 years, having been converted in San Francisco by none other than Alfred Peets, the leading guru of the American gourmet coffee industry.

The bulk of Rose's business comes from commercial accounts like Cuppucino's, Café Magritte, The Cup, Ted's Country Store, the Food Conspiracy, the Oasis Café, and Tubac's Chile Pepper Café. He limits his retail sales of coffee with the Wilde Rose label to a few hours at Downtown Saturday Night, the Palomino Plaza Farmer's Market, and chance walk-ins at his storefront. Along with house blends ranging from moderately priced Kenyan and "monsooned Malabar" to expensive Jamaican Blue Mountain, Rose offers 31 special flavors of coffee, including exotics like butterscotch nut sundae, jalapeño, prickly pear and, come Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie.

Rose is impatient with those who do not share his passion for coffee perfectly brewed. "So many restaurants here have great coffee, but the people who work in them don't know it," he says. He won't sell to anyone whose coffee-making skills don't meet his standards, including among the sinners anyone who would keep a pot of coffee on a hot burner for more than five minutes.

The gospel of righteous java is spreading, and the sinners are growing fewer. Fast food restaurants and posh Foothills eateries alike, Rose says, are improving their coffee in response to consumer expectations, while every shopping center in town is looking to add a coffeehouse to the mix, hoping to draw new business from jitterjuice junkies.
--Gregory McNamee

1998 Winner: Starbucks Coffee
1997 Winner: Coffee, Etc.
1996 Winner: Coffee, Etc.