Lala Land

Story By Simon Farrell-Green

Deep in the Coromandel bush, former potter Mark Tugendhaft roasts award-winning Coffee Lala by hand, in roasters he designed himself.

In 2002, A friend of Mark Tugendhaft brought him a handful of green coffee beans. They decided to roast them in a popcorn maker.  He was surprised: they were good.  He should know, because he grew up in New York.  “I don’t think I had mother’s milk,“ he says, “I think I had cawfee.”

Tugendhaft is a former potter and ardent environmentalist who led the fight against mining in the area in the 1980s.  He’s lived in the bushy valley on the Coromandel Peninsula since the 1970s, and is used to making do.

So he converted a few more popcorn makers into coffee roasters; the coffee got better.  There was something in this, he decided.  He asked his neighbour, who makes tools for a living, to build him a two-kilogram coffee roaster – tiny, by commercial standards – out of salvaged parts.

It’s a cute little machine, small and round.  (“That’s the brake mount off a Hillman Minx,”says Tugendhaft, pointing at the mechanism that rolls the barrel.)  Not long after, he had his neighbour build him two more roasters, 10kg this time, again out of salvaged parts – the barrels came from pipes at the Wairakei thermal power station, the burners came straight off a gas barbecue.

Out of the blue, just a couple of years after starting to roast, Tugendhaft and wife Nedika Radokovich started to win awards at the New Zealand Coffee festival awards, beating out big, established roasters with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.  Now, the couple sells coffee all over the Coromandel and to customers around the country.

Tugendhaft still roasts every day from his old potting shed – and it’s very hands on.  The only high-tech equipment he owns are the two very precise temperature gauges; he constantly adjusts the gas burners to manipulate the heat.

In theory, his roasters are all wrong.  “If I’d seen a standard machine, I wouldn’t have tried to make one,“ he says.  His are sealed, for a start: most roasters have a double skin, one perforated; you heat the air between the drums, which roasts the coffee.  On Tugendhaft’s, the gas burners heat the barrel, which roasts the coffee.  There’s something about sealing in the aroma, he theorises, that makes his coffee so distinctive.  “It just seemed like an easy thing to do – I had all these bits lying around,” he says.  “A lot of times, the standard way of doing things isn’t the best.”

His mix is made up of beans from South America, Africa and a bit from the Pacific.

He’s coy about the precise makeup, but there are Kenyan beans for acidity, Columbian for body; each bean gives him a different flavour, a different amount of body and he roasts each type separately.  It took him a year to learn how to best treat each bean – if you roast Columbian in the same way as Kenyan, it comes out uderdone and green; if you roast Kenyan like Columbian, you burn it.

There are no plans to build a bigger roaster and increase production: he likes being able to monitor his beans, smell the precise moment when they’re just about ready.  “It’s always the last few minutes that count,” he says.  “I like it because it’s physical – it’s like potting.

“A lot of times, the standard way of doing things isn’t the best.”