Euro Coffee

I grew up drinking coffee. Before I went to Kindergarten I was enjoying quality coffee brewed in our Sunbeam vacuum pot brewer. My parents always bought Bokar from our local A & P Market. It was my job to set the A & P grinder to "Vacuum Pot" and then to grind the coffee Coffee has always been something I loved...somehow a great cup of coffee was something special for me. I decided after college to pursue coffee. I spent 1982 researching coffee and roaster technology with 3 trips to Europe. I spent time with green coffee experts in San Francisco and Hamburg, I visited coffee roaster manufacturers in Germany and coffee packaging companies in Italy. I was lucky enough to visit modern coffee factories in Europe and even managed to spend several days roasting coffee on a wood burning 1916 coffee roaster in a factory outside of Rome. I was young and somehow managed to get people to open their doors to me since I wasn't competing with them and the whole coffee revolution had not happened yet. People were very surprised to find someone from America concerned with coffee quality. At that time gourmet coffee was a small business and most coffee stores didn't actually sell hot beverages. I ordered our first Probat Roaster from Germany and our Fresco packaging equipment from Italy and we built our first small roasting plant in 1983. We grew slowly for years. This time was instrumental because even though I thought I knew so much about coffee when we first started, those years of roasting and buying green helped me establish a solid foundation for the technology and the "chops" needed to hone my knowledge base of green coffee. In 1986 we added our second coffee roaster. In 1991 we built our first real factory and added one significantly larger roaster next to the two we already had. 1994 was the first year we roasted over one million pounds of coffee. We continued to grow one customer at a time through the 90's and in 1996 we added one more larger roaster and retired our first small roasters to the museum of storage. In 2004 we bought what seemed like a huge building and we built our new roasting plant. It took the better part of 2 years to get our new facility built. It was 4 times larger than our previous plant and now we wish we had more room. In 2008 we will add one more vintage direct fired Probat roaster. We started as gourmet coffee merchants, and we remain gourmet coffee merchants. We are honored to roast coffee for the finest gourmet supermarket in the Los Angeles area Gelson's Markets. We are proud to also roast for Wolfgang Puck Coffee and Pasquini Espresso. We also roast fine quality coffees for First Choice Services, one of the largest office coffee services in the world. Larry Emerine, President and CEO.