SPRINGFIELD – Walking around Monkey Wrench building on Main St. in Springfield you may catch the scent of freshly roasted coffee beans wafting through the halls. Monsoon Roastery opened its doors in January and is already selling their freshly blended roast to numerous coffee shops in the area.

Owner and Operator of Monsoon Roastery Tim Monson grew up in the hill towns in Huntington and moved around for many years following his high school graduation until he and his wife, Andrea, settled down in Springfield two years ago.

“The whole vision started a little bit over three years ago when we found out we were going to have our daughter. It spawned from, ‘hey, I’m tired of living for other peoples dreams, do you think we could find a way to work for our own, or a way to not have to both work full time?’” he explained. “We want to spend our lives together, that’s the dream, and how this roastery was born.”

The Monson’s decided on opening a coffee roastery after researching roasters in the area. They found that there was a need for a local roastery, as there was no competition within a 20–mile radius.

“There are coffee shops that carry their own coffee, but nobody roasting coffee, and certainly not specialty coffee roasting around us. I’ve been roasting coffee for many years and kind of wanted to dabble in it professionally,” Tim chuckled. “It’s been pretty crazy since then.”

Though Tim has been roasting coffee for the last four and a half years, he said it had taken him at least 2,000 hours of roasting before he felt he was good enough to roast professionally.

The couple works together on their business, with Tim working on roasting and distribution and Andrea focusing on social media, packaging, product design and marketing.

“My background is customer service, making people happy, food and coffee. She [Andrea] is kind of the personality behind us as well as all of our market research, and that’s where her background is,” Tim said.

The pair opened Monsoon Roastery in Springfield’s Monkey Wrench building, which houses offices, retail businesses, artist studios and more. The building owner, David Rothenberg, told Reminder Publications that he welcomes people and their businesses into the building after he sits with them and goes over their business plans. He noted that he wants to be sure that those renting from him are prepared and that they will be successful.

“It’s a really awesome building filled with 30 or so tenants and we’re all just doing our own thing and starting businesses,” Tim said of Monkey Wrench.

While currently the couple runs the operation, Tim told Reminder Publications that within the next year they are already making plans for expansion.

“We’ve blown up a little bit quicker than we thought we would,” he said.

While the process sounds fairly technical, Tim explained how he roasts coffee. Monsoon roasts about three pounds of coffee a batch in their fluid bed roaster by pouring it into the roasting chamber. A fan with heating elements will send hot air up to the center of the chamber to move the coffee so it’s constantly rotating.

“It’s a style of roasting that’s used by the minority of coffee roasters. Most of the coffee roasters use a drum roaster, we went with this style because we’re looking to the future,” he explained.

Tim said Monsoon’s fluid bed roaster is 80 percent more efficient than a drum roaster and it also provides a cleaner process of roasting. He noted that the roaster removes most of the skin on the coffee, which removes  carcinogens from the beans. As the beans are heated from 400 to 500 degrees over the course of 11 to 12 minutes, the beans lose the layer of skin.

“That’s why the fluid bed roaster helps create a cleaner coffee. The skin peels off the bean and that gets forced through our ventilation system where it builds out. It removes more carcinogens than a traditional roaster,” Tim said.

From there, Tim decides how dark to make the roast and how long to keep it in the roaster.

Monsoon works on a seasonal rotation, meaning they don’t directly import the beans themselves and instead they work through a broker. The broker helps to secure a selection of beans each month, ensuring that the coffee is coming in and off the port fresh while still fitting the palette of what Monsoon’s customers desire.

“One of the things people don’t realize about coffee is that it takes 10 months to grow a crop,” Tim shared. “It grows around the equator, and different countries have harvest at different seasons.”

He continued, explaining that now that it’s the summertime, Monsoon see’s coffee beans from Central and South America. The brew they just packaged up came from Peru and Costa Rica, however in the winter, Monsoon will work with a lot of African coffee.

“We always want to have a lot of fresh coffee coming in. We don’t want coffee that’s been sitting in a warehouse,” he said.

Eventually, Tim stated that they’d like to work on importing directly from farmers. For now, it simply isn’t in the cards due to costs.

Tim believes that Monsoon is in “a really good place” now, especially since they’ve worked out most kinks that naturally come out when starting a business. A few challenges he noted were finding a building to roast in that would meet their needs, as well as the logistics of getting their coffee into home consumers hands.

“We’re aimed at getting people to have our coffee at home, so we set up a home delivery service. Executing that was a bit trickier than we thought,” he said. “We’re down to a really good pace now, it’s really cool because we’re providing a service that nobody else seems to really be doing right now.”

Tim stated that people at home can order coffee from Monsoon and the next day he’ll hand deliver it.

“It’s pretty much as good as Amazon home delivery,” he joked.

While there were a few challenges, Tim and Andrea have found plenty of enjoyment, not only in their new venture but through the farmers markets that they take part in selling their coffee at. The pair travels to four farmers markets a week, and love talking to new people about coffee.

“The farmers markets we do have been an absolute blast. It just makes me so excited when we get to really just talk about coffee and hang out with people and drink coffee,” he said.    

Additionally, Monsoon hosts coffee education events every other week, which are free to the public. On July 14 they’re hosting a “cold brew class” called Cold Brew 101 where customers can learn how to make their own cold brew at home. The events are always listed at https://www.monsoonroastery.com/new-events/ or on the roastery’s Facebook or Instagram pages.

As for the future, within 10 years Tim hopes that Monsoon will be working with small farmers around the world. Even sooner, he hopes that they will have their own brick and mortar location.

“By the grace of God we’re growing almost faster than we can keep up with right now.” He said of the experience of starting a new business from the ground up, “You can follow your dreams, you’ve got to at least try it once. If you crash and burn, you have to pick yourself up.

“We live in a culture that’s so afraid of failing that they don’t try to do anything. We can’t live our lives in fear.”

To test out Monsoon’s coffee, head over to GoodWorks in Chicopee or GoodNews in Feeding Hills. Monsoon’s cold brew and retail bags are also sold at stores in the area, including The Apple Place in East Longmeadow, For Love and Food in Enfield, Nosh restaurant and at the farm stand at Urban Artisan Farm in Gasoline Alley. Additionally, Monsoon is working with Vanished valley Brewing Company in Ludlow to create a coffee beer. The business also has several private accounts that they work with, and also offer their home delivery directly to consumers. For more information on Monsoon Roastery, go to https://www.monsoonroastery.com/.