While Shinchu Coffee is the brainchild of longtime friends, Chef Jamie Bissonnette and artist Darren Brass, they have some pretty serious folks roasting their brand of coffee. Winchell Mountain Coffee has been roasting coffee with heat and hands since 1903.
Originally based in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, the company moved to the Hudson Valley region of the state in 1973 where not much changed with the exception of the scenery!
Master Roaster Willis Rivkin learned the craft of roasting coffee from his father and legendary Master Roaster, Bob Rivkin. Bob’s biggest contribution to the coffee industry in the United States was identifying technology that did exactly what he was seeking to do, which was preserve the quality of the beans inside the bag. Coffee naturally starts to stale after 36 hours of coming out of the roaster and cooling down so Bob not only wanted to find a fix to that, but felt if his business was going to truly evolve, he would NEED to figure out a solution to this plaguing problem.
Europe had long been ahead of the USA with regards to preservation of food quality so Bob set out to see what Europeans were doing that the United States was not. Sometime in the early part of the 1980’s on a trip to Italy, he met a gentleman named Luigi Goglio. Luigi had invented a specific bag called the “One-Way Valve” and a method of packaging coffee called “vacuum packaging”.
Upon touring Luigi’s machinery and technology, it was immediately clear to Bob that this was the future of coffee. Bob felt that by stopping time inside the coffee bag and by adding months of shelf-life to his already cared about product, he would have a unique and competitive edge in the growing market for coffee in the United States.
In the early part of the 2000’s, Bob stepped aside to allow new blood to take the reins. Working under his father, Willis learned not the precision, so to speak, but the feel and smell of perfectly roasted beans. On two very large probat propane roasters, Willis learned to never need anything except his nose and trusted notebook where he logs every roast from start to finish.
Willis has made a name for himself in the industry since his dad’s retirement creating complex and balanced blends and pushing the envelope on non traditional bean combos, but don’t worry Willis still very much is a purist and traditionalist when it comes to his craft. While technology has evolved and taken great jumps forward, we pride ourselves on utilizing none of it! All of our coffees are still roasted by nothing but heat and hands every single day, the same as when the company was founded in 1903. We hope you enjoy our very cool collaboration with Jamie and Darren and we most certainly hope you enjoy the coffee!
