Connoiseur of coffee

Coffee isn’t just the dark brew most of us sip or guzzle to Johnny Carriere Jr., head roaster and owner of Prayer House Coffee in Washington.
Coffee beans are something that are roasted by exact formulations and turned into the equivalent of a wine with complexities of taste and aroma.
“We source coffee. We bring it in from all over the world — some of the top 1 percent of the coffee and we bring it in to roast,” Carriere said at Thursday’s Eunice Kiwanis Club meeting.
Carriere, who is also executive director of the Lighthouse Mission in Opelousas, sells roasted coffee beans from the website prayerhousecoffee.com.
He calls it speciality coffee that is from the highest quality coffee beans to be found.
“We take advantage of our smallness. A micro-roaster can buy higher quality lots of coffee, but smaller amounts. So, it is easier for a micro-roaster to get high-quality coffee where a big company will have a lot more difficulty if they are selling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of coffee,” he said.
“I’m spending $5 to $9 a pound for green coffee,” he said. In contrast, mass production coffee makers spend from 50 cents to a $1 a pound for coffee beans, he said.
Carriere said micro-roasting is part of a third wave of coffee. The first wave was the mass production and sale of coffee by brands such as Folgers. The next wave was selling coffee at speciality shops such as Starbucks.
The third wave is an artisan approach to coffee that taps into the distinct characteristics of coffee grown around the world.
Carriere, who said he can roast about 15 pounds of coffee in an hour, sells his coffee for up to $15 for 12 ounces of roasted beans.
There is rule of “15s” to coffee, he said. Green coffee beans are good for 15 months after harvest, roasted coffee is good for 15 days and ground coffee is good for 15 minutes, he said.
Vacuum packing does help extend the freshness of coffee, as does storing it in a freezer, he said.
Carriere said five years ago he didn’t like coffee. “It started off as a hobby and it is really an obsession,” he said of his newfound appreciation of coffee.