Longview Washington Business Directory Blog
Longview, Washington Business Directory
Guse’s Gourmet Coffee Roasting and Coffee Shop
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Guse’s Gourmet Coffee is located in downtown Longview Washington at 1208 Commerce Avenue. A quaint little coffee shop in a building built in the early nineteen hundreds. A beautiful building that defies its age as it has been exceptionally maintained.
This Longview Washington Coffee Shop got its start in 1986 when Ken Guse retired from Weyerhaeuser. Ken wanted something to do in his retirement and was looking for a job when he met Alberto Miranda who was from Costa Rica. Alberto had a history and education in the coffee business. More so he had solid connections in Costa Rico and in other locals that grew high quality coffee beans. Ken and Alberto founded a good friendship and business alliance. Ken Guse learned to roast coffee in a coffee roaster that he himself built with Albertos help. The business got off the ground roasting coffee for locals in the Kelso/Longview Washington area. Ken Guse owned and operated the business until 2006 when his daughter Georgia took over the daily operations. Ken still has a hand in the coffee roasting business and visits daily to meet with some of his friends and enjoy a terrific cup of coffee in the morning.
Today Georgia Guse operates the business much the same way her father did. This gourmet coffee shop only uses organic coffee beans of high quality. I spent almost two hours talking to Georgia and walked away with a new found respect for quality coffee and what goes into it and more so what dictates what is considered a quality coffee. I also learned some interesting facts that were both enlightening and reinforcing in my appreciation of a good cup of coffee.
- A medium roast coffee has more caffeine than a dark roast. When roasting coffee beans from the time a bean is in its medium roast condition to when it reaches a dark roast a lot of oils and caffeine evaporates form the beans.
- When you think of coffee you think of what we see on television, plantation style. Quality coffee beans are grown in the shade of a treed canopy. This ensures the beans ripen slower and develop a richer smoother taste. Grown plantation style is good if you want to maximise the output of the coffee bushes. But when a coffee bean ripens too fast it gets bitter and does not have the time to develop a rich, smooth taste and aroma that is associated with gourmet coffee beans.
- According to coffee connoisseur’s when a coffee bean is grown with insecticides and artificial fertilizers they impart a taste into the bean. Guse’s Gourmet Coffee only uses organic beans grown in organic certified farms. A farm can only be certified after being insecticide free for five years.
- There are basically two types of coffee beans grown. Arabica and Robusto. Robusto beans are easily to detect as they are round. Robusto beans are of a lesser quality than Arabica coffee beans. By nature Robusto beans have a bitter taste.
- After a coffee bean is roasted, it has a shelf life of only twelve to fourteen days. After that the oils in the beans start to evaporate and it goes essentially stale.
- The practice of putting coffee in the refrigerator does little good in preserving the freshness of coffee. In fact when you roast and grind fresh beans you want the coffee to breath so the flavor and oils are readily available when you brew your coffee.
Today Georgia continues in the tradition and care delivering quality gourmet coffee not only to discerning consumers but to some of the Kelso/Longview Washington area’s finest restaurants. Judy’s Restaurant, The Masthead, The Kelso Theater Pub, Brits Restaurant just to name a few. They sell and deliver freshly roasted coffee’s to as far away as Pensylvania to the Brickhouse Cafe. She uses regularly over twelve hundred pounds of gourmet coffee beans in a month. That is a lot of roasting and grinding. Guse’s Gourmet Coffee is one of our Advertisers in The Kelso/Longview Washington Business Directory, LongviewBiz.com.
If you love a terrific cup of coffee stop by and see the difference, maybe take home a pound. They are open Monday through Saturday. They have WIFI available to you if you would like to enjoy a cup and maybe get some work done.
For some additional reading on the subject of Gourmet Coffee here are a few links:
