Gina Schauland
Roasters Next Door owner Steffon Randolph (left) talks coffee.
In a quiet corner of the Deschutes Brewery Tasting Room in downtown Roanoke, Steffon Randolph describes a key commonality between nitro beer and nitro coffee: little bubbles. When nitrogen is infused into either of the dark and deeply-flavored drinks, it triggers the formation of small, dense bubbles.
“That’s what creates that creamy head of foam on the top of both the coffee and the beer,” Randolph says. “It’s a whole different mouthfeel, it can bring out sweetness and a lot of great texture. It’s a fun sort of thing.” At the moment, Randolph himself is a little like a nitro bubble, passing back and forth between the two worlds of beer and coffee.
At night, you can find Randolph at Deschutes, where he has poured beer since he moved to Roanoke last May. And in the morning, you can find him pouring coffee at Roasters Next Door, the pop-up cafe he opened in Wasena last week. The space he shares at 1116A Main Street SW with Black Snake Meadery and its tasting room, the Hive, enables Randolph to test out his coffee offerings with customers, including regular batch, pour-over and cold brew coffee (with the option for nitro cold brew, his specialty). Randolph hopes his time at the Hive will lead to acquiring a larger space of his own, where he can combine best practices recognizable in the craft beer industry — experimentation, collaboration, approachability — with coffee tradition.
Gina Schauland
Randolph pours his special brews.
Randolph’s background in coffee begins with the shop his parents bought in Richmond when he was 18, called Java Chocolate Cafe. His father, who went to the cafe on a regular basis, stopped in one day to see the owner packing up, closing the business. He decided to buy it. Randolph’s family had no experience in owning a business, nor with coffee. Everything felt brand new at the time, he says. He helped serve coffee, but didn’t geek out on the making of it until he went to Coffee Fest, an annual industry trade show, with his father in 2011.
“There were all these people doing all these crazy and awesome and fun things in coffee that I was previously unaware of,” he says. “That stoked the interest.” Since then, Randolph has never stopped learning about coffee.
Randolph went straight into roasting coffee for a company in Cincinnati, starting a line of nitro coffee and keg products for the business. At the time, there wasn’t much information around about making nitro coffee, he says. “You mostly just had to adapt beer industry practices and technology and figure out how you could make it work for coffee.” He remembers the pace of that time: roasting hundreds of pounds of coffee a day, brewing gallons of cold brew, making tea.
With the launch of his own business, Randolph hopes to get back to roasting as soon as possible. “I want to be able own the process all the way,” he says. He lays out his dream scenario for making and serving coffee: “In an ideal world, I have a cafe where I can do the roasting there, but then have ample seating for people to come, hang out,” he says. “Offer coffee flights like you would get a flight of beer, so you can see what the Sumatra coffee is like next to the Ethiopia coffee, next to a Colombia coffee. Or what the same coffee is like processed washed versus processed naturally. Or the same coffee, roasted light, medium, dark.” He’s full of options: Eight different types of nitro coffee on tap and in flights. Infused cold brews, adapting beer industry technology to create a coffee infused with mint, or honeycomb, or vanilla. Or Tootsie Rolls.
Gina Schauland
Guests pop into the pop up coffee shop.
That is what Randolph seems to love about coffee, and aims to extend in options and experience to customers: the ability to try new flavors, learn what you like, and enjoy a good cup. “So people can really see, this is how I like my coffee roasted, these are the countries I tend to enjoy best, or maybe a blend of coffee,” he says. His sense of experimentation inspired the cafe’s name and acronym: RND. “I like the idea of Research and Development,” he says. “Honoring coffee tradition, but also trying to see what I can do that’s new and different, what people can enjoy.”
As the beer industry cultivates “beer enthusiasts” and embraces new ideas, with an outpouring of creative collaborations and evolving flavors, Randolph believes the same effect can happen for coffee, a beverage that millions of people pick up and drink every day.
“Being able to make awesome coffee approachable without being pretentious, I think is something that’s important,” says Randolph. Roanoke may be the perfect place to test his theory. After bouncing around between Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Richmond and Bowling Green, Kentucky, Randolph was drawn to Roanoke for its budding craft beer scene, affordable living, and city vibes sans big-city traffic. But throughout the year he’s spent interacting with locals and visitors from night to night at Deschutes, it is the community that stands out to him.
“The people seem really great,” he says.
Roasters Next Door is located at 1116A Main Street SW, and is open Monday to Friday, 6:30 am to 1:30 pm, and Saturday to Sunday, 8 am to noon.