KNOX, Pa. (EYT) – Elmo Fired Beans’ Aaron Lloyd turned years of working in the restaurant business into a fresh cup of coffee and hasn’t looked back.

(Pictured above: Conrad Lloyd works on the latest order of coffee beans.)

Elmo Fired Beans is located in the town of Elmo, just outside of Knox, but since the post office there closed, it has a Knox address. It creates coffee blends for coffee shops across the region, but the wholesale coffee bean business started as a side job for Lloyd and became a life’s work.

“I worked in restaurants pretty much my whole life,” Lloyd said. “I mean, I went into the military, but I was a chef, sometimes a server, but I mostly cooked. When I got married, my wife was a teacher and I was a chef. That’s the worst combination of hours.”

Lloyd has lived all over the country, but in his return to Pennsylvania, he was able to bring a lot of experiences into crafting a good cup of coffee. He knew roasters in California, spent time figuring out coffee in Pittsburgh, and realized that the key was the attention to detail.

The key to coffee is fresh beans, according to Lloyd, who said that his move into becoming a roast master started simply by drinking coffee.

“It was out of necessity,” he said. “Once you realize that most people aren’t making really good coffee, and you think you can make it. Nobody even knows how you become a coffee roaster, but if you like to read and get information, you can learn almost anything. Then, you have to get your hands dirty.”

Lloyd got his hands dirty. He learned what he could about coffee, and now gets his coffee a pallet at a time, usually around 12-1500 pounds of beans.

“Coffee that comes into the country is green and in bags,” Lloyd said. “I get 90% of mine from New York, which is one of the big coffee import areas. When coffee’s green, it’s really stable. Once it’s roasted, you don’t want to keep it more than two weeks, or you’ll begin to notice the difference, no matter what you do for it. I roast and deliver the same day for all my shops. People notice that these shops have fresh coffee.”

Coffee beans as they arrive at Elmo Fired Beans.

Lloyd said some roasters will send shipments in three-month supplies, but that coffee is not fresh. He gives weekly shipments, with Friday being his busy days. In his research, he learned that coffee does not have to be just a quick cup of joe.

“I have 20 some origins, or countries, represented,” he said. “Each country’s bean is like their wines, they’re so different. There’s incredible diversity. Coffee has nearly 900 flavor and aroma compounds, so when it’s fresh, there’s so much potential flavor.”

His knowledge of coffee led to a life of roasting. Twenty years ago, Lloyd started roasting at farmers’ markets, finding that he could make money producing fresh coffee. He then turned that roasting into a side job that grew as long as it could, but the recession took its toll on the business.

“At one time, I roasted for 22 coffee shops wholesale,” Lloyd said. “It was a side thing, but a good one, until the recession. I sold my coffee shop in Franklin, so I went back to cooking for four years. I worked at the Gateway Lodge. I was single and had four kids, so it wasn’t possible to be a chef like that. You don’t get to avoid working a double every weekend. The coffee, I knew I would get back to it.”

The chance to get back into coffee came from a former employee who was now a librarian in Saxonburg. She called Lloyd in 2014 about a building that would work as a coffee shop. That restarted Lloyd in the coffee business.

“We partnered together and did all the work ourselves,” he said. “We bought the equipment, but I knew if we did what we did in Franklin, we would do well. Saxonburg is one of the best performing shops now. You’d never believe how many beans they went through in a week.”

Pictured above: Elmo Fired Beans at the Barnard House B&B.

Now, Elmo Fired Beans ships coffee to coffee shops and restaurants, focusing on the wholesale. The plan is to create a website soon so individuals can taste the coffee.

Roasting, Lloyd explained, is an endothermic reaction to exothermic, but he now uses fluid bed roasting, which is like popcorn popping. Most roasters use drum roasting, where most of the heat comes from the metal, but fluid bed uses air.

“It’s so simple, but it creates this wonderful situation where the beans are never sitting in one place,” he said. “If you use air, it brings out the origin better. It showcases taste. I don’t do anything as dark as Starbucks. Dark roasting doesn’t get stale, so it sits on a shelf and tastes the same. And, if you have mediocre beans and roast it dark, you can’t tell.”

For every shop, Lloyd does a house blend and an espresso blend. Blending makes the coffee taste the same throughout the year, whereas focusing on the origin could have small variances, like wine vintages. He also does some flavors, but he feels that the flavor should come from the origin of the beans, so that is not his focus.

“I want you to taste what goes into it,” he said. “Growing coffee is one of the most labor-intensive crops. It’s been handled by five hands before it gets to me. I want to show off the origin.”

While he has not done advertising, people ask his shops who does the beans. He chooses the places he sells to based on how much they care about the coffee. Even during the pandemic, the coffee business is booming.

“In coffee, like so many other food items, it got put down because people don’t know what fresh stuff tastes like,” he said.

To taste some of Elmo Fired Beans’ fresh coffee, check out Wunderbar Coffee ’n Crepes in Harmony; Karma Coffee or Core Goods in Oil City; Saxonburg Coffee in Saxonburg; National Grind in Ellwood City; or Zack’s Restaurant in New Bethlehem.