Characters in Coffee
Michael Sivetz: The man who launched coffee into thin air
By Julie Beals

When Michael Sivetz began working as a chemical engineer at General Foods in 1944, he couldn't have imagined that by the mid-'70s he would invent air roasting—now one of two standard methods for roasting coffee commercially. Gifted, determined and open to any sphere of possibility, Sivetz made happenstance the mother of his invention. For the past 40 years, his roasters have maintained cult-like popularity.

It has been said that Michael Sivetz has done more for coffee industry technology than anyone alive. But unless you roast coffee, you probably have little or no idea who he is. "People don't know much about me, and that's just fine," he says. Sivetz is sitting like a man with nothing to prove, leaning back with one arm thrown over the back of his chair at a bistro table in the old mission-style church that houses Sivetz Coffee. He has operated his company in the smallish college town of Corvallis, Ore., since 1980, more or less quietly, though not due to lack of passion or commitment.

Sivetz Coffee is part coffee shop, part science lab and part manufacturing facility for Sivetz's fluid-bed coffee roasting equipment. The no-frills retail store is in the lobby, sporting a small plastic menu board, plywood paneling and a circa-1960 cash register on top of a glass display case that must have once held jewelry or sports memorabilia but is now stocked with house-made coffee extract. Customers stop in for lattes, freshly roasted coffee and bottles of the extract to go. A lifetime achievement award from the SCAA hangs on the wall near the double doors that lead to the inner workings of the company, where refrigerators and freezers store coffee and two employees assemble all sizes of fluid-bed roasters, from 30-gram home roasters to 70-kilo commercial units.

Long before settling in Oregon, Sivetz's coffee career gave him a peripatetic existence, taking his knowledge and burgeoning ideas from one city or country to the next. He grew up in New York, attending Brooklyn Technical High School, an important technical school to this day, and then Polytechnic University, also in Brooklyn. He still gets newsletters from Brooklyn Tech. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, most of his fellow male graduates from PU took commissions in the armed forces, but Sivetz had developed a chronic spinal infection that kept him from serving.

He landed in nearby Hoboken, N.J., to stay close to the doctors who were treating him, working in research and development at General Foods. His expertise became instant coffee, a role that quickly grew in importance as GIs came back from the war with a taste for the stuff. "It was developed specifically to get coffee to soldiers at war," he says. "And when they came home, the coffee companies had to decide whether to create a consumer market for it, and if so, how to make it profitable."

His work was top secret, in a race between Maxwell House, Nestle, Folgers and a handful of other companies to create the best—or somewhat realistic—tasting product that was most easily produced. The General Foods plant and research facility was located on the same grounds as Maxwell House, which was looking for engineers to provide its expansion into instant coffee. Sivetz remained in charge of coffee projects at General Foods while consulting with Maxwell House. "I would go to weekly meetings at Maxwell House," he says. "A lot of people were involved, 15 or 20 people discussing trade secrets. Instant coffee was important business in the '50s, and very secretive."

His expertise became known, for better and worse. At one point, he and two colleagues were sent to Florida to get Maxwell House's instant coffee extraction equipment up and running after an initial team had failed to do so. "There was no congratulations for this. I had no way of winning anything." Sivetz says his team had embarrassed higher-ups who hadn't been able to get the project going. "I got fired, but in a way they did me a favor."

Word traveled quickly in the highly competitive instant coffee business. Not a week passed before Sivetz got a call from the president of Folgers in Houston. "I went to work for Folgers in Texas and got them up to speed. Before that, they had no technical expertise." And once again he worked his way out of a job. Folgers let him go after its machines were up and running, but MJB in San Francisco had already tapped him to build an instant coffee plant in Nicaragua. It became a two-year project, and once it ended, Sivetz had some time on his hands.

As is typical of authors, Sivetz had been mulling over a book idea for several years before he took a year to write "Coffee Processing Technology," a 736-page tome originally published in 1963 and reissued by the SCAA in 1998. The book set strict standards for coffee, from growing, sourcing and processing to roasting, brewing and tasting. It also opened doors for consulting work, which initially took Sivetz away from coffee, but would lead to his greatest professional success—back in the coffee-industry, no less.

For the next two years he worked at Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical in San Leandro, Calif., making magnesium metal, which is similar to aluminum but lighter. "At the time, Dow Chemical had a virtual monopoly on magnesium metal production," says Sivetz, "so Kaiser wanted to make its own." He was back in his element, going against competitors to develop secrets of the trade. The process involved concentrating salt, specifically magnesium chloride, by removing its water content. "We made prills out of it, which is like buckshot. I dried the prills," which exposed Sivetz to building the fluid-bed drying systems that effectively extracted water from the salt.

All the while, Sivetz kept getting calls from Brazil. "I was asked to go down and build an instant coffee plant. I wanted to get back into coffee, so I took on the plant as a two-year project to get it running and profitable."

Sivetz continued consulting on instant coffee production into the '70s with various companies in Brazil. These large-scale operations were met with regular downtime on their drum roasters, triggering Sivetz's curiosity about finding a new roasting technology. "We were using large drum roasters," he says. "We were selling everything we could roast and make, so the time spent on cleaning and repairing roasters cost us a good 15 percent in production." He returned to the States and went to work on creating a fluid-bed roasting system, and in 1976 he took out a patent on the process. He started selling roasters out of his garage in Marin County before moving the operation to Oregon in 1980.

Coffee Review defines the fluid-bed roaster as "a roasting apparatus that works much like a giant popcorn popper, utilizing a column of forced hot air to simultaneously agitate and roast green coffee beans." "It provides greater efficiency, greater heat transfer, more active movement than drum roasting," says Sivetz. "It's cleaner and faster. We can roast in seven or eight minutes, although we don't need to. It takes 15 minutes or so on a drum."

Speed and reduced downtime might be attractive for large-scale productions, but the pros and cons of fluid beds and drums is another story altogether. One thing is certain: Proponents of fluid-bed roasters seem as fanatical as Red Sox fans. Roasteries like Kaladi Coffee, Alaska Coffee and The Roasterie in Kansas City tout the benefits of air roasting's "precise, clean roast," noting that the color of the roasted bean directly correlates with its taste because of the air roasting process. Several, such as Alaska Coffee and Aah! Coffee in Madison, Wis., have diagrams and photographs of air roasters on their Web sites, detailing how and why they use the technology.

"It's been a great marketing tool and helps us to be unique and do something a little different in an industry that's dominated by drum roasting," says David Hermann, master roaster at The Roasterie, the largest 100-percent air roasting company in the Midwest, if not the country. The Roasterie uses only Sivetz-brand roasters, which is now one of several companies that manufacture air roasters. "Sometimes it seems like we're black sheep, and that's OK," says Hermann. "It's good to have that dynamic, it shakes things up. We're not challenging the norms, but saying, 'Here's a different way and another perspective, which is also valuable.'"

"It comes down to personal preference, and I'd love to see a more equal playing field and greater exposure for air roasting," says Mike Ebert, president of Coffee Masters in Spring Grove, Ill., and SCAA second vice-president. There have been air roasters at a few SCAA/Roasters Guild functions, though without involvement from Sivetz. "A study done at a Roasters Guild retreat would be a great thing, to show people what else is out there."

Sivetz hasn't wanted much to do with formal industry gatherings, due to what he sees as a lack of control in most environments in comparing roasting and brewing methods (though he currently is scheduled to speak on coffee freshness at the SCAA conference in May). His attitudes are a clear reflection of his background. "What people need to understand is that I spent my career in research and development, not production," he says. "This is where my expertise lies, and where my strongest opinions come out."

Sivetz also does little to promote his machines, adding to his relative obscurity. His disinterest in image management and marketing could reasonably explain air roasting's small percentage of the market. "Diedrich, Probat and Ambex [drum roaster manufacturers] are all at the shows," says Norm Killmon, green coffee buyer at The Roasterie. "I wish he'd promote his technology a bit more."

Sivetz seems to cultivate his outsider status, unconsciously or perhaps reflexively. "I have no idea how many roasters I sell in a given month or year," he says. He invented the thing, so what does he need to prove with sales figures? It seems the characteristics of his invention sell themselves, or should. He has never gone the mass production route, though he says he originally offered his air-roasting patent to a few drum roaster manufacturers who showed no interest, maybe because they were so immersed in what they were already doing.

There's something admirable about Sivetz's disregard for aesthetics, his seeming lack of agenda, both visually and in how he communicates his ideas. "His books have more real coffee information in them, no sparkle or pictures of desserts or any of that," says Coffee Review editor Ken Davids. "His work is no-nonsense, cut and dry. His machines aren't fancy or romantic looking."

Davids remembers Sivetz demonstrating a simple sample roaster he created many years ago. "It was basically a heat gun set on its side with a little funnel attached to it. It blew chaff all over." Someone pointed out the chaff issue to Sivetz, who reportedly replied, "It's not a problem. All you need is a vacuum cleaner." As long as it works, "everything else is irrelevant to him," says Davids. "He had tremendous knowledge and a leg up on the competition, but his simple approach may have held him back in the long run. But I respect the honesty—no smoke and mirrors there."

The man and the invention could both be called polarizing. But neither seem to have any firm detractors. "He's done great things for the industry, more than most people combined," says Ebert, who is a drum-roasting loyalist at heart but stresses that it's a personal preference. "He definitely wants to do things his way, which can be challenging but admirable at the same time."

Hermann met Sivetz at the 2007 SCAA conference in Long Beach, Calif. "He's the epitome of the strong personalities in the coffee industry. And that's what makes it unique. Everywhere you turn, whether you're talking roasting, coffee buying, etc., the people who are putting out the best products also tend to have the strongest personalities. It's great to interact with people like that. It's a part of the dynamic that keeps things interesting, for sure."

"I love Mike—he's a genius," says Killmon, who has been in coffee almost as long as Sivetz. "He's got a personality that's a little hard to get around sometimes, but if you get beyond that crust, you find a man who's willing to sit down and talk with you and help you to get done what needs to be done."

Now 86 years old, Sivetz continues to consult on green coffee purchasing, sampling, cupping, brokerage, storage, transport and properties of origins. And he's still churning out new ideas. A few years ago, he patented a process for maintaining coffee's freshness. "A lot of what's going on is incorrect," he says. "There's an unacceptable amount of oxygen in a lot of packaging that is supposedly air-tight."

When asked about the future of his company, Sivetz says, "There's a lot of detail in this business. I'd have to spend at least a year or so with someone to get them up to speed." A scientist at his core, here he seems to be giving a nod to the artistic element of coffee production, which makes specialty coffee special, just as state-of-the-art equipment facilitates it. "Sure, it's the people as much as it is the equipment. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for some creative thinking and the exposure I got along the way to other people's ideas."

 

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