In a java-loving world dominated by Starbucks and flavored with local roasters ranging from Metropolis and Casteel to Stewarts and PapaNicholas, Zell has carved a niche for Intelligentsia based on his coffee — and coffee-drinking — philosophies.
His mission: to change your notion about that cup of coffee you’re drinking.
It should be “a culinary experience,” he says. “The experience we deliver in our stores could be transformational to the way people perceive coffee, that it’s not just more of the same, that it’s not a fast-food experience.”
Zell believes aficionados of the bean should enjoy coffees in season when a bean first comes to market and savor single-origin brews as well as blends. Coffee should be paired with foods. Each cup should be brewed to order. And espresso should be perfect. Always.
A perfectionist? He’s been called that as well as a pioneer and champion of the humble coffee bean.
“Perfection in coffee is something we are chasing but will never catch. It is something to continuously strive for,” he says. “By pursuing coffee in this fashion, we believe we can elevate it to its rightful place in the culinary world.”
His vision stretches beyond the cup — beyond its role as a “caffeine delivery system” — into the realm of fine wines and craft beers: “There is a real opportunity to change economies beginning at source and transform what was once a commodity product into something of meaningful value, something that has the potential to change lives in a very positive way.”
His sourcing and seasonality efforts have earned him the respect (and business) of many top chefs, from Charlie Trotter and Paul Kahan (Avec, Blackbird) in Chicago to celeb chef Mario Batali’s Mozza eateries with Nancy Silverton in LA.
“He is responsible for a great deal of what’s happening in today’s coffee world,” says Bruce Sherman, a chef and locavore proponent who serves Intelligentsia at his North Pond restaurant. “Doug is trying to approach coffee the way we approach food,” he says. “What he’s doing represents the same philosophy of what we do with produce and meat, which is to find out where it’s coming from.”
At Alinea, featuring award-winning chef Grant Achatz, several Intelligentsia selections are offered to diners, says the restaurant’s sommelier/general manager, Joe Catterson.
The coffees “really do have some sense of place, the same sort of thing we look for in wines,” he says. “Servers say to diners, “‘Well, do you like something more full-bodied and toasty, or do you like something light with brighter acidity and prettier red fruits?'”
Doug Zell’s road to perfection begins in the 19 countries where the Intelligentsia team is developing direct trade, rare in the coffee roasting arena.
“One of our buyers is usually at source working on something with our direct-trade partners almost every day of the year,” says Zell. “It’s rigorous, but I think that’s what it takes now. I don’t think you can sit behind a desk and hope that it’s all going to work out.”
He’s one of the “pioneers of the seasonal movement and single-origin,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, based in Long Beach, Calif. “And he may be the first roaster … actively working to train his producers to produce to a higher standard.”
“They are incredibly passionate about what they do,” says Rick Bayless, the Frontera Grill/Topolobampo chef/cookbook author/TV personality, referring to Zell and his VP of coffee/coffee buyer Geoff Watts. “Who else visits all their farms?”
And brings together those growers to, as Zell says, “share their country-specific knowledge with each other.”
The first such gathering was held in Colombia last year. Last month, 13 growers from Central and South America plus East Africa and the Pacific met in Santa Ana, El Salvador, for visits to growers from which Intelligentsia buys.
“The conditions where coffee is grown around the world does have its similarities, but there are also great differences,” says Zell of his grower-education effort. “This closes those gaps of understanding through a farmer-to-farmer forum.”
While the direct-trade effort has evolved over the years, the educational piece has always been part of his mission, whether it’s in the training of baristas or chefs or passionate coffee-sippers. Public tours are offered monthly at the Chicago roasting facilities, with tours in LA in the works. A New York City training facility is designed for chefs, baristas, etc., to learn “latte art,” barista skills and food pairings.
Intelligentsia’s logo says it all: an eye peering out from a winged coffee cup.
“An eye that’s looking to the heavens, the idea of lofty ideas,” says Zell, “and the wings are really supposed to convey the idea of the travel piece of it, and worldliness.”
He is explaining this on a hike through Intelligentsia’s low-slung, red brick building on West Fulton Street, where coffee passion percolates. In the cupping lab, glass Chemex coffeemakers, coffee mugs and grinders jostle for space with coffee buyer Watts and tasters, sniffing and sipping brews from Kenyan and Brazilian beans. Another space, a Rube Goldberg playroom, is stacked with metal contraptions. “We’re developing barista tools, for home and shops, and brewing devices,” he says.
Zell’s a longtime supporter of barista competitions — “We’ve won the U.S., I think, more than anybody and have the most regional champions” — because, as the perfectionist explains, “it provides intense focus on getting something seemingly ordinary exactly right. It elevates what is possible for baristas, taking great strides to professionalize the industry.” The next U.S. event, the eighth annual, is in mid-April.Back in the training room, tea buyer Doug Palas and barista educator Mike Phillips (also the 2009 U.S. barista champ) are at work. A few minutes later, it’s down a flight of stairs to the roasting room, where burlap-sacked beans reside on metal shelving awaiting their turn in 90-kilo vintage Gothot roasters from Germany. At a round table, young men sniff and taste their way through quality-control experiments. They’ve been at it since 6 a.m.
“Everything is roasted to order and shipped out today and delivered tomorrow,” Zell shouts over the beat of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the growl of the roasters.
“When people say, ‘Why should coffee cost more than XYZ?’ they don’t realize that by paying so little, the chain goes back to somebody being very, very poor in a very, very poor country producing coffee. And to me, that’s not OK,” he says. “We wanted to put an incentive for quality but also to pay prices that would allow the growers to invest in the future, both in terms of the infrastructure, better growing practices, etc.”
“He’s helping consumers recognize that there are qualitative differences in coffees. That it’s not just a commodity,” says Rhinehart, of the Specialty Coffee group (Zell was a board member). “It’s not just coffee, period, no more than it’s just wine, period.”
Zell grew up in Whitefish Bay, just north of Milwaukee, with brother Steve, mom Daisy and dad Donald, now retired jewelry designers and entrepreneurs.
“My mother’s side of the family is German, so they definitely liked their coffee,” he says, “even before good coffee was good coffee.”
At 18, he headed to the University of Wisconsin to be a lawyer: “I didn’t do that well on the LSAT, so I decided to do something else.”
“Something else” was a yearlong corporate sales job with a Japanese electronics firm, followed by a move to California to launch a bottled stevia-flavored iced-tea company with a friend. He met Emily Mange over tea.
The Zell-Mange relationship clicked. The iced tea didn’t.
“It went belly up after four years,” he remembers.
But the young couple saw a future in coffee. Zell went to work for Peet’s Coffee & Tea, then Spinelli Coffee Co. They wanted to offer a coffee culture beyond what the giants were offering and with more oversight than he’d had over tea.
“It was difficult to control where the tea was distributed, who was getting it out there, how it was prepared,” he says. “Initially, we just planned on doing a retail store where we would have control of how the coffee was prepared, how it’s presented, etc.”
So, with coffee on their minds, the now-married Doug and Emily packed up their Isuzu Trooper and drove back to the Midwest, through St. Louis (Emily has family there) and on to his parents’ home in Wisconsin. They holed up in Daisy and Donald’s basement and wrote a business plan, Doug drawing on his days working in coffee, Emily, her work in operations at Whole Foods. They opened the North Broadway Intelligentsia, then built the business together for 10 years before Emily became a full-time mom to Scarlet.
These days, Zell is busy juggling the whole life-balance thing with his global travels (he has visited 10 countries that source his coffees; he has his sights set on Uganda next).
Are you ever off the clock?
“Ah, not very well,” Zell says, who often skis with his family in winter and summers at a rented place in Michigan. “There’s not a lot of free time with an 8-year-old daughter. She’s in soccer, ice skating all that family stuff.
“I work out in a gym, lift weights and run,” he says. “But I still am working on balancing work and everything else.”
“We work on balance,” Emily says, with a laugh.
He may be most relaxed when cooking, she says. “He’s a fantastic cook. He can just conjure up a recipe and a meal plan in his head, and it turns out fantastic.”
His specialty? “Fish tacos.”
And coffee. “I use Chemex. It brews a really nice cup. You get great clarity. It enhances the style of coffees that I like,” says the man who takes his coffee black — always black. “If the coffee is great, there is no need to add anything. It should be sweet and balanced on its own.”
His view of the perfect cup of coffee has evolved as Intelligentsia and our coffee drinking have evolved, from roasting preferences to a barista’s role, nudged along by coffee guys such as Zell.
The coffee at source, with input from roasters that invest in getting the coffee right, he says, “has improved the quality of those coffees dramatically.” We’ve moved, he says, “away from darker roasts that obscure the inherent flavors in a great coffee to lighter roasts which highlight them. If the coffee is sweet and clean, it doesn’t need to hide behind a dark roast that is merely carbonizing something that is marvelous tasting.”
His mantra? “You should be expecting carefully prepared espresso drinks and coffees that taste great and also have a story behind them to the extent that you know where the coffees are coming from,” he adds. “You should have an experienced crew that’s very, very well-trained preparing them. You should expect a culinary experience for your $5.”
What keeps him in Chicago is more than proximity to extended family. “There’s something lovely about this city. It’s comfortable. It’s cozy, and it’s still a big city, a big hulking city. But it produces people that are practical but hardworking. Good things emanate from here.
“There are a lot of imaginative things going on culinarily.”
You could say the same thing about Doug Zell.
Intelligentsia by the numbers:
3: coffee bars in Chicago (3123 N. Broadway; 53 W. Jackson Blvd.; 53 E. Randolph St.)
2: coffee bars in LA (Venice, Silver Lake; this summer: Pasadena)
159: Employees
8-10: thousands of pounds roasted daily in Chicago
2.3 million: projected number of pounds roasted in Chicago in 2010
3+ million: projected number of pounds roasted companywide in 2010
19: countries where the beans come from: Bolivia, Brazil, Burundi, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia (Sulawesi), Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Papua (New Guinea), Peru, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia.
Coffee talk: What should you be looking for in a perfect cup of coffee? Taste for its sweetness, body, acidity, finish and flavor. “Look for a balance of those,” says barista Mike Phillips.
Drink it: “Delicate, smaller espresso drinks have a life span. It’s tragically short,” says Phillips.
Taste for flavors: dark chocolate, baking chocolate, maple syrup, roasted almond, allspice, clove.
Doug Zell’s favorite beans — now: Los Inmortales-Finca Matalapa, Los Guayabos Micro-Lot (El Salvador): creamy cherry, caramel, dried fruit, lime. (Fresh crop available March 12.) Itzamna, La Maravilla (Guatemala): ripe cherry, milk chocolate, citrus. (Fresh crop arrives mid-May.) Yirgacheffee (Ethiopia): floral, bergamot, purple fruit. (Fresh crop arrives in May.)Thiriku (Kenya): blackberry, sweet citrus with great depth. (Fresh crop in late May, early June.)