A soft ch- ch- ch- ch- sound comes from a 100-year-old coffee roasting machine as it turns raw coffee beans in a heated drum. The sound is just barely heard over the quiet jazz playing through nearby speakers, but it helps create a certain ambience that fills Sheldrake Coffee Roasting, a small coffee shop on the corner of Second Street and Livingston Drive.
Outside on the patio, owner Mike Sheldrake can be found talking to customers like they’re old buddies. Sheldrake has become friends with many of his regulars, some of whom have been coming since the shop opened in 1976.
Now, Sheldrake Coffee Roasting is celebrating its 50th anniversary on Wednesday, Sept. 30, from 5 to 7 p.m. with catering from Primal Alchemy and presentations about the shop’s history.
Sheldrake’s Coffee Roasting began as Polly’s Gourmet Coffee and was the only in-house coffee roasting business between Beverly Hills and San Diego.
Sheldrake’s father, Eddie, had opened a diner in 1968 called Polly’s Pies — now with locations across Southern California. Eddie wanted to control the coffee they were serving and tasked Sheldrake, the resident coffee lover, to open a shop specifically to make quality coffee for the family’s restaurant.
“I was the coffee fanatic in the company. I just lived for a good cup of coffee,” he said. Sheldrake ran the shop as a subsidiary of Polly’s Pies for 13 years.
“Then I had what is called an ‘entrepreneurial seizure,’” Sheldrake said. “That’s a situation where you’re working for somebody else, and one day you say, ‘Wait a minute! If I know so much about what I’m doing, why are they getting all the money?’”
He bought the coffee shop from his parents in 1989 and has been running it independently ever since. Polly’s Pies continues to be one of their biggest customers, buying 1,000 pounds of coffee each week. Sheldrake also supplies the coffee sold at the Long Beach Airport and 15 other businesses throughout the city.
Sheldrake Coffee Roasting has built a name for itself as a coffee expert. The shop even appeared in an episode of the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels” about the history of coffee.
The shop’s identity was solidified when Starbucks opened down the street in 1993.
“Back in the day, [Starbucks was] the 800-pound gorilla. We just hung on everything they did and tried to do it,” Sheldrake said. “Fortunately for us, we failed in everything that they were doing, and we eventually learned that what we sell is coffee beans, coffee drinks and pastries.”
Sheldrake said they always knew how to make good coffee, but they struggled with marketing. A consultant set up a David (Sheldrake) and Goliath (Starbucks) marketing campaign that garnered the attention of the New York Times in 1999.
Sheldrake’s strength lies in his in-house coffee roasting program.
“Our mechanical advantage in the business is that coffee will lose 25% of its flavor in the first 14 days after it’s roasted,” Sheldrake said. “That’s why we import the beans and bring them in green, and we roast them on our 100-year-old German machine.”
On the large machine, Sheldrake and his team roast 8,000 to 10,000 pounds of coffee every month.
Only four people, including Sheldrake, know how to operate the machine. It’s a very delicate process that requires a lot of fine-tuning, Sheldrake explained.
“It’s like when you’re riding a bicycle, you make a million adjustments every second. That’s what these roasters do on this machine, without even thinking about it. They just react to what’s being shown to them by the roasting process,” he said.
The roasters can check on the beans as they roast by pulling out a rod that holds a small sample of the beans. When the beans are ready – usually once they’re at a medium-dark roast – they’re dumped onto a cooling tray then packaged by hand.
Sheldrake is proud of the product he puts out and the customers-turned-friends he’s made along the way.
“People ask what my favorite coffee is, might as well ask me who my favorite grandchild is. I love them all. If I don’t love it, it’s not going to be good,” he said.
Sheldrake Coffee Roasting, 4606 Second St., is open every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.