Roast of the Town

It's Pho Time

by Layla Khoury-Hanold

August 30, 2023

10:33 AM

The story below is a preview from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!

Gladheart Wine & Brews adds artfully roasted coffee to their robust craft beverage line-up.

Courtesy of Gladheart

Knowing that Gladheart Wine & Brews recently added coffee to their beverage line-up, I expected to be met with the aroma of freshly roasted coffee when I walked in. But the beans’ perfume greeted me with more of a whisper than an enveloping hug. Turns out, the roasting room’s door is kept closed at all times so as not to distract customers picking up their favorite double IPA or hoping to discover a new Malbec. But beyond the room’s gleaming glass window, one can see that something special is brewing here. With the addition of its thoughtfully sourced, artfully roasted beans, Gladheart Wine & Brews offers a craft beverage for mornings, too.

Layla KHoury-Hanold

Approachable, thoughtfully sourced coffee beans complement Gladheart’s beverage offerings.

Coffee has been part of co-owners’ Philip Hatter’s and Jayson Anuszkiewicz’s vision for Gladheart from day one. Although the roasting room build was completed last summer, they couldn’t start roasting without proper equipment. Nine months later, their top-of-the-line, three-kilo roaster from Mill City Roasters arrived. It was worth the wait. When the shop started selling coffee the second week of April, it sold 150 bags of beans, five times as much as Hatter had hoped.

Prior to opening Gladheart, Hatter, a Roanoke native and self-styled coffee devotee, earned a BA in studio art from Roanoke College. “I have noticed that in coffee, a lot of creative people work their way into this world. Because there’s a craft—the art of roasting, brewing—it draws a lot of awesome, creative folks,” Hatter says. “The process of taking this product that people have dedicated their lives to around the world and honoring that in what you do is really rewarding.”

Hatter’s decade of coffee industry experience began with a small at-home roasting operation in Roanoke. He then became a barista in 2013 at Froth; when it closed, he traded in his apron for an account manager role with Floyd-based roastery Red Rooster Coffee. “I got to work with them and all their amazing products. I’d drive up and down the I-81 corridor tasting coffees with cafes and training baristas.” In 2017, Hatter placed eighth in the U.S. Coffee Championship’s Brewer’s Cup; shortly after, Hatter and his growing family moved to Tennessee where he worked as director of coffee at Vienna Coffee Company. Throughout his five-year tenure, Hatter says he learned the art of coffee roasting and gained valuable experience travelling to coffee farms in Guatemala and working directly with producers. In 2022, he returned to Roanoke to open Gladheart with Anuszkiewicz in the former Mr. Bill’s Wine Cellar space.

Courtesy of Gladheart

Gladheart Wine & Brews’ co-owners Philip Hatter and Jayson Anuszkiewicz.

True to Gladheart’s ethos, the bags of thoughtfully sourced beans match the integrity of the wine and beer assortment. Hatter leans on his industry knowledge and relationships with producers and conscientious buyers to source high-quality beans. “I learned this the hard way—you cannot start with a bad quality green coffee and produce a great coffee. You have to start with a green coffee that’s been well-produced,” Hatter says. “I can tell you on most of these bags, down to the farm level where they come from, how they were produced.”

Hatter describes the roasting process as equal parts art and science, so having a background in both realms is vital. “You can’t just do what you feel. These beans react a certain way to heat and to air and you have to know all of that. But you can put your stamp on it in the way you draw different parts of the roast out.” Having an intimate knowledge of the bean’s origin, elevation and terroir is important for understanding each coffee’s complexity, too. As heat is applied to the beans, they change in color from green to yellow to brown, indicating caramelization.

Courtesy of Gladheart

Ethiopian Limu is lauded for its complexity and lemony acidity.

“Hundreds of chemical changes happen inside the bean. That’s where the magic takes place,” Hatter explains. “Then you move in to first crack—it sounds like popcorn popping—that’s the moisture being driven out of the coffee. From the first crack to the second crack you have big acidity, big sugar and then as it progresses you have more of that caramelization, it gets more muted.” Beyond the second crack, one gets the smoky, carbon notes that are signature to a French roast, but don’t showcase the profile of the coffee beans’ origin.

“We typically roast in the light to medium range where you can still taste the origin of the coffee,” Hatter says. “The goal for us is just always a really easy-drinking, balanced cup of coffee. We don’t want intense acidity; we don’t want a lot of bitterness. We want to find a roasting range that really appeals to most people.”

Want to learn more about Gladheart's new coffee roasting operation? Check out the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see it for free in our digital guide linked below!

The story above is a preview from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!

by Layla Khoury-Hanold

August 30, 2023

10:33 AM