Brewing Better Coffee with Stay Golden & FETCO

Since opening in Nashville, Tenn., in July 2018, the folks at Stay Golden have raised the bar for coffee operations in Music City and beyond; their offerings now include two restaurants, a roastery, and retail and wholesale products. Stay Golden's restaurant experience includes breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and coffee (of course), while the wholesale side works closely with customers to ensure they have the coffee, equipment, and training they need to optimize their own coffee program. We spoke to training manager and coffee educator Lee Sill to learn more about how Stay Golden's wholesale operations help other coffee businesses succeed.

Coffee Consultation

"We're a business that roasts green coffee into roasted product that we then bag and sell to various accounts," Sill says. "We sell retail bags online and cases of retail or 5-pound wholesale bags to customers. Those wholesale clients can obviously be coffee shops, but we get a lot of boutique hotels, restaurants, shared work spaces, churches and other non-profits, and sometimes bars and places like that that want to have a coffee service."

Sill consults with customers regarding their bar layouts, equipment needs, and employee training. Ongoing support and education are free services provided to Stay Golden's customers, which sets the company apart from other roasters.

"Compared to five or ten years ago, there's a lot of good roasters out there doing some good work," Sill says. "If we were going to come onto the scene and add value, not only do we want to be one of the best roasters in the country – that's our goal – but we knew we needed to add more than that."

So far, Stay Golden has helped customers from Savannah, Ga., all the way to Upstate New York with dialing in brewers and training baristas on milk steaming and espresso theory to serve superior products.

A FETCO Partnership

Dialing in their coffee brewers is something Stay Golden's team focuses on, too. FETCO coffee brewers from the Extractor® series – including the FETCO CBS-1131-V+ and FETCO CBS-1152-V+ – make up the majority of the company's batch brewers.

"We like the digital programming," Sill says. "With the Extractor series, there's enough control that I can mess with [several] variables that control [the equipment] and really experiment [to] bring out – hopefully – the best out of that coffee. I've been super happy."

Unless a customer can justify having extra help on hand, Sill steers them away from pourover coffee brewers and advises them to focus on creating highly customized batch brew settings.

"Batch brewing has been great for our customers, and the ease in quality has been awesome – as long as the [FETCO coffee brewers] are maintained and you're keeping their filters changed," Sill explains. "We haven't really had any problems, and have just had a lot of satisfied wholesale partners using their FETCOs."

In addition to brewers, Stay Golden's coffee specialist also recommends FETCO grinders, like the FETCO GR-2.3 portion-controlled coffee grinder, for restaurants that don't want the added hassle of weighing and grinding their coffee beans. FETCO GR coffee grinders are portion controlled and will dispense the amount of beans the customer needs with a simple bush of a button, eliminating waste and saving labor.

Augmented Coffees & Coffee on Tap

Stay Golden offers both alcoholic and non-alcoholic coffee drinks, which they refer to as "augmented coffees." One of their most popular beverages – the Calypso – could be described as a tiki-take on Irish coffee. Made with FETCO brewers, it features an almond-based syrup with iced coffee topped with aromatic cream.

Using a FETCO coffee brewer and flash chiller, Stay Golden serves customers iced coffee that comes from a tap, just like beer. The process begins with a freshly brewed, full-strength pot of coffee, which is then run through a beer flash chiller – a process that retains more coffee flavor and aroma. In just 5 minutes, the 190-degree-Fahrenheit coffee is lowered to a temperature between 30 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Then we keg it, remove the oxygen, tap it with nitrogen, and keep it on draft," Sill explains.

Stay Golden also creates coffee cocktails using coffee soda, a flash-chilled roasted coffee product created by their partners at Matchless Coffee Soda®. This carbonated beverage includes sweetener and citric acid for added flavor. Stay Golden's baristas combine this coffee soda with Campari and La Pivón to create a Matchless Americano.

Green Beans?

Stay Golden's coffee beans are proudly roasted in Nashville, but those beans look very different at first. In fact, coffee beans are naturally green. They are classified as seeds and grow inside the fruit of the coffee plant, which is called a "cherry."

"The best quality coffee is actually handpicked when those cherries are ripe or ready," Sill says. "Those cherries can be red, orange, [or] yellow – depending on the variety."

Although coffee beans can be processed in various ways, the more traditional method is called washed processing. During this process, the cherries are thrown into a water bath, where the seeds are separated from the cherry. The seeds are then typically dried outdoors in the sun – or sometimes the shade, which lengthens the drying process – to a specific level of dryness before they're stored and shipped.

"We roast coffee that is only in season, and what that means for us is that all of our coffee was generally harvested six to nine months ago," Sill explains. "Any earlier than six months, and it can be difficult because there's a little too much moisture in the seeds, but later than nine months – especially up to a year – [is] when the coffee becomes past crop."

Want to Stay Golden?

Order your own bag of Stay Golden coffee beans on the company's website or grab an augmented coffee and a bite to eat by visiting one of their Nashville locations at 901 Woodland Street and 2934 Sidco Drive #130.