Fall Internship: A Day in the Life of Elias Tchapadarian
Management Major with a Specialization in Entrepreneurship
Elias Tchapadarian, Coffee Roaster Intern fro TRVLR Coffee Roasters.
Hello! My name is Elias Tchapadarian and I am a third year transfer student from Orange County majoring in Management with a specialization in Entrepreneurship! Since coming to campus, I have been getting involved in various organizations including the Men’s Lacrosse Team and holding an executive position in the Armenian Student Association. In addition to these involvements, I also have an immense passion for the coffee industry. I currently intern as a Coffee Roaster for TRVLR Coffee Roasters and work as a barista/roasting assistant for The Coffee & Tea Collective.
I was lucky enough to begin my internship a couple weeks after the school year started. I met with the owner, Dan Romeo, during my first week in San Diego and the rest was history. TRVLR Coffee Roasters is a local, San Diego coffee company established in 2018 by Dan Romeo. In addition to serving amazing drinks, we also supply many restaurants and bars across San Diego with roasted coffee and cold brew.
Coffee roasting is an art form in and of itself, so there is always a new profile to create or an old one to perfect. Being in the industry for over five years now, this keeps my day-to-day life exciting and caffeinated.
Here is a typical roasting day as an intern at TRVLR:
6:30 am - Working in coffee is the equivalent of being a morning person through and through. I’m up at 6:30 am sharp; I will usually make a sandwich the night before and grab it in the morning on my way out.
7:30 am - By this time, I’m dressed and heading out the door. I always make sure to grab my water bottle and apron on the way out. I like to give myself plenty of time to get to work and every Thursday I stop to grab a bagel from Einstein Bros!
8:00 am - I arrive at my internship and meet up with Dan as well as my co-roaster Isaac. We have a meeting to discuss goals for the day, orders, and anything else related to workflow and operations. It is always nice to start the day collaborating and bouncing ideas off of eachother.
9:00 am - The roasting begins with us firing up the roaster and bringing it to temperature. A typical charge temperature is anywhere between 390 - 410 degrees Fahrenheit. The charge temperature is the temperature the roasting drum needs to be before we drop the coffee in! While the roaster heats up, we load our computer charts, software, and excel sheets.
10:00 am - We are ready for our first roasts of the day! Typically, we plan in advance which roasts we want to crank out, but today we had a large volume of orders from our wholesale clients. The average roast takes anywhere from 9-12 minutes for us, depending on the coffee, so the typical hour consists of around 5 roasts. Coffee has all different types of sizes and densities, depending on the region of the world it comes from!
Tchapadarian performing quality control on the freshly roasted coffee bean batch.
11:00 am - By this time, we have completed 5 Pipeline roasts, which is our amazing espresso blend. We roast Pipeline in 7 pound batches, allowing us to control the roast impeccably. Our roaster, the Diedrich IR-5 has a max load of 5 kilos, or 11 pounds per roast.
12:00 pm - We recently took on a new client, who needed us to fire through a lot of coffee. I went to work prepping the immense amount of green so the roasts can flow smoothly.
1:00 pm - By this time we have prepared and started roasting 2 Ethiopian roasts, 2 Colombian roasts, 2 Peruvian roasts, 3 Guatemalan roasts, and 1 Swiss Water Processed decaf Ethiopian roast.
2:00 pm - Around this time, our roast day concludes. Next, we begin the process of bagging what we roasted and preparing it for distribution. We deliver on Fridays, so the entire week leading up to delivery day is simply roasting, making cold brew, and bagging. We process and roast about 300 to 400 pounds per week!
3:00 pm - At this time we are finished bagging and the final step is simply to stage the coffee for delivery. We have a process order and make sure everything stays together and labeled. We then sit down, make a cup of coffee, and discuss the day. We review our charts and if something about a roast needs to be tightened up, we figure out the best steps to take.
4:00pm - I am out the door, usually with a 12oz bag of coffee and heading back home. The roastery is only a 10 minute drive from my house which makes the commute almost non-existent.
Overall, I have been loving my time as an intern for TRVLR Coffee Roasters. There is always something new to learn and I am excited to apply the roasting skills I am building to my future coffee endeavors. I am extremely lucky to be in the position I am in and this internship is continuing to develop crucial knowledge needed to be a successful coffee professional.
