Hidden in an industrial area in the Avondale Area, a massive roasterie right on the river.
"This place is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for adults," laughed Tony Dreyfuss, co-owner, Metropolis Coffee Company, who IS the Willie Wonka of this family owned roasting facility.
"You come in, you get caffeinated, there's beans flying all over the place", he smiled. "Some of these roasters go back to the 1930's."
Inside the 18,000 square foot manufacturing hub, 3057 N. Rockwell, is where the magic happens.
"We do everything here," Dreyfuss said. "Raw coffee comes in from around the world, 150 pound bags, burlap sacks and then we take it and we roast it to order for our customers, wholesalers and retailers."
Several vintage machines churn and roast millions of beans each day. There's a training center and a so-called cupping lab where coffee tasters literally put the blends to the slurping test.
"We buy coffee and we get samples of coffee from around the world," he said. "We roast 100 gram samples. It's a very specific way of tasting where you can evaluate the coffee on its own merits, you can score it just like a wine or a beer. We apply that score to different categories like the flavor, the aroma, the acidity."
Dreyfuss was a philosophy major at the University of Wisconsin when he decided he might want to venture into the coffee industry.
"I was driving a cab to get through school," he said. "I would go get coffee at this rat hole coffee shop and I loved the atmosphere. When I tasted the coffee, it knocked me over. I knew then what I wanted to do with my life."
He would soon move to Portland, Or. and work for Peet's Coffee & Tea where he was first introduced to the business.
Founded in 2003, he and his father Jeff started out running a small cafe in Edgewater after they found a vintage roasting machine at a trade show.
"This piece of equipment looked like a freight train and we bought it. It was nuts. We didn't have a business plan. We had no place to put it but we bought it and we started planning Metropolis. We started as a roaster retailer," he recalled.
Fifty employees and nearly 20 years later, the duo has grown Metropolis into the largest fair trade coffee roaster in the state of Illinois, producing up to a million pounds of coffee a year.
"There are people that grow this coffee around the world, there are people that roast it, people who drink it. We just see ourselves as stewards of the coffee along the way." he said.
Dreyfuss travels the world to find the perfect beans, and meet the farmers who cultivate them.
"If people knew, they would be so in love with this process. It takes 1500 hand picked coffee cherries to make just one pound of coffee. It's unbelievable," he said.
Metropolis offers 25 different coffee blends and single origins and now cold brews that can be found in more than 300 locations nationwide.
Dreyfuss says, in the end, the mission is about building a community around coffee, something they hope to do for decades to come.
"'The coffee business has the power to bring people together. In our cafe in Edgewater, we have dozens and dozens of languages spoken every day there, young people, old people, rich people, poor people. I think it's an amazing thing about the space of coffee. The price of admission is the price of a small cup of coffee. It's communal." he smiled. "In the end, we're in the people business."
For more information about Metropolis Coffee company, log onto their website at metropoliscoffee.com .
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