The Unseen Bean sits in an unassuming building off an ordinary, industrial street in North Boulder, Colorado. Its only marking is a small sign of a sunglasses-clad black lab with an exceptionally large muzzle. As I push open the door, bells jingle and immediately two dogs are jumping around me, tails going every which way. I cringe as a tail just misses a coffee mug. I recognize one of the dogs as Midknight, the large-snouted black lab on the sign.
“Hello!” I hear a man’s voice call. His voice has sort of an older folksy tone, as though he’s been singing all night at a bluegrass concert and has stopped between songs to tell a story. I call back, “hello!” and we play this Marco-Polo game until he appears in front of me. He sticks his hand out, “I’m Gerry.” I grab his hand and he begins to show me around his place.
He gestures to the other roasters and I am introduced to his coworkers. The majority of the space is a large room with high ceilings and a concrete floor. There are about fifty garbage bins that line the wall, all labeled. In the middle of the room flop burlap sacks, some of them have a tiny rip where a few beans have escaped their roasting fate. These sacks are adorned with big black letters: COLUMBIA, ZAMBIA, BOLIVIA.
Gerry turns toward me, “Well, shall we talk?” And the interview begins.
Gerry Leary, blind since birth, was raised in a family of car mechanics. Despite his parents’ desperate attempts to keep him out of the garage in fear he might hurt himself on tools he couldn’t see, it was inevitable that this would become his trade as well. Despite his determination and skill, however, Gerry found that no one would hire a blind car mechanic. Undaunted, he decided to start his own garage, and for the next forty years proceeded to prove his doubters wrong by succeeding as the owner and highly-regarded mechanic of Leary Automotive. It wasn’t until a trip to San Francisco that he realized that as much as he loved being an auto mechanic, another passion might take his life in a completely different direction.
Coffee Roasting Passion Begins
During that fateful trip in the early 1990’s, Gerry was dining at a San Franciscan restaurant when he heard an odd clanking noise. When he asked the owner what was making the curious noise, the man enthusiastically took Gerry back into the kitchen and described to him the coffee roaster that was making such a loud, clanking sound. Fascinated by the machine, Gerry was equally intrigued by what it was doing: roasting coffee beans. And thus began Gerry’s fascination with the art and passion of coffee roasting.
It took Gerry nearly seven years after his San Francisco epiphany to get started roasting. For years he attempted to apprentice under other coffee roasters, but they all roasted by color and couldn’t or wouldn’t imagine an alternative to roasting by sight. Finally, however, Gerry was referred to a coffee broker on the West Coast who taught and certified people in coffee roasting. He not only believed Gerry could learn to roast coffee by using his heightened sense of smell as well as some assistive technology that would help him organize and run his business, he was willing to take Gerry on as a student. After years spent learning the differences among beans and roasting techniques, Gerry received his certification in 2003, and was ready to launch his business.
Blind Entrepreneur Once More
With a bit more entrepreneurial enthusiasm than experience, Gerry figured all he needed to succeed in his roasting business was a talking timer and talking thermometer, plus the small quarter-pounder roaster he purchased to begin roasting coffee in his backyard. Slowly, and in small quantities, he earned enough to rent a place in a small town northeast of Boulder to set up an additional roaster that was too large to run from his home. His roasting business continued to grow, and by March 2007, Gerry was finally ready to open his store, the Unseen Bean coffee shop, in downtown Boulder.
Gerry begins showing me around, accompanied by Midknight, who serves as his seeing eye dog, but seems to be off-duty much of the time. Gerry leads me over to the many trash cans lining the walls, and feels along the sides of the bins, reading their Braille labels. “Ahh, here’s Guatemalan beans. Here, reach in and smell these!” I reach into the bin and grab a handful of small green coffee beans. I smell. They have an earthy, root smell to them, not the delicious smell of a roasted bean. “Okay, now smell these!” Gerry opens up the bin to the Panamanian coffee beans and I reach in again and take a big sniff. “Smell how different those are to the Guatemalan?” I answer, “Yes!” with false enthusiasm; I’m not sure I smell as big of a difference as Gerry’s heightened olfaction does. While a visitor stumbles and trips over wood crates and bins,Gerry navigates his way confidently among the bins and canvas bags. To an observer, the Braille labels seem unnecessary, since Gerry has memorized the locations of his many types of beans.
He shows me his smaller roaster, the one he started with in his backyard only a couple of years ago. He talks about an order he received the first Christmas after he began roasting. “I got an order for 360 quarter pounds of coffee. I said, ‘look I can do it, but I can only put out about 4 quarter-pounds an hour. So in an 8-hour day, I can get about 34 roasts in.’ So it took me two and a half weeks to do that man’s order, but it was the first thousand bucks I made and it allowed me to buy the bigger roaster. It was a huge step for me in getting going.”
He walks me over to the finished beans, exhorting me to “smell this roasted Zambia.” I stick my hand into the brown beans and pull out a handful. It takes all my restraint not to climb into the barrel of roasted beans. The smell is rich, flavorful, amazing. It’s one thing to walk through the coffee aisle at the supermarket, but this is heavenly. The beans I smell have been roasted hours ago. I’m sold. I buy a couple of half pounds, the Malawi and a Delta Gamma blend. The thirty minute car ride home gives me a second-hand high of smell.
Assistive Technology and Giving Spirits
When he isn’t roasting, Gerry likes to bike, camp, fish, hunt, connect with his amateur radio, hike, cook, eat, listen to Bluegrass, and socialize. One of his first events as a coffee roaster, in fact, was serving patrons at a Bluegrass festival. Well-liked and accepted in his community, Gerry has found that he rarely needs to ask for help, as it is often given freely. He has also received assistance from The National Federation for the Blind, which has helped Gerry to obtain his assistive technology. Additionally, the Delta Gamma sorority has members who volunteer at the Unseen Bean and fund-raise.
Coffee beans Gerry Leary has proved to the world that sight is not a factor in following your passion – or starting and running a successful business. Those who doubted Gerry’s ability to become a car mechanic – or coffee roaster – were sorely mistaken. To the contrary, Gerry feels strongly that because he relies on other senses to roast coffee, he’s much more involved in the care of his coffee – which makes him an exceptional roaster. It’s his life and anyone who has a sip of his coffee will be hard pressed to disagree.
You can order Gerry’s delicious roasts by visiting www.theunseenbean.com
