Rasheed Al-Omari has been roasting coffee for thirty-eight years. Only the last twelve of them have been with a machine.
Samar is a small village in the hills north of Irbid, close enough to the Syrian border that you can hear other people’s weather. Rasheed’s father, Abu Rasheed, kept a sack of green coffee in the back room and roasted it in a long-handled iron pan — a mihmas — over olive wood, twice a week, for anyone who walked in.
There was no thermometer and no timer. There was the sound the beans made when they turned, the colour of the smoke, and a man who would take the pan off the fire ten seconds before you thought he should. Rasheed was nine when he was first handed the handle and told to keep it moving.
“My father never used the word specialty. He just refused to sell anything he wouldn’t drink himself. Turns out that’s the whole industry.”
Rasheed Al-Omari
He moved to Amman at nineteen and to Dubai in 2009, cooking in hotel kitchens on Sheikh Zayed Road because that was the work available. For five years the roasting was a weekend thing on the balcony of a flat in Karama, with a heat gun, a bread machine drum and a neighbour who complained twice.
The complaints stopped when he started leaving bags at the door.
In 2014 he took a unit in Al Quoz with a second-hand Probat UG15 that arrived from Hamburg missing a cooling-tray motor. He rebuilt it over a summer. It is still the only machine he roasts production on; everything on this site came off that drum.
He roasts on Tuesdays. Orders placed by Monday night ship Wednesday morning, which means the coffee in your grinder is usually four days off the cooling tray.
Twice a year he flies to origin and buys what he tastes, not what a sheet says. Boquete and Volcán in Panama in February; Tarrazú, Huehuetenango and Usulután in March; Huila and the Haraz mountains when he can get in. He pays above the auction reference on every lot on this site and prints what he paid on the bag, because his father would have found it strange not to.
The Udaini in the qahwa comes through a broker in Amman who has known the family since before Rasheed was born. That one isn’t a business decision.
Rasheed’s is four people, one drum, eleven wholesale accounts and a Saturday morning cupping table that anyone can sit at if they email first. Abu Rasheed died in 2019. The mihmas is on the shelf above the roaster, and it still gets used at Eid.
Nothing in here yet.
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