At a small shotgun building at the edge of New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, Jericho Cyrus scoops coffee beans and prepares for a roast. Thirty-four years ago, he was just a guy looking for work.
“I was looking to do something better than working in a grocery store or restaurant,” he says. “So I decided to flip through the Yellow Pages to try to find a better job, and I saw Try Me Coffee.”
He knocked on the door. While the owner initially turned him away, Cyrus came back the following day and tried again. The owner needed some help, and soon Cyrus had a job.
Cyrus started as a roaster – and now decades later he's a master roaster and production manager. But the history of the company goes back even further.
According to the current co-owner Lauren McKay, who goes by the nickname Mermaid, the story begins in 1925.
“A hundred years ago, a bank teller started roasting coffee and he went door to door in the Bywater,” she told me. “And he asked his neighbors to try my coffee.”
The company was born, and so was the name, Try-Me Coffee. The Kepler/Lutz family managed the business for 98 years, and in 2023, they sold it to Mermaid and her husband Abby King, who – by no surprise – goes by Merman. They say it’s their innovative mixtures of flavors that’s helped the business last a century.
“We started with classic coffee and chicory,” she says. “But then we went to blends and then single origin coffee. And then we did flavored coffee. So we're just always kind of trying to be creative and meet our community with what they want next.”
And what I want next is a cup of dark roast. We head to the back area – a big room with a tall ceiling, a chicory mixer, bags of beans and 30-pound roasters as old as the business itself.
Cyrus starts by scooping up a pound of Colombian coffee beans. He pours them into a one pound roaster, lights a flame underneath, and the beans start to rotate.
“As the cylinder heats up and it starts to roast your first indication that it's getting close is its color and starts to pop,” he says.
The beans are spinning round and round, slowly changing color. But Cyrus says, it’s not just about how they look, it’s how they smell and sound.
“You use your sense of hearing to hear how often it's popping,” he says. “To know when to reduce the flame again, to let it level out at that even shade.”
One round of popping if you want a light roast. Two if you want dark. After the pops, Cyrus turns down the flame and scoops out some beans to compare them to a previously roasted batch. They match up! Which means the beans are ready.
Once the beans have cooled, Jericho weighs them on the scale…now it’s time to grind.
From scooping the beans, to roasting them over a flame, to grinding them down, the process only takes about 10 minutes. And while it might seem repetitive to some, the team doesn't see it that way.
“The process of coffee is so interesting because it's just like New Orleans,” says Merman. “You go as deep as you go, there's always something else to learn.”
When the beans are ground to completion, it’s finally time to make a cup of coffee. We pour hot water over the grounds and smells of a deep, rich dark roast fill the air. Then we take a sip.
It’s hard for any business to last this long. But then again – it’s a really good cup of coffee.
