William Ruiz, of New Haven’s new coffee roasting company, Bequest Coffee Roasters, knows and understands the power of a good cup of coffee powered by good beans. A graduate of Collab + CitySeed’s Food Business Accelerator program, Ruiz has opened Bequest online first, and is ready to deliver good beans to the people of New Haven and beyond.
For once, there’s a good thing to keep us awake at night.
For Ruiz, coffee has “been kind of a passion of mine,” he said. “It started as a desire for a café, but real estate was ridiculous. So I said I’d be a roaster, and do e‑commence during Covid and go from there.”
He describes himself as a coffee addict, and that proved inspiration enough.
“I started traveling a bunch in the last 10 years, and as I traveled more, my at-peace place was finding the nearest artisanal café for a nice latte,” he said. He smiled, reminiscing on the joys of travel and coffee at the same time. “From Indonesia to Thailand or Costa Rica, I needed a café to start my day. I love coffee and I love brewing it, and culturally it’s very Hispanic —even though the origins are in Africa. It’s just something I wanted to do.”
Ruiz is especially knowledgeable on the processing of the beans. Most coffees are prepared by washing off the fruit that surrounds the beans and drying them mechanically.
Ruiz’s latest love, however, has been natural-process coffees from Ethiopia: Rather than washing off the fruit, growers allow it to fall off naturally as the beans dry in the sun, adding sweet and fruity notes to the beans. The variation in flavor is tremendous with a less controlled process, but for Ruiz, that’s what makes it so compelling.
“That’s the side of coffee I compare to wine or tea,” he said.
With the knowledge he brings to selecting his coffees, Ruiz is also careful to share the ideal conditions for the perfect cup.
Ruiz grew up drinking coffee from stovetop espresso makers. Today he regularly prepares pour-over coffee for himself at home with the occasional latte as a treat. The labels on the jars for his coffee (yes, jar; we’ll address that later) list brewing and grinding instructions for five different brewing lessons, from espresso to pour-over, to ensure each cup is the best it can be. The information makes a café-level brew accessible in all the right ways, and saves early morning bleary-eyed searches for proper ratios from ever happening again.
But why plastic jars, as opposed to the near-ubiquitous bags?
For Ruiz, it’s for two reasons: freshness and sustainability. Sealed jars slow the rate at which coffee grows stale and provide a vehicle for better quality control and freshness — not to mention the aesthetic value of seeing the beans in all their caffeinated glory. Another perk lies in providing customers with the option to “close the loop” — that is, return the jars back to Bequest and eliminate waste, in a similar fashion to, say, CO2 canisters for soda machines, or growlers for brewers.
Returning the jars also allows customers to have an ongoing relationship with Bequest that extends beyond the transactional. “I wanted to build a community where the exchange was almost a requirement. It harbors a relationship of some sort,” Ruiz said. He also is cognizant that there’s a huge garbage issue piling up both locally and globally. “I’d hate for people to throw the container away, and then I’d be contributing even more to the world’s garbage issue…. Going to a lot of our community management meetings, our disposal head of New Haven said we’re in a crisis, and that we don’t know what to do with recyclables, and it’s all going into the garbage… Looking at piles of garbage, it occurred to me that all of these brands have never changed their packaging because they’ve never been held accountable for it.” Bequest, even in its name, carries the idea of inheritance and the stewardship that comes with it.
Using the medium-roast beans from Guatemala — Bequest’s current option (though more are on the way) — I made a standard pour-over cup. The aroma of the ground beans themselves was delicate with notes of citrus or fruit. The prepared coffee also delivered, with a nutty taste that stayed balanced with the sweeter notes, leaving no bitterness on the tongue and a very, very satisfied and awake journalist.
Covid-19 has prevented Ruiz from moving forward with any kind of brick-and-mortar plans (he eventually hopes to have a space to roast and sell), but he’s excited to stay in New Haven as an e‑commerce business. He was born and raised in New Haven, attended Career High School and SCSU, and previous operated a food cart, The Twisted Croissant, in the Cedar Street area. He’s now excited to grow a business in a growing city.
“The New Haven of 2008 is not the New Haven of today,” he said. “It’s booming.”