Jennings Java: Coffee-Roasting

Daniel Jennings, 22, and A.J. Kazmierczak, 24, met as students at Muskingum College and launched their own coffee-roasting business, which today is based in the German Village area. Here, they tell their story.

On the origin of their business:

Daniel: My freshman year of college I really started acquiring the taste for coffee. In the winter of 2015, I tried roasting my own— and set off the smoke alarms in my parents’ kitchen. Luckily, I got a lot better at roasting. I was also studying business with the idea that I might want to start my own small business someday. In 2016, I met A.J. at the university at this program we have called Ignition, run by [Professor] Gary Golden.

A.J: The Ignition program helps students develop their entrepreneurial ideas. I sat in on a meeting where they had people talk about their skills. Daniel and I didn’t know each other, but when he spoke about his ideas … well, from that instant I knew Daniel was born to do something very high up in the coffee industry, and I knew that I wanted to work with him to help him with his endeavor. As it turned out, his passion for coffee rubbed off on me.

Daniel: I was a soccer player and A.J. was a baseball player, so we had hectic schedules. But I also got motivation from some of my professors to start the business. There’s no time like the present, and I was blessed to have people tell me that, because life’s always going to be hectic. One thing we realized quickly at the start is that there’s a lot we don’t know about coffee, but we really enjoyed the aspect of learning more about it.

A.J.: We came up with three pillars to hold up our business. One is to have the freshest coffee possible. So our coffee is usually roasted the day before or two days before you get it.

Daniel: Coffee is not like bourbon or wine where age is a good thing. To really experience the unique flavors that coffee has to offer, you need to drink it within a one-to-21-day time period after roasting. It’s important that your coffee is freshly brewed and freshly ground, but freshly roasted is important as well.

A.J.: Our second pillar is high quality, and so we take extra time to make sure the beans are very well sourced. Our goal is to be able to do direct trade with everybody. And the third pillar is our enthusiasm for the educational side of things. We always tell people here’s what we know, but we will never claim to know it all because we ourselves are always learning.

On the roasting process:

Daniel: Roasting is really just a fancy term for cooking the beans, which are the seeds of the coffee cherry. You just need a heat source and a way of stirring your beans. It’s like cooking a steak. The steak can be rare, medium or well done, which are just different stages of cooking. That’s what we do with coffee as well. A light roast would be similar to rare, a medium roast would be like a medium-well or medium and a well done would be like our dark roast. It’s very important for us to make sure we have a good product from a good farm, because the farmer growing the coffee is doing so much of the work. We like to use the phrase “true to the origin.”

A.J.: That means we want to highlight the incredible flavors that are already in these coffee beans, because we want you to be able to enjoy the amazing product that these farmers created.

On future plans:

Daniel: Wholesaling is a big part of our business now, and that’s what we want to do going forward. But even more than that, we want to create custom roasts and also create custom private labels for restaurants and coffee shops. We want to help promote other people’s brands as well as our own.

A.J: The restaurant that encompasses all that we do would be Fado Pub and Kitchen in Dublin. They serve our espresso, our cold brew, our drip coffee … and they’ve taken it a step further and they’re creating cold-brew cocktails. We’ve also worked with Nocterra Brewing and Grove City Brewing to create some phenomenal beers.

Daniel: We’re continuing to explore other collaborations and opportunities. Columbus has a really great coffee scene. Most of the roasters know each other and support each other, because we’re all doing what we love.

You can find Jennings Java coffee at the Fado Pubs in Dublin and Easton, The Farm Table on 62 in Grove City, JoyHouse Coffee Shop in Circleville and Urban Comforts in Zanesville, among other places. Learn more about the operation and order coffee online at jenningsjava.com.