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Saturday, April 11, 2009

St. Thomas Roasters

St. Thomas Roasters Coffee House, Harrisburg Pennsylvania © Susqueats.com 2009

If you aren't from the Linglestown area, you may wonder as you drive through town why so many of the businesses use St. Thomas in their name. St. Thomas Roasters is one such business, and it took owner Geof Smith to shine a light on the mystery for me, but more on that later. St. Thomas Roasters is a quaint little coffee house that takes coffee to the next level by roasting their own beans.

Here freshly roasted beans are stirred to help quickly cool them off.

In this picture Geof releases freshly roasted beans from the roaster into the cooling hopper.

Roasting coffee beans is a bit of an art. Geof uses multiple indicators to help him reach the perfect roast for each batch. Time, temperature, visual color, smell, sound (of the popping beans) can all help determine when the beans are done roasting and the same beans can be roasted different amounts for a different finished product.

After roasting Geof mixes beans with flavoring agents to create the specialty coffees that they also have available.

St. Thomas Roasters sells their roasted beans both retail and wholesale and their coffee can be found in several local coffee houses and restaurants.

In addition to their freshly roasted coffee, St. Thomas Roasters has a selection of food items for breakfast or lunch.

Breakfast items include a selection of Croissants with egg, various pastries like the Danish pictured here, muffins (pictured below) and more.

Lunch includes a selection of Paninis named after levels of coffee aficionado. Choices include The Grammy, The Master Roaster, The Barista or The Apprentice (pictured here) which is ham, Swiss, baby spinach, and dill mayonnaise served with chips.

Other choices include Tuna or Chicken Salad on Croissant, Soup of the Day, and Quiche.

There is also a selection of pastries available at lunch. Here their Pretzel Pastry is pictured with a Latte and some freshly roasted coffee beans.

Oh... and I almost forgot the Linglestown story. The town founder Thomas Lingle named the town after his first name, thus St. Thomas. People however always referred to it as Lingle's Town, and later after his death the name of the town was officially changed to Linglestown.