Next time you race up front to res­cue a pair of pan­icked baris­tas serv­ing 100 cups an hour con­sider the 2000-cups-per hour Texas-sized chuck wagon break­fasts, church ser­vices for 1000 and the annual Lance Armstrong bicy­cle race R.C. Beall has mas­tered since 1981.

Beall, who founded Montana Coffee Traders (and its Austin, Tex. twin), cut his teeth on Montana rodeos which remain among the more chal­leng­ing venues for the Montana/Texas-based roaster who sells and ser­vices cof­fee brew­ing equip­ment and oper­ates retail shops in Kalispell, Whitefish, Flathead and Columbia Falls Montana as well as the University of Texas, Austin.  www.coffeetraders.com
A Licensed Q-Grader, Beall doesn’t serve swill. He does good busi­ness in high-volume brew­ing, deliv­er­ing 50 to 250 fresh-brewed gal­lons at a time. In some venues a shop can earn $35 per gal­lon retail which is what hotels charge (or $160 whole­sale at $1 a cup deliv­ered in 10-gallon containers).

Every shop should offer catered cof­fee in 96-oz. insu­lated card­board take-away. The busi­ness is prof­itable at $18 for reg­u­lar brew but what Beall has learned is the abil­ity to scale up for events like the pop­u­lar Austin City Limits con­certs and city-wide extravaganzas.

Churches are a sig­nif­i­cant part of his cus­tomer base, says Paul Ballenger, founder of Nashville, Tenn.-based Coffee Makers Etc. In the half hour fol­low­ing ser­vices it is not unusual for churches to serve 500 to 1000 8-ounce cups from a dozen serv­ing sta­tions. www.coffeemakersetc.com

“Pastors know that it doesn’t look good to serve bad cof­fee,” he observes.

Ballenger has a lot to say in praise of the gear itself. Modern brew­ers are not the over-heating over-extracting per­co­la­tors of yore.

Next gen­er­a­tion 4.5– to 45-gallon per hour brew­ers from BUNN, Fetco, Grindmaster, and Wilbur Curtis pro­vide pre­cise tem­per­a­ture con­trols, extrac­tion brew­ing, inter­change­able heat-conserving ther­mal dis­pensers and pulse brew­ing tech­nol­ogy to please the crowds.

You can serve good – even great cof­fee – in quan­tity if you have the right equip­ment and make prepa­ra­tions well in advance, says Beall, “You just have to get up well before dawn.”

“Our chal­lenge as spe­cialty roast­ers 30 years ago was the 10-cent bot­tom­less cup at small town cafes,” he explains. “We were sit­u­ated out­side Glacier Park sur­rounded by 4 mil­lion acres of wilder­ness. Everything was far apart. We learned to do things long distance.”

That’s how he dis­cov­ered the key to suc­cess, he explains. “It’s too much trou­ble to take brew­ing equip­ment to a rodeo and set it up. We brew double-strength cof­fee in a row of French presses and add hot water to taste,” he says.

Delivering 3,750 pounds of brewed cof­fee poses logis­ti­cal prob­lems that may require a fork­lift, two pickup trucks and pal­lets, but that’s often a lot eas­ier than find­ing a sup­ply of fil­tered water.
Ballenger, who dis­trib­utes all the major brands, says that choos­ing the right equip­ment is crit­i­cal… but only after you have scouted the site for water and elec­tric­ity. In most instances one or both are lack­ing, he says.

“Power is one of the biggest con­sid­er­a­tions,” he says, “Serving that large a crowd comes down to heat­ing lots of water very quickly.” Lining up 10 half-gallon cof­fee mak­ers in a church hall is sure to blow a fuse. A 100-cup per­co­la­tor takes an hour to warm up and brew.

“Some of the big­ger equip­ment takes 440 volts. The 220-volt units are com­mon,” he says. High-volume brew­ers that pro­duce 4– to up to 45-gallons an hour are typ­i­cal (the BUNN Titan series makes 22 gal­lons an hour, enough to make 352 8-oz. cups). Prices range from $2,000 to $12,000.

A stain­less steel three gal­lon elec­tric cof­fee urn with a 10-gallon reser­voir that can brew half batches costs under $2,500 new and 1.5 gal­lon portable servers are $175 each.

“Another thing – remem­ber to limit the cup size to 8 oz.,” says Beall. Using a 12-oz. cup greatly increases your cost and the cof­fee gets cold while peo­ple are talk­ing, lead­ing to unnec­es­sary waste.

They can always come back for a sec­ond cup, he says.

Beall’s crew can make 250 gal­lons at a time, occa­sion­ally return­ing to re-brew and refill each 5-gallon ther­mos with hot coffee.

Labor is a big con­sid­er­a­tion. Pre-heating water using boil­ers late in the evening means you can arrive at 2 a.m. and imme­di­ately begin brew­ing. Quality ther­mals keep cof­fee hot for four hours.

The Lance Armstrong can­cer pre­ven­tion ride is more than an hour away. Beall prides him­self in the supe­rior cof­fee he donates to fuel the vol­un­teers so vital to the event.

Hotels and local con­ven­tion cen­ters gen­er­ally invest in their own equip­ment but retail­ers should con­sider pur­su­ing con­ces­sions dur­ing col­lege or high school foot­ball half-time rush or the lines form­ing for the sev­enth inning stretch on a fine October after­noon at the four dia­mond adult league ballpark.

Cowboy Days hosted by the City of Austin draws a crowd large enough to con­sume 4,000 cups in two and a half hours. “They have eight real cow­boy chuck wagon cooks mak­ing cow­boy cof­fee in big enamel ket­tles,” says Beall, but that is not nearly enough. “We have 250 gal­lons ready to go by 5 a.m. in 5-gallon ther­mos, and even then we have to re-brew.”