It's 8 a.m., the beans are weighed, and the oven is preheating to 450 F. Old World’s coffee roaster Katie Gilgen, has 45 minutes to begin her week with the warmth of her own frothy cappuccino.
“The Ayarza [Guatemalan roast] with blueberry flavor is my favorite right now,” she says, before beginning the next five hours of roasting some of Reno’s finest coffee.
With four locations set between Reno and Carson City, Old World Coffee Lab welcomes its guests with its ambient interior. A harmonious blend of exposed hardware and soft organics like Monstera plants permeates its raw-industrial interior.
On a full-time basis, Gilgen works to reproduce promising varieties of quality roasts that are later sold in and out of house.
“The name of the game is consistency,” she explains.
Meticulously profiled coffee beans are thrown into a cast iron Probat roaster - a 12-kilogram drum oven designed to fluctuate in temperature as beans rotate inside. The oven is used alongside analytic software designed to ensure replicable results, all within about 15 minutes. Web-based tools are used to store individual profiles on each variety of coffee bean, and programed to control and monitor the heating and cooling process.
After moving from Cincinnati to study at UNR, Gilgen graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and set out to begin her new career.
After the first two years of working in the tech industry, she came to a blunt realization: a sedentary, isolating workday facing a computer screen was not the life for her. “I needed more activity. I get that here [Old World]... and the vibes are good,” she said.
She also does side work as a taxidermist artist, since launching a shop called Morbid Merriments during the pandemic, as a means to “giving a new life to deceased creatures”. Her Instagram at MorbidMerriments is full of photos of creations made up of bones found in the desert and mice found in nature or “donated from pest control measures.”
Story by Beatrice Bash for Our Town Reno