The Unseen Bean: Blindness can’t stop master coffee roaster

BOULDER — Everywhere Gerry Leary turned, people told him there were things he couldn’t do because he couldn’t see.

Turns out those people were the shortsighted ones.

“In my life, everything I’ve done I started myself,” said Leary, 64, owner of The Unseen Bean, the hot spot for “blind-roasted coffee” in downtown Boulder. “I found it easier to build my own work than to find it.”

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Leary has spent his life finding his own way — with a guide dog and cane, but also with ears and a nose for success.

Born three months premature in Chicago, Leary’s retinas were burned because of too much oxygen in his incubator, and doctors had to remove his eyes when he was 10 months old because they were too infected. So as he grew, Leary relied on his other senses — but what he kept hearing was “You can’t.”

“Most of my life, I got paid under the counter as an auto mechanic because no one else would put me on a payroll,” he said.

On a vacation to San Francisco in the mid-1990s, however, Leary stopped into a restaurant and heard something intriguing. “I asked the waiter what that noise is; it sounded like a giant rock polisher. He said I should come and check it out.

“The sound was coming from a coffee roaster. He roasted by sound and smell instead of sight because he couldn’t stand in front of his roaster; he had too much to do,” Leary said. “He let me do a couple of roasts myself and walked me through it. So I knew this is something I could do; if I ever stopped fixing cars, I could be a coffee roaster.”

So in 2001, Leary closed Gerry’s Auto Service on North Broadway in Boulder “and tried going to every coffee company I could find, trying to find a job as a roaster or even a roaster’s apprentice,” he said. “All the people said I needed to see because you need to roast coffee by color. But I thought, gee, I did this already. Maybe I just need more experience.”

Leary secured $20,000 by refinancing his house, spent $2,000 of it on classes at the West Coast Specialty Coffee Co. in San Francisco “and came back with a certificate but still couldn’t find a job,” he said.

He paid $2,000 for an 8-by-12-foot Tuff Shed for his backyard and $6,000 on his first coffee roaster — but heard yet another “you can’t” when he found out he couldn’t run a commercial roaster out of his home. In May 2004, he rented a space at 120 Ninth Ave. in Longmont and spent $8,000 to open the first Unseen Bean.

“I was roasting a quarter-pound of coffee at a time,” he said, “and then I saved money for a year and bought the big roaster I have now. It’ll handle 27 pounds.”

Leary opened the current 330-square-foot coffeehouse in leased space at 2052 Broadway in Boulder in May 2007, then moved his roaster to a spot near 55th Street and Arapahoe Avenue but soon decided that site was too expensive. In December 2012, he moved the roaster again, this time to a 650-square-foot space in a building owned by Flatirons Community Church at 400 W. South Boulder Road in Lafayette, where Leary hopes to establish a second retail presence.

“People really like the coffee, and that’s a lot of fun,” he said. “The business brings out the positives in folks. There aren’t a lot of blind entrepreneurs around, so people are interested in asking me how I do it.” So how does he do it?

“Once you determine what kind of business you want, you need a really good support group — a bookkeeper, accountant and secretary, because the hardest part is paperwork,” he said. “You need good marketing people. You need people you can trust, instead of managers skimming the cash drawer or miscommunicating about sales. And you need a driver.”

All sorts of specialty aids help Leary do his work. “I developed a talking thermometer – a thermocouple inside the roaster that can read up to 2,500 degrees,” he said. “I have a talking timer to time my roast, and then I use the sound of the coffee tumbling in the roaster — and how it smells. Coffee smells different when it’s roasting than when it’s brewing; it gives off a whole different set of information. In a way, it’s similar to cooking in that some foods taste a little different than they smell, and they smell a little different when they’re cooking than on your plate.”

When Leary works behind the counter in Boulder, he uses a Dymo label-maker to make raised-letter labels for condiments, pastries on the shelf and creamers in the refrigerator. A touch screen on the cash register comes with an automated voice that tells him what key he’s hitting.

“I went through a whole lot of point-of-sale programs until I could find one I could work with,” he said. “That wasn’t easy.”

Besides selling at the coffeehouse, he fills online orders and also ships coffee to offices, restaurants and businesses such as The Cupboard in Fort Collins and Colorado Gift Co. in Broomfield. He and associates are working on a CBD-infused coffee, and his brew helped Boulder-based Twisted Pine Brewing Co. win a bronze medal at the 2012 Great American Beer Festival for its Big Shot Espresso Stout.

He buys his coffees from brokers but dreams of visiting coffee farms himself.

“I don’t know when retirement’s going to be,” Leary said. “Until I can afford to quit. I’ve got $29 in my savings account. That’s how close I am to retirement. I don’t get government money, and I know nothing about Social Security and all that crap.

“But I’m having a good time and don’t want to stop. I’m hoping to build it big enough that I can take a stipend on it and let it run or sell it to someone else and live on that.”

Until then, Leary will keep brewing up good coffee and good cheer — and ignoring anyone who says, “You can’t.”

“I’d had the Boulder store about a year, and we were burgled,” he recalled. “The police didn’t believe a blind guy could have a business. I told them I do it the same way you would start one: Sign the papers and run it!”

Dallas Heltzell can be reached at 303-868-6631. Follow him on Twitter at @DallasHeltzell.