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The coffee pot was always on at Rodak’s Cadillac Repair body shop near the Texas Christian University campus in Fort Worth.
That tradition blended with another one of Marvin Rodak’s passions, drag racing. It percolated into a friendship with WFO Radio’s Joe Castello and later eight-time Top Fuel champion Tony Schumacher.
Today Rodak produces a “Tony Schumacher Champion” blend, along with a WFO Radio Special blend and a “radical” one that “really pushes the limits” that he calls “Bang The Blower.” They’re just three offerings in an impressive lineup of coffees that Rodak travels the world to find from his own exclusive growers.
How Rodak, also an experienced pilot with an affinity for the World War II-era Douglas A-26 Invader, developed a global supply of exclusive coffee beans and paid tribute to drag racing is a journey that began at the shop on Pafford Street.
“It was a typical garage deal,” Rodak said. “When you’ve got an automotive shop, you’ve always got a pot of coffee sitting on the burner. A customer comes in, you offer him coffee. We drink it all day.”
But by two or three o’clock in the afternoon, he said, “the coffee was dried up and burnt and crunchy. You get it off the burner and add water to it and slosh it around and drink it up and go on home. But we figured out there’s got to be a better way. So we did some research and learned about home coffee roasting, buying green coffee in small quantities, and doing minimum amounts of coffee for personal consumption. And I started roasting it here in the shop, just to have better coffee for my car customers and for us to drink better coffee.
“So the shop would smell of coffee roasting, and it was just wonderful, something like baked bread [would do for the senses],” he said. “When customers walked in, they’d pick up on that and they’d drink the coffee. And the next thing you know, they were all wanting to buy the coffee from us and wanting me to roast coffee for ’em.
“Man, at that point, I didn’t want to get in the coffee-roasting business. I had a little roaster. We couldn’t roast enough at a time to sell it,” Rodak said. “We got so much reaction from the customers on it that we explored it and investigated it and found some modest equipment and a supplier for beans. That was about 20 years ago.”
Since then, the business – which has evolved to include barbecue sauces, coffee rubs and spices, and upscale grills and accessories – “has grown to the point that it’s nearly overtaken everything else,” he said.
Rodak still fixes and tricks out cars. “We do it for our older customers. We do have some project cars here. But that’s dwindling. We’re getting older, and it’s easier on the body to roast coffee than to turn wrenches, although we still love turning wrenches.”
He said his eclectic mix of businesses is no grind at all. Instead, he said, “It’s kind of a fun thing that has worked together. It’s a fun business when you’re making people happy. When you’re giving them the absolute finest stuff they’re not going to get anywhere else and perform a service for them, it just takes it over the top.”
Schumacher has remarked, “I don’t risk my life to be average.” So when it comes to coffee, he said he wants to have the best, too: “I love coffee. If I’m going to put it in my body, I’m going to make a great coffee. That’s what I’m looking for: quality.”
And he has found it with Rodak.
“At the end of the year, we give the [NHRA pro-class] champions one of our gift packs: a pound of coffee, a bottle of our spice rub, and one of our hot sauces. We got a wonderful reply from Tony,” Rodak said. “And he’s living down the road from us, in Austin. We just hit it off.”
Schumacher said, “I called him quite often, and we became phone buddies. He’s an outstandingly nice guy, and he makes a great product. That’s what America is built off of, people working hard and making great products. It’s the American Dream. He’s a great guy. He has a great business, and his customers follow him around because they’re happy. He’s a great guy.
“He did the Tony Schumacher Champion blend, and he wasn’t planning to sell it. His intention was to make a bag for me,” Schumacher said. “He sent it to me, and I posted right on Facebook: ‘Is this cool?!’ And people were like, ‘Can we buy it?’ So I called him up and said, ‘Feel free [to sell the blend that bears his name]. Go ahead, if people want to buy it. It’s a great blend. Move it as much as you want.’ ”
Schumacher, the eight-time champion who has won at every racetrack on the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series tour except Atlanta and multiple times at most of them, mock-moaned a year or so ago that he hasn’t been honored at any racetrack. But sitting in the lounge of his hauler, next to a case of Rodak’s “Tony Schumacher Champion” blend, he teased, “Keep your John Force Grandstands! I’ve got coffee, baby!”
He pondered for a second whether it would be cool for every racer to have his own special blend, then decided, “No – earn it. John Force has more than earned it. But for everybody . . . nah. I appreciate that [Rodak] did that.”
Schumacher also appreciates the fact that “there’s only so many bags [distributed]. There’s not a plethora of it out there. I grind up this one bean. It’s got this green . . . I don’t know how to explain it . . . It is a different flavor. It is a great flavor, but I like that deep, oiled bean – when you look at it, it’s a good, dark, strong [bean]. It’s ultra-smooth – I don’t like a bitter taste. Some people love it. It’s just not my palate. I love something that’s smooth and flavorful – not where they add and infuse stuff but just a good flavor of coffee, unique and rich.”
Rodak said the Schumacher blend fuses “two award-winning coffees. One of them is an Indonesian coffee we bring in out of Sumatra. We mix that with an Ethiopian coffee out of the Yirga Cheffe region. Most of the Ethiopian coffees are what they call ‘dry processed – once the coffee cherry is picked, the fruit is naturally fermented off of it. This [Schumacher blend] ingredient is actually a washed Yirga Cheffe. It’s got a lot of different flavors to it that really, really accentuate the blend that we do.”
Most of what he sells are not blends but rather, in his words, “single-origin, single-plantation, or single-farm coffees that are from a specific area, from a specific place and are not blended. Tony’s coffee is blended. The Kona that I have [from the Big Island of Hawaii] is a pure, 100-percent Kona coffee. It’s extra-fancy, screened – it’s a polished bean. It’s tumbled when it’s done, and it’s an extra-fancy grade. I’ve got a wonderful coffee out of Maui. It’s not an Arabica bean. It’s a Caturra bean. It’s an unbelievable coffee for a Hawaiian coffee.”
Rodak’s suppliers are diverse. His beans come from the Hawaiian Islands; Australia; Mexico; Jamaica; the African nations of Burundi, Ethiopia, and Malawi; Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua in Central and South America; and Asia’s India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Vietnam.
“Each one of these is a whole story in itself,” he said. These are all farm-direct. I know the farmer who has grown these. I’ve been and slept in his house. He’s been here and slept at my house. We’re like family, and the stuff’s just phenomenal.”
Said Rodak, “The coffees that I sell represent the top five percent of the coffees grown. The brokers we use and/or the farms that I’m buying from direct are just the absolute premier. A lot of it [the coffee] is very limited supply. Some of it’s as little as just nine 150-pound sacks a year produced off a plantation. We have the opportunity to have that presented to our customers. It’s the top of the top of the top.”
Coffee brews at the center of a highly competitive industry, but Rodak isn’t concerned about competition.
“Costco is a great store, and Starbucks has done an incredible job of marketing better coffee. The quality of coffee that Starbucks has available for distribution to sell is far below what we have available, because the quantities aren’t there for them for them to be able to purchase and distribute. We have that leg up, that edge on them, by being able to get the finest coffees,” he said. “There’s nowhere that you’re going to walk in, look at 40 different coffees in 150-pound bags, pick out what you want, and go to the shop to a roaster and have it roasted for you. So it’s absolutely the freshest that it can be.”
Furthermore, he said, a customer at his store can “have it roasted to the correct profile that exhibits all the wonderful natural flavors that come from that particular coffee.”
What that means to Schumacher is assurance that all Rodak’s offerings are superb.
“I’ve never had one of his I didn’t like. Never,” Schumacher said. “There’s no wrong choice. They’re just different, so I rotate them.
“I used to buy ground coffee because I was too lazy [to grind the bans],” he said. “And it’s just not the right way. I still ‘cheat,’ because I get up so early with my kids and I want to make sure they’re the focus and it’s not me making coffee. So I’ll grind enough for two or three days and put it in a [plastic baggie], and it’s still outstanding. But when you need a really good cup, you just grind it up – it’s ultra-fresh. It’s a beautiful thing. He has great barbecue sauce, too.”
The WFO Radio blend, Rodak said, “is milder and sweeter than the others. WFO coffee has wonderful refinements in flavor with nice body, rich pleasing mouth feel, a touch of brightness, and a deep, elegant finish.”
His description of “Bang The Blower,” an Indian and Indonesian mix, is playful: “It’s a little radical and really pushes the limits. It has great body, rich mouth feel, a little smokiness, and wonderful crema.” Rodak even honored his beloved A-26s with an espresso blend.
It has been a few years since Rodak was a high-schooler with a snazzy ’64 GTO he could put up against his buddy’s ’64 Mustang. Since the Texas Motorplex opened thirty years ago at Ennis, about an hour south of Fort Worth, he hasn’t missed an NHRA national event. He has raced his street car at the Motorplex and on the eighth-mile dragstrip at Kennedale.
“We never had enough money to build anything good, so it was run what you brung. We’ve always dabbled in that,” Rodak said.
With his impressive inventory of beans from around the globe and his sauces and grills, Rodak isn’t dabbling. His shop is filled with the mesmerizing aroma of roasted coffee beans – and of success. And the coffee pot still is always on, with a warm welcome to match.
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