Roastmaster Marvin Rodak.

The metal sign for Marvin Rodak's business has seen better days, but, perched on a patch of grass in front of an otherwise anonymous 1960s blue brick building in the Pafford Street industrial district off Berry Street, it is simple and friendly. Red vinyl letters on a sign so small that it's easy to miss spell out "Rodak, tune-up, brake job and oil change."

In one of the building's five garage bays rests an old Chevy truck, and in another sits a 1990s Sedan de Ville connected to a diagnostic computer. "We're a car repair business with specialty certification in Cadillacs," says Rodak, 51. "But then we sell the mustard and the salsa and I help my buddy down the street sell the teak flooring he imports. And now I sell the coffee," he adds, almost as an afterthought.

Be not fooled. Marvin Rodak's coffee is no afterthought. From a tiny, windowless renovated storeroom in the middle of his car repair shop, he roasts and sells the freshest coffee in town. Rodak's surroundings emphasize the basic incongruity of selling small-batch-roasted, organic specialty coffee out of the family Cadillac repair business he inherited from his father just two years ago.

To walk into Rodak's shop is to step feet-first into time rolled back 40 years. Four decades of mechanics' training certificates hang slightly askew on the wood-paneled walls. A glossy photo outside his office shows a city official recognizing Rodak's father as "Fort Worth Citizen of the Year" for stopping a robbery. Photos of World War II vintage airplanes fill the rest of the wall space. On weekends, Rodak's tools maintain the engines of the Commemorative Air Force's A-26 Invader, Spirit of Waco, or those of the Stearman or AT-6 trainer at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum in Addison.

The door to his garage opens, and Rodak, dressed in a mechanic's work clothes and fresh from a tune-up on a middle-aged Eldorado, introduces himself and shakes hands. Then he gives two customers progress reports on the coffee he's roasting specifically for them.

Two steps back through the door and he's in his roastery, a storeroom that Rodak has furnished with his buddy's teak floors, kitchen appliances, eight bags of green coffee beans from all over the world and -- in a place of honor -- his prized commercial air roaster.

"The freshest coffee spends the least time between the steps of roasting, grinding, and brewing," Rodak says. He minimizes the first lag time with the air roaster, which takes between nine and 15 minutes to roast a pound of green coffee beans, depending on the variety. "I can time it to the second," he adds. "Roasters that run beans between burners or around a metal drum heated from the outside spread the heat unevenly and burn beans," he says. Some coffee fanatics air roast beans at home in 1970s forced-air popcorn poppers, though fire is a big risk.

Rodak checks the beans every two to four minutes, pausing to field phone calls from worried Caddy owners, to welcome walk-in customers, and to answer questions from anybody about most anything. He roasts about 50 pounds a week and hopes to market to upscale restaurants. "Roasting, grinding, and brewing at the table is catching on in upscale restaurants on the West Coast," he says.

"I got sick of canned coffee," says Rodak, "I had tasted good Turkish coffee, and I liked the aromatic, fully roasted European coffees I'd had. It couldn't be that difficult to get a regular, decent cup."

Phone conversations and e-mail exchanges with coffee farmers, small-batch roasters, and green-coffee brokers, along with some fearless experiments of his own, convinced Rodak that the best cup of coffee emerges from beans air-roasted to their peak flavor, then ground and brewed immediately. Ground coffee is stale after a few days, he says, but roasted beans stay fresh for a couple of weeks.

Customers understand that this isn't a coffee bar; Rodak doesn't serve his coffees brewed. As he speaks, the aroma from the air roaster is suddenly so heavy and fragrant that the two customers sport the silly, spacey smile that stems from a good thing smelled. He asks what they like in coffee -- dark flavor, rich, or sweet -- and, picking one of his burlap bags of beans, he makes a match. Once the beans have reached first crack -- when the skin of the bean pops open, releasing the oils that define its flavor -- Rodak nurses them with the same scrutiny he gives to the friable parts of a customer's prized 1969 Fleetwood Eldorado.

Roasting ends any time after first crack, and it's the flip of the power switch that makes or breaks the brew. The proper roast time to Rodak is a gestalt, intensely subjective, taking in all he's learned up to that moment about the particular bean he is roasting. "I learned early on that most beans are roasted way too long, even beans that beg for a darker brew," he says. Dark-colored beans do not equal sumptuous, flavorful coffee. And that's Lesson One for coffee drinkers who crave the French-roast richness of Starbucks' blends but figure the only way to get it is to endure what some think is a burned, blackened aftertaste or cover it up with, forgive the blasphemy, milk. "Takes so little effort to get such a big improvement," he adds.

A woman waiting for her beans motions toward two strikingly carved wooden boxes on shelves behind the desk. "They're teak," answers Rodak. Then, he drops the bomb: "They're cremation urns. They go for about $150 to $250." Rodak's first job was selling cemetery lots, and he knows his urns.

You can round out an urn purchase with an obscure gourmet mustard, add one of the Mexican regional salsas he decided to sell after he beat his son in a habanero-eating contest, and drive the finned Fleetwood away from this Cowtown version of a wacky eBay store, grounded by decidedly serious Cadillacs and coffees.