You can smell and hear it from the street.

Approaching The Lab, North Hyde Park’s joint venture between Peter Davidson of Zeal Coffee Roasters and The Blind Tiger's Roberto Torres, I notice black wood walls, dark concrete floors, a white leather couch and industrial white metal ceilings.

A barista serves coffee at a stainless steel bar inside 1703 W. State St., where a few people mingle on this particular Wednesday. And in the far corner, a woman works at the 22-pound Ambex machine, designed by a man in Clearwater, with a trainee.

Veronica Lee, master roaster and district manager for The Blind Tiger, crouches by the roaster with Rob Roa (the younger brother of CL's music editor Ray), talking with him about times and temperatures. As I walk up, Lee grins.

"Roberto called," she says.

We shake hands, then quickly launch into a breakdown of the roasting process. Lee takes me over to two large Rubbermaid containers labeled Burundi and Brazil Cerrado and pulls the lid off one, running her hands through the beans. Next to us are giant burlap sacks, stamped with dates and locations, also full of beans; behind us, brown paper bags are labeled Honduras, Colombia and decaf.

Here since 10 a.m., she's in the middle of roasting a Costa Rican batch. The process can take all day depending on how much there is to roast.

"You have to work with the beans to get the best out of them," Lee explains.

Although it looks easy to me, which I tell her as sweat drips off my face and down my back, she insists that it's not. Roasting is a complicated procedure with multiple variables, from the machine to the beans themselves.

It starts with the moisture content and density of the bean, she says. You can change the size of your batch to compensate for those variables, and batch size affects air flow inside the roaster: more beans, less air. Air circulation is then controlled by vents in the drum, while levels of propane are adjusted for more or less heat.

Checking the machine in between explanations of each step, Lee's primer on the roasting process is riddled with the knowledge and passion she's gained from working with coffee since late 2010, which was "before [she] could even drink."

"It's a battle of compensating what the bean is," the 25-year-old says.

And there are so, so many beans.

Opened back in April, the collaborative Tampa roastery, or “coffee collaboration laboratory,” allows The Blind Tiger and Zeal Coffee to roast their beans on-site. Others, hobby roasters or otherwise, can pay a fee to experiment at The Lab as well.

"It's nice to be able to bounce off of one another," says Lee. "There's not a tight community of roasters."

The region's got big names, like Kahwa and Buddy Brew, but she says roasting is still very much an isolated skill. In the past, it was "just you and the internet."

We walk over to wide double windows, and she points across the courtyard (which Torres aims to transform into a community space for festivals, live concerts and traveling markets) from the roastery. The Blind Tiger is opening a new spot over there, Lee tells me. My coffee-loving ears perk up, not long before Torres strolls through the front door, his baby propped on his shoulder.

I meet him at his car and shake hands with his 3-month-old business partner, Ricardo Antonio, who grins at me toothlessly. After handing him off to his mother, Torres and I return to the shop and chat at a long table.

"We wanted a roastery, and we wanted a place where we can create," he says, eyes big and eyebrows raised, "and do experiments."

The Lab crew plays around with recipes, tweaking them to fit different palates. Whether they want something more floral or citrusy or chocolatey, they're continuously improving flavor profiles and highlighting multiple tasting notes for customers.

"It's a free-flowing space where we can try different things, try new things," Torres says.

In addition to the North Hyde Park Blind Tiger location set for 910 N. Rome Ave., a relocation of the Seminole Heights cafe to 4304 N. Florida Ave. is also planned.