Fresh Cup Magazine | September 2016

BAR FLOW | JAPANESE ICED TEA | NATURALS | DEVELOPING YOUR MENU | QUALITY MANAGERS | 5TH ELEMENT

September 2016 » freshcup.com

NEW YORK Diversity in the outer boroughs.

Page 60

&

Redondo Beach’s THE FIKA COMPANY Page 42

freshcup.com | November 2014

T H E M AGA Z I N E FO R S P E C I A LT Y C O F F E E & T E A P R O F E S S I O N A L S S I N C E 1 9 9 2

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FEATURES September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine » Vol. 25 » No. 9

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44 DO YOU KNOW JOE MARROCCO AND MEISTER? The Cafe Imports duo and coffee debate team.

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BY CORY ELDRIDGE

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EL SALVADOR IN WISCONSIN

GETTING YOUR MENU IN ORDER

NEW YORK’S OWN COFFEE

HANDING OVER THE KEYS

Alejandro Mendez chose Wisconsin, of all places, to open his first US café.

His path there began more than twenty years before.

Building your menu with intention, with your customers and staff in mind, sets a foundation for a successful café.

New York City has grown its own coffee scene, featuring staff and customers as diverse as the city itself.

Identifying, training, and empowering a potential manager from your crew is vital to the health of not just your café but yourself.

BY KRISTINE HANSEN

BY ELLIE BRADLEY

September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

BY RACHEL NORTHROP

BY KERRY MILLER

DEPARTMENTS September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine » Vol. 25 » No. 9

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Myanmar coffee; Coffee Culture book; new SCAA competition schedule; SCAA/SCAE unification vote

The Case for Naturals

by Andrea Allen

THE FILTER

THE WHOLE BEAN

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NINE BAR 26

CAFÉ OUTFITTER Bean-to-Bar

by Ellie Bradley

So You Think You Can Taste

by Michael Butterworth

38 28

IN HOUSE Let It Flow

by Nathanael May

A Matter of Tasting

by Cory Eldridge

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Japanese Iced Tea

by Lauren Purvis

The Fika Company Redondo Beach

by Ellie Bradley

WHOLE LEAF

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ORIGIN

CAFÉ CROSSROADS

September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

12 FROM THE EDITOR

16 CONTRIBUTORS

YOU COME AT THE KING, YOU BEST NOT MISS

78 COUNTER INTELLIGENCE People and products

82 ADVERTISER INDEX

80 CALENDAR Trade shows and events

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FROM THE EDITOR

You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss THERE WAS A LONG MOMENT ABOUT A DECADE AGO when food people in mid-major and even smallish cities like Austin, Denver, Seattle, and Kansas City could legitimately argue they’d collectively snatched the tiara of gastronomic hegemony off the haughty head of New York City. The best restaurants were popping up far from Midtown. New York’s beer scene was a joke. And the best coffee in the city was imported from Portland, Chicago, and San Francisco.

For Americans who withstand a never-ending message that we’re just kind of lame for not living in America’s best city, it was pure mirth when New York media denied this new state of reality. It was glorious schadenfreude when they wrote article after article whose tone and takeaway was what is happening. This was what the Visigoths felt walking up to Rome, right? Probably.

Unfortunately for anyone who thought this new center would hold, there was one problem: this new center wasn’t going to hold.

In her article “New York’s Own Coffee,” Rachel Northrop shows that coffee in New York City has become much, much more than a colony of out-of-towners. It’s even more than the local, Manhattan-centered cafés that very often took their cues from West Coast coffee culture. There’s now a thriving coffee culture that represents the diversity of New York. That diversity, and the unlimited creative energy it emits, has always been the source of the city’s cultural power.

Now that it’s been harnessed by the coffee industry, the best that cities across the US can hope is that NYC is merely first among equals, a leader by dent of its size. But that’s not really New York’s jam.

It was a fun time for us Southerners, Midwesterners, and Left Coasters living and creating during those brief seconds we could imagine New York was irrelevant. We have to pay attention to the city again. The coffee is really damn good.

CONNECT WITH US

Fresh Cup Magazine

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ON THE COVER: New York Coffee

CORY ELDRIDGE, EDITOR

The staff at Taszo

cory@freshcup.com

Espresso Bar in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Photo by Landon Yost

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September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

TOP RIGHT PHOTO C O URTESY O F THE FIKA C O MPANY

@FreshCupMag

FRESH CUP MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE FOR SPECIALTY COFFEE & TEA PROFESSIONALS SINCE 1992

-FRESH CUP FOUNDERWARD BARBEE 1938-2006

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-EDITORIALEditor CORY ELDRIDGE cory@freshcup.com Associate Editor ELLIE BRADLEY ellie@freshcup.com

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BRAD PRICE Monin Gourmet Flavorings

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September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

CONTRIBUTORS

ANDREA ALLEN Andrea Allen is the co-owner of Onyx Coffee Lab, with three locations in Northwest Arkansas. In this month’s Whole Bean, Allen makes a case for natural processed coffees (page 32).

“For the roaster, high-quality naturals offer a chance to maintain lot selection and a diversity of flavor that is simply not available in washed coffees.”

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH The Q grader license is widely seen as one of the most authoritative certifications in the coffee industry. But is it worth the time and money to pursue? In NINE BAR, Michael Butterworth looks at the pros and cons of Q grader certification for baristas, weaving in his own experience with the licensing process (PAGE 34). Butterworth is a barista and trainer for Louisville’s Quills Coffee and founding editor of the Coffee Compass, a website covering craft coffee around the world.

KRISTINE HANSEN In 2011, the World Barista Championships crowned the first victor from a coffee-growing country. Five years later, Salvadoran champion Alejandro Mendez is part-owner of a Wisconsin café. Kristine Hansen tells the story of how the Madison café came to be in “El Salvador in Wisconsin,” on page 46. Hansen is a Milwaukee-based writer who covers food, drink, and travel. She co-authored the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Coffee & Tea.

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NATHANAEL MAY A solo barista has command of their work flow, but get two or more baristas behind the bar, and skillful teamwork is crucial for success. In “Let It Flow,” Nathanael May tackles the topic of coordinating work flow to ensure customers get drinks in a timely manner— more easily said than done (In House, page 28). May is director of coffee and green coffee buyer for Portland Roasting Coffee.

KERRY MILLER Kerry Miller is a business development representative for Dillanos Coffee Roasters. A seasoned speaker and national consultant for retail coffee businesses, she shares some of her insights into what makes good managers in “Handing Over the Keys,” on page 68. “I had lots of bad managers, and a few really great ones, and now, twentyone years after I began my management career, I have some advice on how we can choose, train, and empower those in our leadership roles.”

RACHEL NORTHROP There’s more to New York’s coffee scene than industry big-hitters and West Coast–inspired cafés. The five boroughs have a culture that’s all their own, a representation of the richly diverse community that makes the city unique. Rachel Northrop details the rise of New York’s homegrown coffee culture in “New York’s Own Coffee,” on page 60. Northrop is a sales rep with Ally Coffee’s specialty importing division and the author of When Coffee Speaks: Stories from and of Latin American Coffeepeople.

LAUREN PURVIS If you think iced tea is a vessel for disguising lower-quality teas, Lauren Purvis passionately disagrees. In “Umami on the Rocks,” Purvis shares how care and attention to your cold cup of tea can surprise your palate and open you to a new world of flavor exploration (Whole Leaf, page 30). Purvis is the owner of Mizuba Tea Co. in Portland, Oregon.

CORRECTION In our July Café Crossroads, we misidentified who photographed Spearhead Coffee. The stunning photo display was shot by Heidi Toevs.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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The FILTER A Fine Blend of News and Notes

CHERRY SORTING: Women in the Mya Ze Diin community in Myanmar’s Shan State.

offee has been growing in Myanmar since the late 1800s, but there’s been little seen outside the country in the decades since its isolationist junta that ran the state made it a global pariah. With significant political strides made toward democracy and a return to the international community, trade sanc-

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tions led by the United States have greatly eased and the world is finally getting an opportunity to experience coffee from Myanmar.

The British brought coffee to Myanmar, then called Burma, in the 1800s, but saw limited success. After Britain gave up its colonial claim after World War II, the coffee industry survived until the junta took power in 1962.

The historically prosperous country fell off a political and economic cliff.

But with open trade, open elections, and the first non-military president in more than a half century, decades of repressed economic energy are being released.

And coffee is coming back.

Andrew Hetzel, a consultant working with the Coffee Quality Institute in Myanmar, says, “Practically all of the coffee is arabica. The growing conditions in Myanmar are really exceptional for good coffee: similar

P HOTO C OURTESY OF WINRO C K INTERNATIO NAL

Welcome, Myanmar

latitude as Hawaii but with more elevation, and a stable pattern of rainfall and dry harvest months that are excellent for quality.”

tors with a score of 87.08. The coffees cupped in this year’s competition demonstrated a collective boost in quality over the previous year, show-

Earlier this year, Myanmar Coffee Association held its second annual cupping competition. Of the sixty samples entered, fifty-six exceeded the eightypoint specialty cup quality threshold established by the SCAA. Earlier this year, Myanmar Coffee Association held its second annual cupping competition. Of the sixty samples entered, fifty-six exceeded the eighty-point specialty cup quality threshold established by the SCAA. The winner was a fully washed SL34 lot from the Green Land Coffee estate of Pyin Oo Lwin, topping competi-

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ing promise for the future of specialty coffee in Myanmar.

Myanmar coffee farmers are supported by the Value Chains for Rural Development project, implemented

by Winrock International and funded

by USAID, the United States’ international development arm. The cupping competition was organized as part of

the project with assistance from the Myanmar Coffee Association and the Coffee Quality Institute. The development project seeks to increase the productivity and profitability of smallholders in Myanmar. The program brings technical assistance to members all across the coffee value chain and draws on the expertise of volunteers to improve farmer productivity and market access.

Featured coffees from the Myanmar project were debuted at the 2016 SCAA Expo, marking the first Myanmar specialty coffee to be imported to the US. The coffee has been purchased by companies including La Colombe, Allegro, Kaldi’s, Farmer Brothers, and Rojo’s Roaster. La Colombe Coffee held a launch event at their Chinatown café on August twenty-three, welcoming two coffee producers and project staff from Myanmar, as well as officials from USAID and the State Department.

—Ellie Bradley

The Ultimate Coffee Table Display

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s the specialty coffee movement spreads across the US, customers benefit from the increased availability of not only great coffee, but beautifully designed spaces to drink it in.

With so many cafés boasting cutting-edge architecture and design, it’s only right that a stunning photo display of these spaces be compiled into a book perfect for, well, your coffee table.

United by a common appreciation of coffee, these cafés interweave architecture, design, and historic preservation into their interiors.

Coffee Culture: hot coffee + cool spaces celebrates the concept of space extending beyond the four walls of a shop. United by a common appreciation of coffee, these cafés interweave architecture, design, and historic preservation into their interiors. Flipping through the pages, you’ll find shops situated

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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in historic buildings, an arcade, an art museum, a former loading dock, and a reclaimed shipping container. From coast to coast, the thirty-three featured shops put their unique personality on full display in stunning photo spreads, giving a glimpse into seating areas, bar layouts, retail displays, roasting facilities, menus, and facades.

The book was compiled by Robert Schneider, who provides an introduction and overview to the featured shops. The front material also includes concept drawings for some of the spaces, offering a unique opportunity to view a selection of the coffee shops in their development phase. The spaces themselves were photographed by a group of photographers, and include businesses in Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.

Plan out your next coffee crawl, drool over your dream shops, or simply spend a moment appreciating the creativity and talent on display in each café.

Coffee Culture: hot coffee + cool spaces is available for purchase at imagespublishing.com.

—Ellie Bradley

SCAA-SCAE Will Unify

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he Specialty Coffee Association of America and the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe are going to unify after SCAA members voted in favor of the nuptials. Following a strong effort by the SCAA board and executive team to get members to the virtual polls, the vote represented a double majority, with 56 percent of SCAA voting members casting a ballot and 62 percent of

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September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

that group checking the yes box. While a 24 percent margin was healthy, it paled compared to the SCAE vote, which saw 86 percent of voters say yes, though only 49 percent of its members voted.

A late No campaign launched by former presidents of the SCAA had little firepower compared to the Yes proponents who had the full resources of the board of directors and SCAA staff behind them.

What we know about the next steps is pretty limited. The two organizations will merge, of course, and, as the SCAA’s unification promotion website said, “every individual member of the new organization will enjoy voting rights, including Guild members.”

If you’re a current member, you’ll be rolled into the new organization. Protocols for grading and cupping coffees will likely be aligned. And five “member value centers” focused on various aspects of coffee, like education and sustainability, will be created and staffed.

That’s about all that’s nailed down.

Under the proposed structure, the first board will comprise six members from the SCAE and six from the SCAA, plus another six from the two group’s officers and guilds.

What the new, unified organization will look like, for instance, is pretty vague. The unification prospectus was two pages of bullet points. On the critical question of the makeup of the board and executive team, the prospectus says, “Proposed structure of the Board and Executive Team provides areas of strength, particularly for continuity, expanding Board representation among nonvoting members with the guilds, and achieving balance between the Board and the Executive Team.” Under the proposed structure, the first board will comprise six members from the SCAE and six from the SCAA, plus another six from the two group’s officers and guilds.

How the initial board will be chosen is not spelled out, and there’s no hint at how the subsequent board will be comprised. The titles of the new executive team (the organization’s key full-time staff) are laid out, but not how they are chosen. The prospectus says, confusingly, of the proposed structure (emphasis theirs), “This structure is guaranteed for the initial period of 5 years.”

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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US Coffee Competitions Get Another Overhaul It’s been a rocky year for the barista competitions that lead to the United States Coffee Championships. In June 2015, the SCAA canceled the six regional qualification competitions and made the competitions a first-comefirst-in free-for-all to the disgruntled surprise of just about everyone, including the boards of the SCAA and Barista Guild. A social-media storm and a weekend board meeting later, the plan was nixed.

An ad hoc committee convened to create a stopgap competition made of two regionals held in Kansas City over a long weekend. Even its creators regarded the mega-regional with side-eye. Fortunately for all involved, the ultimate

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outcome was that a beloved, perennial competitor, Lemuel Butler, won the barista crown.

The structure of last year’s rushed qualifier was never intended to persist, and now the USCC’s competition committee has proposed a new system.

From a letter sent to Barista Guild members by the competition committee chair, Jess Steffy: “The new structure will take effect next year (the 2017/2018 competition cycle). We envision no fewer than 6 events that would be hosted by member companies throughout the US ideally in areas that are typically under-served by coffee events. These new events will essentially vet competitors at a micro-regional level. A predetermined number of top ranking competitors at each event will advance to one of two Qualifying Events produced by the SCAA prior to the USCC. This is the proposal we have developed that will go before the SCAA Board for consideration.”

The letter goes on to say the qualifying events will be held in Seattle, which is also where the USCC will be. The qualifiers will include 120 Barista Championship and seventy-two Brewers Cup competitors, up from 100 and fifty respectively.

Critical to the return of six pre-qualification events is the line that they will “be hosted by member companies.”

Cost was the driving reason for axing regionals and many SCAA and Barista Guild board members suggested hosting duties would fall on businesses if something like those competitions were to return.

The USCC website says, “The new event envisions having the potential to include twice as many competitors overall as they have previously while also accomplishing the purpose of narrowing the competitor pool leading up to the USCC, as well as working to create more entry points for baristas of all levels to practice their skills, engage with their fellow professionals and work towards the chance of competing at the national level.”

The proposed structure now goes to the SCAA board.

—Cory Eldridge

P HOTO C OURTESY OF C OUNTER C ULTUR E CO FFEE

The prospectus says the new organization’s structure will be (emphasis theirs), “Decentralized, member centric to foster representation, inclusivity, collaboration, and communications.” That seems to mean it will be resemble the SCAE’s structure, which includes national chapters in each of its member countries, but, again, no details.

There are good reasons for two organizations to issue broad outlines instead of detailed bylaws before a unification. Minutiae provides nitpickers opportunities to scuttle a merger and it’s easier to walk away from hard choices when they aren’t mandated. The vote was on a principle— is specialty coffee better served by two organizations or one—and now the two will unify, so details must be hammered out. That’s the task at hand.

In its celebratory letter to members, the SCAA board wrote, “Over the remainder of 2016 a great deal of planning and prep work will continue to happen with the Board, other volunteer leadership and staff to drive us forward in the right direction, however for the most part many programs and benefits will not change during this time period. We will continue to be two separate organizations through the remainder of the year as much focus is put on infrastructure and planning for a shared future. However, we remain fully committed to open lines of communication with our members, and ensuring that members are the first to know as next steps are taken.

When something important is about to happen, you will be the first to know.”

With the amount of detail that needs to be sorted out, we should expect a lot of updates coming our way.

—Cory Eldridge

Café OUTFITTER: Bean-to-Bar

Whether you’re talking sourcing, processing, packaging, or tasting, the parallels between coffee and chocolate are plentiful. Offering bean-to-bar chocolate to your customers is a meaningful way to engage in discussions about flavors and origin, while providing a tasty complement to your drink menu. With beautiful packaging, thoughtful sourcing, and careful craftsmanship, these chocolates help curate an experience for customers that’s memorable and sweet.

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1) DANDELION Based in the Mission District of San Francisco, Dandelion tempers small batches of beans, then carefully molds and packages each bar by hand. Sourcing highquality beans and crafting tiny batches brings out the individual flavors and nuances of each bean. Current offerings come from Zorzal, Dominican Republic; Mantuano, Venezuela; Ambanja, Madagascar; and Butuo, Liberia. dandelionchocolate.com 2) PITCH DARK The 80 percent Rugoso is a single-varietal Nicaragua with strong cocoa and tannic flavors at the start, followed by notes of plum and strawberry blended in a sweet, chocolaty aftertaste. Crafted in Portland, Oregon, Pitch Dark combines proven Old World methods with new and innovative technology to highlight the character and personality of their handpicked singleorigin cocoa beans from Nicaragua, Madagascar, Ecuador, and Fiji. pitchdarkchocolate.com 26

September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

3) RAAKA Raaka head chocolate maker Nate Hodge is also a home cook who likes to experiment with flavor and push the boundaries of chocolate. To make their best-selling Bourbon Cask Aged bar, Raaka ages their Belize cacao in bourbon casks from Berkshire Mountain Distillers for four weeks. After four weeks, the nibs are ground, mixed with a house blend of cane and maple sugar, and made into a deliciously deep dark chocolate with notes of caramel, vanilla, and oak. raakachocolate.com 4) RITUAL At a small factory in Park City, Utah, Ritual Chocolate handcrafts small batches, bringing together early European traditions with a modern American style. Ritual seeks to revive the focus on quality and support the people who grow their raw ingredients. With only cacao and cane sugar, each bar is an authentic expression of the flavors unique to its origin. Origins include Ecuador, Belize, Madagascar, and Peru. ritualchocolate.com

In HOUSE Let It Flow » By Nathanael May t was during a training with a wholesale client that I heard a familiar refrain.

“We’re too busy to do things well,” the café manager told me.

“We don’t have time to pay attention to our shots, or steam milk thoughtfully, or whatever else you’re telling us to do. We can barely keep up without doing those things. How could we hope to keep up if we’re adding time to our process?”

When she asked me that question, I was caught off guard. Because it’s the right thing to do, of course. Because you care about the experience your customers have. Because you want to be proud of the products you’re creating and selling for money. Because you want people to come back. Because . . . well, because.

The truth was, she did want all of those things. But her customers didn’t want to wait ten minutes for all of her dreams to come true. They wanted their beverages, posthaste. She was getting a loud and clear message that speed trumped quality. So they quit trying to produce quality and tried to make things more quickly.

Her story is not uncommon, and the desires of her customers are not new.

In them we have a problem, and the solution—wait for it!—is training. We need to train our baristas in the art of efficient bar flow and order management. It’s not as simple as throwing people at the problem with the expectation that it will get solved. We have to train people, put them in the right places at the right times, and (perhaps most importantly) get people used to the idea that the most efficient way to make excellent drinks quickly is not always making them in the same order as customers requested them.

I recently spent time helping a busy new café get on its feet, which found me behind the bar early in the morning steaming milk and pouring lattes.

There was a clear line of communi-

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cation between me and the barista pulling espresso shots. He communicated what drinks were next in line to be made, and while I prepared pitcher after pitcher of milk, I trusted that he was pulling top-notch espresso shots to suit the requirements of every beverage. Even more, I trusted him to manage the flow of beverages to ensure that we were making drinks efficiently, and customers were receiving their drinks quickly, even if we weren’t making them in the same order they were ordered. As the lines snaked ever longer away from the bar, our efficiency only improved, until—like the smooth running of a machine—we were pumping out drinks at an extraordinary pace.

Then he was called away to an important errand, and a much newer barista jumped into his position on the machine. Physically, the new barista was doing exactly the same thing as their predecessor, but functionally, it was completely different.

Espresso shots were being pulled without a planned destination, which slowed me down as I tried to place shots with their associated drinks. I was still combining pitchers of milk to match a more efficient order of beverage production, but shots were being pulled in the order that drinks were ordered. It’s a subtle difference, but one that has a huge impact on speed of service.

The new barista assumed efficiency meant pulling shots as fast as humanly possible, when in fact it often means slowing the heck down.

We were like two mismatched gears grinding away and making little progress. All the ingredients for beautiful drinks were in front of us, but none of them went together correctly. Even competent, skilled baristas need specific training on the vagaries of double-teaming an espresso bar. It’s not just working fast. It’s working wisely.

By putting the right people in the

right jobs, and focusing them on specific tasks, things will get accomplished in a more efficient and effective way. There are going to be moments where the gears grind together and the whole thing feels like work.

But with training and experience those moments will pass, and will be replaced by more and more rushes that run like clockwork.

Making drinks out of order, though? Won’t my customers be furious if they see the person behind them in line get their drink first?

I would be. I was first! Where’s my drink? That seems like the opposite of what I’d want my team to do.

In reality, it’s exactly what you want your team to do, if it speeds things up.

If I can batch steam a pitcher of milk, or pull shots for two drinks at once, and those things produce two or three drinks in the time it would take me to make one, shouldn’t I do it? Even if I end up giving a few customers their drinks out of order, it creates an efficiency that gets everyone’s orders completed faster.

Will a customer be frustrated that the person behind them got their drink first? Maybe, for the five seconds until their name is called, and then they’ll have forgotten all about it.

Thanks to our training and proper deployment, their drink came out more quickly, and it tasted better.

We were efficient and effective.

We didn’t sacrifice quality or speed, and our customers are happier. Happier customers tip better, your staff is happier, and rushes feel exciting instead of stressful. We work on bar flow and efficiency because we care about our customers, we care about our product quality, and we care about return business. It’s easier said than done, to be sure, but it can be done.

Nathanael May is Portland Roasting Coffee’s director of coffee.

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The WHOLE LEAF Umami on the Rocks: Japan’s tradition of iced tea » By Lauren Purvis

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(and I mean vigorously) with 4 to 7 ounces cold water. Or for a bigger batch, you could take one teaspoon sifted matcha with 8 to 16 ounces cold water in a tightly lidded mason jar or thermos. The classic thick, creamy froth should settle at the head. Enjoy neat, or pour it on the rocks. We’ve also made a signature, slightly sweeter version popular up and down the West Coast: whisk one teaspoon matcha with local honey, to taste. Add 160–175-degree water so the honey dissolves while whisking. Pour over ice. If honey isn’t your preference, agave or simple syrup dissolves very readily into matcha.

Now to the iced loose leaf teas, and our three main methods. To enter the world of Japanese iced tea, we recommend starting with well-made sencha.

The deeper steamed (fukamushi) the sencha is, the milder in taste and syrupy in mouthfeel it is likely to be.

METHOD ONE: hot tea on ice. It’s quite common, and completely acceptable, to brew tea hot and pour it over ice (plus, it’s efficient for to-order menus at cafés). The trick is to watch the proportion of ice to tea, so the ice does not water down the tea. To get the full-bodied flavor of the tea, it’s advisable to brew the tea quite strong: use a slightly higher dosage of leaves (a tablespoon to 1 ½ tablespoons as opposed to a teaspoon); about 30 seconds to a minute more than recommended hot brewing time to make a concentrate. It’s easy to experiment and find your favorite recipe and brew time, but try 7 to 8 grams of tea leaves to 175-degree water. Steep 2 to 3 minutes for sencha, gyokuro, or genmaicha, and longer (4 to 5 minutes) for less astringent houjicha and mugicha (not actually tea, but barley!) teas. Pour over ice, and enjoy the crackling, pachi pachi sounds of the ice that herald summertime.

METHOD TWO: the highly popular cold brew. Easy to make, easy to store, easy to keep in large batches. The catechins and caffeine in tea do not extract as easily in cold water, so you’ll enjoy a mellow, smooth flavor. Our favorite teas to cold brew are houjicha, bancha, or mugicha (the latter our number-one drink to pair with ramen). A favorite recipe: place 20 grams of bancha or houjicha in a half-gallon mason jar. Fill with cold water, and seal the lid tightly. Flip the jar once to disperse the leaves, and store the jar in your refrigerator overnight. Additionally, try 14 to 20 grams Japanese tea leaves to 40 to 60 ounces cold water in a jar. Shake your jar to disperse the flavor evenly before straining and serving. For your customers who prefer a decaf option, try making cold brew with mugicha tea bags: add one tea bag for every half gallon of water, and chill for 2 or more hours.

METHOD THREE: the most noble and highly aesthetic way to enjoy authentic Japanese iced tea is to brew with ice. This method may require patience, and it likely doesn’t fit in a café, but it’s perfect for a luxuriously languid afternoon. Place 1 to 1 ½ tablespoons of your highest grade of sencha, gyokuro, or—highly recommended here— tencha or tencha karigane leaves inside a glass teapot. Fill your pot ½ to ¾ full with ice. Let the ice thaw naturally, at room-temperature. Do not heat the pot! You’ll be rewarded with a lovely, smooth, umami-filled brew.

Doctor with more ice should it be too strong. If you’re sharing your pot, the tea is traditionally poured alternately between two glasses so the taste is equally bodied in each.

Once you’re comfortable with these brewing techniques, apply them to gyokuro, kukicha, tencha, konacha, genmaicha, or your current favorite tea, and enjoy the umami on ice.

Lauren Purvis owns Mizuba Tea Co.

P HOTO C OURTESY O F MIZ UBA T EA CO .

hink iced tea is a pedestrian way to move through lower-quality teas? Not so!

Just as high-quality, hot tea elicits an infinite world of flavor experiences, the same care and attention to your cold cup of tea will surprise your palate. Take Japanese teas for example. Just when you think you’ve tasted all that sencha, houjicha, matcha, or kukicha has to offer, you’ll find there’s nothing more refreshing than a tall, icy glass of straight, umami-filled iced tea.

Thoughts of Japan and its tea inevitably evoke images of chanoyu, the nation’s iconic tea ceremony.

However, Japan has a rich history of iced tea, and not just the crisp bottles out of the vending machines (which, by global vending-machine standards, can be excellent). According to farmers near the city of Uji, iced tea is a tradition that started with the cool, clean, and pure waters that run through the countryside.

Brewing bright senchas or deeply verdant gyokuros with the cool water refreshed those who were weary from the climate’s many hot and humid days. Since then, beautiful recipes for iced tea have developed, with each methodology extracting the tea’s nuances differently. Get ready to be enchanted by, and to enchant your customers with, a sweet, oceanic, deliciously syrupy-yet-bright cup.

Let’s start with what is more and more often found in coffee shops: iced matcha. Since 2013, I’ve been training our café partners on using the traditional chasen, or bamboo matcha whisk, to aerate matcha into a perfectly creamy froth. However, my secret advice is that matcha can actually be made with cold water! You may use your chasen to whisk matcha directly into cold water, but we also love what we’ve dubbed our cocktail method: take ½ to ¾ teaspoons of sifted matcha and shake vigorously

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The WHOLE BEAN ashed coffees have long been considered superior by many parts of the specialty coffee supply chain—from farmers to exporters, all the way to roasters and cafés. Often it’s much more than a mere preference for washed coffees over other processes, especially natural. It’s almost an ideological tenant that washed coffees are the only proper beans, and only their particular cleanness of cup should be what a customer experiences.

Many coffee-producing countries’ economic wellbeing is tied to their coffee trade, and governing bodies attempt to brand their countries’ coffees as high-quality, clean, and delicious, a profile relatively easy to achieve with the washed process. In the name of quality, many of these countries have placed restrictions on the export of any coffee not deemed to be “clean,” or washed. For example, in Burundi, it’s simply illegal to export naturals. They must be labeled as triage, or trash, in order to be exported. Kenya, Guatemala, and Colombia have similar regulations.

There are ways around these rules, but historically the lack of an easily accessible market and the disdain for naturals keeps producers from taking risks with their nicer cherries. The result has been that most farmers reserve natural processing for their worst cherries. This, in turn, perpetuates the stereotype that all naturals taste essentially the same— dirty, fermenty, perhaps overly fruity— altogether inferior to washed coffees.

The effect of this attitude towards naturals and other alternative processing is manifold. Precious resources are expended to wash coffee, and acidic run-off leaks into ground water.

Smallholding farmers are forced, by market demand, to deliver cherries to wet mills for washing instead of potentially processing some of their cherries themselves using raised beds or drying patios. If they processed their cherries themselves, it could al32

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low farmers to maintain lot selection and keep their higher quality cherries separate from the mediocre.

Because of these benefits, many producers are beginning to apply meticulous processing methods and highconcept drying techniques to naturals.

This can result in higher prices. According to an exporter from Royal Coffee New York and a Colombian producer, high-quality naturals have been selling at a dollar or more FOB (freight-on-board) than their washed counterparts in the differential.

Surprisingly, these natural process advances have all been made using equipment and techniques that are specifically designed for processing washed coffees. Most dry mills are made for washed coffees. Husking or dry milling naturals is difficult and takes special equipment or a recalibration of normal dry-milling machines. More research and experimentation with drying, moisture control, and milling equipment would push naturals forward and would continue to set high-quality naturals apart from other coffees. A refining of the natural processing method would ensure more consistency, and might convince producers to take risks with their nicest cherries.

For the roaster, high-quality naturals offer a chance to maintain lot selection and a diversity of flavor that is simply not available in washed coffees. Highquality naturals tend to contain a powerful combination of sweetness, acidity, and different, interesting flavors while maintaining cleanness in the cup. Most coffee drinkers have limited knowledge of the process that coffee must undergo in order to become a beverage. Being able to offer a customer a sweet, fruitforward cup they can enjoy without cream and sugar, one that offers an unconventional flavor profile, is a huge step in creating an opening to explain all that coffee is, turning it from a fruit to a culinary item, from a highly traded commodity to a set of relationships.

Naturals provide baristas another tool

with which to engage customers and to help explain the chain of people that brought this coffee to them.

Ultimately, the discussion surrounding processing hinges on a balance between offering customers the highest quality cup while still being mindful of the effects that buying choices have on producers. It makes sense to embrace choices that offer positives to both sides. This doesn’t mean the pendulum should swing to only naturals. Certainly, high-quality washed coffees have a place in the café and in the hands of consumers.

As careful sourcing continues to grow in importance, roasters are able to know and promote the region, the farm, and the producer of their coffee, and customers are being introduced to many varying flavor profiles from the same origin. Country-based distinctions like Colombian or Guatemalan are no longer the overarching label for specialty coffees. Offering customers a diverse lineup of processing methods adds nuance to coffees that perhaps in the past presented a similar flavor profile. At our roastery, Onyx, we strive to offer coffees processed naturally, honey, and washed. It’s been particularly salient when we can offer coffees from the same region, or even the same farm, that are processed differently.

The differences between these coffees are profound, and they challenge customers to think about why the coffees taste the way they do. A connection between the hard work, the art, and the luck of producing coffee and a customer is something that is only positive for the specialty industry as a whole.

Creating an industry where multiple flavor profiles and processing methods can be embraced ensures that wellbeing among the diverse makeup of producing countries continues to be cultivated while pushing customers to taste, to think, and to enjoy.

Andrea Allen is the co-owner of Onyx Coffee Lab.

PH OTO BY DAN LEIF

The Case for Naturals » By Andrea Allen

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NINE BAR

ix sets of three cups of coffee are neatly arranged on a table. Each group of three includes two cups of the same coffee and an odd one out. To make matters more challenging, each coffee on the table comes from

didates must select the odd cup out in at least five of the six sets.

This triangulation tasting is one of twenty requisite exams in the Q grader licensing process. With over 4,000 licensed Q graders worldwide, this certification offered by the Coffee Quality Institute is widely recognized as

The Q certification process is notoriously difficult—over 75 percent of candidates fail their first attempt. the same region and shares the same process. Armed only with a cupping spoon and their senses, Q grader can-

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the most authoritative certification in specialty coffee. From the first time I heard of the Q course, I knew I wanted

to take it. For me, the decision was easy. But there’s lots to consider for a barista looking to add a certification to their resume.

In an industry with precious few salary jobs, many ambitious, up-andcoming coffee professionals have turned to certification programs like the Q license to bolster their credentials and open new career possibilities.

“Taking the Q Course can be beneficial to almost everyone in the coffee industry,” says Jodi Wieser, a Q instructor and cofounder of Gather Coffee. From Paris to Tulsa, Wieser and her business partner Marlee Benefield offer Q courses at SCAA- and SCAEcertified labs around the world. Wieser, who has served as a judge for the Best of El Salvador, Best of Panama, and the Good Food Awards, credits her Q license for boosting her own career.

PH OTO BY NIC OLE O’BA NIO N

So You Think You Can Taste » By Michael Butterworth

Wieser sees the Q certification as a quick reference point to display your coffee background to other professionals. “If I am in a conversation with a fellow coffee professional and they mention they’re a Q grader, I immediately understand what they’ve been through to receive the certificate,” she says. “I know they’re not only calibrated with the specialty coffee industry, but they’re familiar with SCAA protocols and standards. They understand quality assessment and the importance to convey an objective analysis about the coffee.”

The Q certification process is notoriously difficult—over 75 percent of candidates fail their first attempt. But according to Wieser, the challenge shouldn’t prevent young coffee professionals from trying. “Anyone can take the Q course and should do it as early as possible in their career,” Wieser says.

“This allows you to be calibrated with the rest of the industry that much sooner.”

For Wieser, coffee evaluation is not the exclusive realm of a select group of super tasters. “I believe most people can learn how to identify what they are smelling and tasting,” says Wieser. This is where the instruction portion of the Q course comes into play. Candidates are fully briefed on SCAA cupping protocols between practice exams and teaching sessions. Whether it’s the proper Agtron reading of a sample roast or the organic acids found in coffee, even students who don’t earn their license walk away with a wealth of coffee knowledge. (While the instructional portion was certainly worth the price of admission, this sentiment did nothing to lessen my sense of exuberance when I passed Roast ID on my last retake.)

With a price tag in the thousands of dollars, taking a Q course remains a remote possibility for many baristas. Certified labs are few and far between. Travel, lodging, and missed work prove to be insurmount-

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able obstacles for many aspiring coffee professionals. Some coffee professionals question whether the certification is even necessary.

“Most of the skill set happens on the job,” says James Tooill, director of La Colombe Torrefaction’s Workshop line. Without any CQI or SCAA certifications, Tooill won the 2015 US Cup Tasters Championship, a competition built around triangulation tasting. “Certifications can help you get that job, but I think there are other ways, be it competitions, self-funded travel, or just being very engaged at work,” says Tooill.

Although Tooill recognizes the merits of a Q license and other programs, he took a different path. “I decided it wasn’t the best use of my

Since I earned my Q license, my career has not dramatically changed. No one is flying me to coffee farms or paying me copious amounts of money for my opinion. If anything, I’ve discovered how much more I have to learn. But I do feel an increased confidence to trust my senses when evaluating a coffee, and I incorporated much of what I learned into the training program at Quills Coffee, where I work. Is a Q license a golden ticket to your dream job? Probably not. Will you benefit from taking the course? Absolutely.

Michael Butterworth is the founding editor of the Coffee Compass.

Becoming a licensed Q grader gives one the ability to assess quality with confidence knowing he or she has been trained and is calibrated with the rest of the specialty coffee industry. money,” says Tooill. “If you see a job posting that has a required certification, by all means get that certification if you want that job. We might see more openings that require certifications in a more mature market.”

But for Wieser, reasons to take the Q extend beyond career ambitions.

“At every level of the value chain, we are assessing quality in one form or another,” she says. “Becoming a licensed Q grader gives one the ability to assess quality with confidence knowing he or she has been trained and is calibrated with the rest of the specialty coffee industry.”

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ORIGIN

ast year, I attended a cupping workshop at a camp for the college-age children of farmers in Colombia’s Antioquia Department.

Rather than instructing the young, potential farmers on the ins and outs of an SCAA-protocol cupping like those done at roasteries every

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day, this was an introduction to the flavors of specialty coffee.

Laid out on each table was a mighty range of Antioquia’s specialty coffees, not just Colombia’s mandated washed process but honeys, naturals, and even experimental fermentations. As the students went around the tables, slurping away, their eyes would go

wide, their eyebrows would go up, and little whistles of surprise would be sounded. They were experiencing something new.

Any roaster, or even barista, would have tasted these coffees and registered them as perfectly lovely but normal, roasts that would have fit comfortably among most roasteries’

PH OTO BY C O RY ELDRIDG E

A Matter of Tasting » By Cory Eldridge

offerings. They were what we in consuming countries have learned to expect from specialty coffee.

For the campers, though, they were mind-blowing revelations of flavor and potential. With the rare exception, each of the campers had tasted specialty coffee exactly once before, while attending a previous camp when a cupping workshop introduced them to the differences between soluble, commodity, and specialty coffee. These are the scions of multi-generation

improve their quality?” That inspired him to launch a very cool project, which I’ll get to later.

This shock, I think, reveals how quickly the industry has grown accustomed to hyper-differentiated coffee and also how little we know about farming. Specialty coffee pros in consuming countries often imagine farmers are incentivized to differentiate their coffee, particularly through flavor quality, whereas most farmers are actually motivated by

A farmer worries about hard truths about her coffee—like defects—instead of fluffy ideas like tasting notes because defects are what the grader and buyer at the mill cares about, because that’s what the commodity market cares about. coffee farms, and this was something that none of their parents or grandparents ever had experienced. At home, the normal brew is either soluble coffee or a basement-grade local roast. This experience of tasting good coffee—a life-event several campers told me had changed their entire conception of coffee—is something that the vast majority of coffee farmers across the globe have never done.

Even more shocking: few coffee farmers, especially smallholders, have ever tasted their own coffee.

I believe shocking is the right word.

I’ve seen more dumbfounded expressions following that fact than any other element of coffee, and it certainly walloped me when I heard it.

Joe Behm, owner of Behmor, a coffee brewer and countertop roaster maker, first heard this more than a year ago, but he says, “It’s still mind-blowing to me that small growers haven’t tasted their coffee. How are they supposed to

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commodity economics. In their Borderlands Coffee Project, Catholic Relief Services and CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) found that specialty coffee made up just 2 percent of output in Colombia’s famed Nariño Department.

Fine-tuned quality is not the concern when 98 percent of your coffee is valued on a different metric.

A farmer worries about hard truths about her coffee—like defects—instead of fluffy ideas like tasting notes because defects are what the grader and buyer at the mill cares about, because that’s what the commodity market cares about. The coffee will end up mixed with a bunch of other similarly graded coffee, so its unique flavors don’t matter anyhow. Besides, tasting your own coffee means pulping, fermenting, dry milling, and roasting the beans, which all require equipment the farmer likely can’t afford and expertise she prob-

ably doesn’t have, all to answer questions no one asked smallholders until very recently.

Our shock is in part because we know that more and more importers and roasters are asking about quality, and having an answer when one shows up inquiring about the taste of a highaltitude lot might mean a windfall or even a long-term, premium-paying buyer. Without it, the only option is the volatile, uncontrollable C market.

As we’ve explored in previous columns, relying on commodity prices is a long-term economic loser for smallholder farmers, so many want a way out of that market. Improving quality and finding premium buyers is one attempt. And knowing what good coffee tastes like and how her coffee stacks up is required if a farmer follows this (still really new, not totally proven) model. If she can cup her coffee, she gains another tool in sussing out problems in her growing practices and identifying standout coffees.

With that knowledge, she has a better footing in the supply chain. That was why the campers in Antioquia spent hours cupping.

It’s also why Behm has donated ninety-six of his Behmor 1600 electric, countertop roasters to Anacafé in Guatemala. The roasters have gone to co-ops and training centers, where samples of hundreds of coffees can be roasted and cupped by farmers and staff at the co-ops. “If they can roast their own coffee, they can understand how to improve the quality of their coffee, which means they can get a higher price for their coffee,” says Behm. Behm plans to donate more roasters to Anacafé and expand the program, Behmor Inspired, to other origin countries.

Cupping alone isn’t enough to close the gap in knowledge and expectations between buyers and farmers, but knowing when she has something special growing can change the fortunes of a smallholder farmer.

Cory Eldridge is the editor of Fresh Cup.

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Café CROSSROADS

The Fika Company » Redondo Beach, California

When people decide to sit for ten minutes, they’ll often end up staying for thirty minutes or longer.

It’s an eye-opening experience for people.

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n the ocean-side outskirts of Los Angeles, a place where coffee-drinkers frantically click through mobile ordering apps to pick up their coffee to go, Andres Pineros focuses his energy on encouraging customers to sit and stay awhile at his new café, the Fika Company. “We try to have soft chairs and nice design and chill ambience,” he says.

Plush cushions are only one part of the appeal of the cafe’s modern design. Set just off the Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach, the Fika Company brings tastes of Swedish and Colombian culture to the beach town.

Pineros was born and raised in Colombia, but it wasn’t until he moved to Sweden that he built an appreciation for coffee. “Being in the culture of Sweden, I learned how to drink coffee—the coffee was super good,” says Pineros. When he returned to Colombia, he connected with friends who were working in the industry, and began forming plans to open a business of his own. “Everyone is connected and everyone knows almost everyone in the coffee industry in Colombia.”

Pineros opened Café Fika Company in 2012 in Villavicencio, Colombia. The pilot company used local coffee connections that provided the opportunity to build relationships with area farmers. But Pineros had

September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

a vision bigger than Colombia. Having attended music school in Los Angeles, Pineros wanted to one day return to California to make a living. After the successful launch of Café Fika Company, he decided the time was right to move operations to LA. The first US branch of the company opened this July, simply called the Fika Company.

At the Redondo Beach café, a custom matteblack La Marzocco Strada EE complements the space’s interior and exterior hue, while a copper Malhkönig EK 43 and a line of Kalita Wave pour-over brewers and kettles provide metallic accents throughout. Interlocking wooden slats warm the face of the bar, matching the soft brown leather of the sofas, and picking up chocolate flecks in the geometricpatterned rugs. The aesthetic is a far cry from the white spaces popular among specialty coffee shops, and the contrast is both intriguing and inviting. So is the relationship the Fika Company maintains with its farmers.

“The concept is bringing the farmer as close as possible to our customers,” says Pineros.

The Fika Company works directly with three Colombian farmers: Cruz del Eden, in northern Tolima; El Reposo, in Santander; and Bello Horizonte, located twenty minutes from Pineros’s hometown, Villavicencio. Pineros explains that working with these farmers

P HOTO S C OURTESY O F THE FIK A C O MPANY

By Ellie Bradley

over the last four years has afforded him a degree of consistency and quality that he couldn’t get through less direct methods of sourcing.

These farmers also represent a new generation’s approach to farming: they don’t just grow coffee, they roast and brew their own crop too. Pineros will bring each farmer to Redondo Beach, similar to the model he ran in Colombia. When the farmers visit, Pineros plans to have them roast on the Diedrich IR-5 (painted black, of course) that stands in line among the equipment behind bar. He says having the farmers visit is like having one more roaster and one more barista behind the bar. While the farmers get to engage with the café side of business, customers also get the rare opportunity to have their coffee prepared by the farmer who grew it.

The close connection with their farmers opens a line of communication that helps the farmers improve their processes and helps the Fika Company offer better coffee to their customers. “We can tell them, ‘Oh, customers didn’t like that coffee that was a fifty-hour fermentation, let’s cut that,’” explains Pineros. “It’s a total constant feedback that makes us better.”

But the amazing transparency of the Fika Company’s sourcing is just one pillar of their identity.

Their name represents the other. Pineros first fell in love with coffee in Sweden, where he learned about fika—the Swedish concept he describes as taking time to drink coffee with people that matter. The practice is encouraged in Swedish businesses, and many people take fika five to six times a day.

When customers at the Fika Company waiver when answering the question “for here, or to go?” baristas jump in and encourage people to stay and experience what fika means. “When people decide to sit for ten minutes, they’ll often end up staying for thirty minutes or longer. It’s an eye-opening experience for people,” Pineros says.

Whether customers choose to stay or go, they can enjoy authentic locally-made Swedish pastries. The shop offers other baked goods from Larder Bakery, as well as vegan, soy-free, dairy-free, and gluten-free options from neighboring shop Gina Mia’s. The Fika Company also house-brews its Nordic Lights coldbrew that’s crafted from a blend of direct-trade coffees and immersed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours.

The Fika Company opened only a few months ago, but has already seen an overwhelmingly positive response from the community. Pineros hopes to continue sharing his concept, from taking a time out to enjoy people and good coffee, to developing better relationships between farmers and the cafés that roast and sell their beans.

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DO YOU KNOW Meister and Joe Marrocco?

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BY CORY ELDRIDGE

ny coffee company is lucky when it has a charismatic employee who doesn’t just represent the business well but represents the whole coffee industry with aplomb. Cafe Imports has two such employees in Erin Meister and Joe Marrocco. Cafe Imports likely has other great champions of coffee, but it’s these two who started a podcast that offers deep insights into issues in the coffee industry.

Opposites Extract, which launched in March, is formatted as a debate between a guest and Meister or Marrocco. It’s an honest-to-goodness debate, with rules and even timers.

Best of all, a coin toss determines the position each debater takes, which in one episode left Marrocco arguing, quite well, that we shouldn’t breed new varieties of coffee trees, instead letting nature do its slow work. In the episode’s second-half discussion that follows the debate, he laid out an even stronger case for why that position is wrong.

That’s where Opposites Extract excels: it offers a peek at how really smart coffee people think about coffee. Along with Meister and Marrocco, that includes a murderers’ row of guests taking on topics like consumer education, latte art, traceability, and service—and most anything that matters to anyone in the industry.

You’ll get to know Meister and Marrocco through your earbuds, so let’s find out how Opposites Extract got started.

This interview has been edited for clarity and space.

P HOTO BY CH RIS TY BAUGH

WHAT WAS THE GENESIS OF THE PODCAST?

Meister: I’d been inspired by some of the arguments that I’d seen between coffee people, on social media in particular.

We’re all very passionate, that’s why we’re in this industry, and we care very much about what we do and about the belief systems we set up and the culture we’ve created around specialty coffee. But I believe we get very much into ruts with our own opinions. We’re talking into an echo chamber, listening to ourselves or people who agree with us. I really loved the idea of having to put yourself out there. Nothing is more empathetic than a forced debate. That’s where the idea for that format came in. Then, obviously, Joe is one of the best, most persuasive argumenters. I saw us as really good foils for each other.

Marrocco: A lot of people doing the best work in coffee don’t have time to debate on social media. A lot of people don’t want to argue about something, so they don’t enter into those discussions, but they are just as passionate. So we wanted to have a place where passion can be brought out of people, expertise can be heard in long form and actually put to the test, and to add a little bit of compassion to the passion. It’s a safe place where I can say something absolutely ridiculous and untrue, but something that maybe

people out there are thinking, but nobody is going to come at me and say, “Well you said this one time.”

ARE YOU TRYING TO REACH PEOPLE NEW TO COFFEE OR IS THE PODCAST FOR COFFEE VETERANS?

Meister: This is the great thing about podcasts because you can see a topic and decide this one is not really for me.

We aim to have a mix of topics that might not appeal to everybody all the time but do appeal to a lot at different times, depending on where they are in their journey.

Marrocco: We try to break it up within the podcast. We’ll start with a pretty generous opening where we talk from 30,000-feet about the topic so everyone can understand where we’re coming from. Then we go deep pretty quick.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE DIFFERENT DEBATES IN THE INDUSTRY?

Meister: I think we recognize as a field that those struggles are what make us better. It allows us to tackle new ideas and tackle new conflict. But I do think that in social media, it can be very fraught.

Marrocco: I think a lot of the debate on social media is two sides that are pitted against each other, and their goal is to win. Whereas our goal is to have two sides that aren’t pitted against each other. They are on the same team, pursuing the same goal together, which is to have a more clear understanding of the topic. The world as we know it in coffee is growing at a very fast pace, and we are, in the next twenty years, going to face some major obstacles. So by practicing how we can come to agreements and conclusions and debate in a concise, friendly, compassionate, empathetic manner, I think we can set the tone for how we deal with a lot of those major issues.

YOU OFTEN LEAVE THE DEBATES UNRESOLVED. BUT ARE WE AT A POINT WHERE WE NEED TO BREAKDOWN SOME OF THE MYTHS AND ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT COFFEE AND SET SOME HARD ANSWERS?

Meister: I can’t wait to hear your answer to this.

Marrocco: I think there are some areas that are black and white in coffee. And those black-and-white areas are exposed. What we’re doing is bringing light to the subject, so the contrast of the subject can be more visible to people who are listening. We don’t have to be an authority on a subject, but through the exercise of debate we can illuminate that topic. Then I don’t have to sign off by saying, “And so, we have learned . . .” If you draw your own conclusion, you own that conclusion and you act on that conclusion.

Meister: One of the greatest myths in coffee is that there are any truths in coffee.

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PARTNERS: (from left) Alejandro Mendez, Silas Valle, Nelson Valle, and Todd Allbaugh outside of their cafĂŠ in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Plenty of us were surprised when 2011 World Barista Champion Alejandro Mendez chose Wisconsin, of all places, to open his first US café. We didn’t know that his path there began more than twenty years before.

PH OTO BY J OSEP H W. JAC KS ON III

T

o learn how the 2011 World Barista Champion, Alejandro Mendez of El Salvador, came to operate a coffee shop in a Midwest college town, first you have to understand how his business partner got to El Salvador.

Todd Allbaugh—one of Mendez’s four partners in 5th Element Coffee, which opened in Madison last year— is a born-and-bred Wisconsinite.

During the late 1980s, he took classes at the University of Wisconsin–Richland, sixty miles west of Madison in a farming town of 5,000 people.

A Salvadoran exchange student named Silas Valle invited him home for Christmas in 1992. “I’d never been out of the country except for Canada,” says Allbaugh. “It was a real life-changing experience for me—the lifestyle, the people, the culture, and what I learned about myself.”

He would return to El Salvador thirty-four times over the next twenty-four years, visiting Valle and meeting others. Sometimes Allbaugh, who knew little Spanish, even navigated dirt roads and passed through small villages not that dissimilar from those he grew up in in Wisconsin. “It’s really become like my second home,” says Allbaugh, who slowly picked up elementary Spanish during these immersive trips. All this time, he was building a career as a political staffer in the state capital.

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Through these travels he developed a love affair with the country’s coffee.

In 2002, Ricardo Valdevieso gave him a tour of his shade-grown coffee farm and restaurant in Apaneca. Allbaugh was taken aback by the craft and beauty behind the harvest and preparation of this coffee, an experience that jolted him to the core. This kind of feeling didn’t exist in his career. “I was at a point in my life where I wanted to see what was next,” he says. “Ricardo is the one who really ignited my passion for specialty coffee and doing coffee the right way in terms of the environment, people, and impact on others. Without him, 5th Element would not exist.”

Coffee was woven through another trip Allbaugh took to El Salvador, this time in 2008, in which he dropped by Viva Espresso, a coffee shop, and ordered a latte. “It was like a food orgasm. I was used to American lattes that taste like they’re from a gas station. It had this beautiful caramel ring; it was sweet and smoky and creamy. It changed my life,” he says. It was Mendez who was behind the bar that day.

At Viva Espresso, Mendez was being coached by owner Federico Bolanos to compete in barista competitions. Three years after serving Allbaugh, at the age of twenty-three, he’d be crowned World Barista Champion in Bogota, Colombia—the youngest to ever win the competition and the first champion to hail from a coffee-producing country. Since El Salvadoran coffee is hugely popular among competitors in the World Barista Championship, it felt right to Mendez that a Salvadoran would achieve that distinction.

At that same time, Allbaugh—by then serving as chief of staff for a Wisconsin state senator—knew his enthusiasm for his career was waning. He was ready to walk away, but the what next? question nagged at him. In 2014, he approached Mendez, who had just left Viva Espresso to launch 4 Monkeys Coffee Roasters in El Salvador, with an offer: “‘Would you be interested in doing a coffee project with me in Madison?’” Silas Valle and his brother Nelson were already on board.

Mendez flew up to Wisconsin for the first time that October, when the leaves were spun into rich tones of gold and fuchsia and college football was at full throttle in Madison. That was all charming, but what took Mendez by surprise was the farm-to-table scene, which included visits to the country’s

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P HOTO BY CHR IS RYAN

BIG WIN: Alejandro Mendez in 2011, moments after winning the World Barista Championship in Bogota, Colombia.

largest farmers market and a meal at James Beard Award– winning chef Tory Miller’s Graze. These mirrored the direct relationships he was forming with coffee buyers at a friend’s coffee farm in El Salvador. “I discovered that [Madison] is a real foodie city,” says Mendez. “I realized that’s exactly what we are doing with coffee.”

From farm to cup, we have complete control of the coffee.

Allbaugh left his job in January of 2015 when his boss retired. Mendez flew back to Madison, marveling at his first sighting of snow. The two trekked to the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual meeting in Seattle that spring—which coincided with the World Barista Championship—to snap up a Victoria Arduino Black Eagle from Nuova Simonelli that was used in the competition. “We’re pretty proud to be the first café in Wisconsin to have a Black Eagle on the bar,” says Mendez.

5th Element—named for the four elements needed to make coffee (land, air, water and fire), plus human interaction to brew—is in Madison’s Regent neighborhood, home to a mix of students, faculty, and staff from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and only a few miles from the domed state capitol where Allbaugh

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worked. Reclaimed wood from a now-shuttered Madison bowling alley is one of the many design touches from OPN Architects. Mendez was heavily involved in building out the interior, going so far as to put forth his desire for a coffee bar that mimics the set-up at a barista competition to encourage customers to interact with baristas.

Mendez’s innovation has translated to a unique cold-brew method he’s developed using the Yama Glass coldbrew tower. Mendez’s twist is to place ice on top of the tower. “The result is an eight-hour extraction time and the temperature of the water, just off the ‘freeze,’ seizes up the bitter aspects of the coffee and allows the richer, more floral notes to come through,” explains Allbaugh. Customers can also have their coffee brewed in a Chemex, Aeropress, and V60.

5th Element has connected with other local food businesses to offer noshing options that pair well with coffee. This includes chocolatier Gail Ambrosis’s El Salvadoran and Colombian chocolates, Batch Bakehouse’s pastries, and made-from-scratch-inhouse waffles and paninis. Organic Valley milk from Wisconsin cows is employed for espresso drinks.

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Not one to be idle, Mendez opened his 4 Monkeys roastery in El Salvador just as 5th Element welcomed its first customers. He continues to fly between Wisconsin and El Salvador, doing double-duty at the roastery and the café. Having a man on the ground has allowed for the creation of a coffee unique to 5th Element: Finca Santa Rosa’s Lot 2 Black Honey pacamara, which won El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence in 2014. It takes between twenty-two and twenty-four days for the beans to dry in raised beds in the shade, says Mendez—an extreme time among honey-processed coffees.

“What makes us unique is that literally, from farm to cup, we have complete control of the coffee,” says Mendez about 5th Element. All of the El Salvadoran coffees ground and brewed at 5th Element are roasted in El Salvador and shipped fresh to Madison on a two-week rotation. To broaden the geographic selection for customers beyond El Salvador, beans are sourced from other Madison roasters, including Yes and JBC, along with Counter Culture Coffee. “Our goal is to give our guests access to some of the finest single-origin coffees of the world that you can’t find anywhere else in Madison while still

focusing on our direct-relationship coffee with our farmers in El Salvador,” says Allbaugh.

Mendez talks to Allbaugh daily and is in constant contact with the Valle brothers too. “The key to having a successful business in that way is to have partners who have the same mindset,” says Mendez, who turned down offers to open cafés in Portland, Brooklyn, and Australia, in favor of a small Midwest city where the coffee scene was just beginning to percolate and where he could make a difference.

His journey there began long before he ever worked behind an espresso machine. It started when a Midwesterner was invited to El Salvador and discovered a love for coffee and the people working to bring it to him. “I was fortunate to learn about coffee at origin,” says Allbaugh. “When you see how hard people work picking coffee and carrying fifty-pound bags, [you see] it’s such a labor-intensive food.

If Americans would experience what I did, they would have no problem paying $5 for a cup of coffee.”

Thanks to 5th Element, though maybe without their knowing it, Madison’s coffee drinkers are now on the cutting edge of coffee’s drive to connect consumers to farmers.

P HOTO BY JOS EPH W. JAC K SO N III

ALEJANDRO MENDEZ pulls shots on the Black Eagle at 5 th Element.

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TOBY’S ESTATE’S Flatiron Espresso Bar in New York has its menu written on a mirror (opposite page) and on a framed chalkboard near the bar.

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A LOOK IN THE MIRROR The first step in creating a menu is determining what type of business you’re running. “The concept is the primary driver of menu offerings,” says Scott Siers, a senior vice president at Farmer Brothers, a national coffee roaster and distributor. “Who do you want to be? Is coffee primary?”

A rush-hour drive-thru coffee stand focused on milkbased beverages and smoothies will have a very different approach to menu curation than an urban café focused on highlighting a selection of single-origin coffees roasted in-house. Think about who your business serves, how you want to engage your customers with your menu items— whether it be through education about origin or a focus on local ingredients—and the speed at which you envision guests moving through the space. A pour-over bar takes time, but allows quality interaction with the barista manning the station. Batch-brew is conducive to a commuter crowd who want good coffee fast.

At Perc Coffee, a roastery in Savannah, Georgia, owner Philip Brown says the first thing they do when helping someone develop a menu is get to know who they are. “I need to see coffee through their eyes,” Brown says.

While it’s tempting to build a menu that draws from the ideas of other cafés, designing a menu around your unique identity sets you up for success in the future. Taking time to thoroughly test recipes and presentation leads to decisions based on what you think is the best expression of your coffee and tea, not just a reflection of café menus around you. “You need to totally believe in it and totally have thought of every angle,” Brown says. He explains that taking the time to carefully consider each aspect of

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the menu—from cup sizes, to coffee and milk sourcing, to drink names—allows you to speak confidently with customers about your offerings and answer questions without getting defensive.

THE CONSISTENCY FACTOR When you take great pains to build a menu from scratch, make sure your staff is on board. Not only do baristas need to be able to make the drinks on your menu, they also need to understand why each is included in order to engage with customers and provide education. This might also mean having a set of ground rules for handling off-menu requests.

Siers recommends establishing how much latitude and creativity you’re willing to have. “All of these things have their positives and negatives,” he says. “Too many options complicates the menu, complicates training for the staff, creates inconsistency, and ultimately dissatisfies customers.”

Brown recommends sticking to what’s on the menu, wary of the tendency of cafés to operate like build-yourown sandwich shops, adding shots and syrups, swapping milks, and ultimately delivering drinks that have yet to be tested. “If we’re going to have a sweet drink, let’s create a sweet drink,” he says. “A drink that’s been created, that has ingredients, that’s been taste-tested, that we are very confident tastes awesome.”

With regular training, your baristas will know how to guide customers to a drink they’ll enjoy, even if it wasn’t what they originally had in mind. “It all comes back to the customer,” Brown says. “If we’ve curated and thought about all of these ideas, it’s all an effort to give good customer service, to present the very best product we can to them.”

DESIGN AND LAYOUT When the staff is appropriately educated on your drinks, the physical menu can be more streamlined. Menus get confusing when too many options are added to the grid. “It’s not a damn Excel spreadsheet,” Brown says. He advocates

P HOTO BY PHILIP BROWN

n many ways, the café menu is the glue that holds an operation together. While the actual contents of the menu play a critical role in informing customers, so does the presentation of your menu and how it’s positioned in your shop. A café menu serves as a driver of customer interaction, informs pricing and offerings, defines the style of a business, and establishes boundaries of what can be expected in a particular service environment.

It determines what supplies you order, how you source ingredients, and how you train staff.

Without a strong sense of who you are as a business, it’s difficult to shape a menu.

Think about times when you peeked at a menu hanging in a window or browsed through online postings before choosing a new restaurant. One glance can give you a sense of the price range, formality of the dining environment, type of food or drink served, and even personality of the business.

Taking the time to consider your concept, the surrounding neighborhood, and your business goals helps design an informative coffee and tea menu that guides meaningful interactions with your customers—and keeps them coming back.

simpler menu layouts that offer drinks at one price and size, with options for modifications listed at the bottom, “something to simplify the visual experience,” he says.

Siers describes menu layout like a newspaper, read from the top left to the bottom right. “It’s the upper left that I’m going to look to first. I’ve got my core drinks up there. And then I come down and on the bottom: add-ins, syrups, milk,” he says.

“It’s that building concept. Simplification with your add-ins, so your menu board is easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to build.” He recommends limiting drink sizes to two options, bringing it back to consistency and the ability for staff to deliver better drinks.

GOING ROGUE Even the best-designed menus tend to get ignored by customers who frequent a café. A way to combat that? Have a specialty menu in addition to your core offerings. “You are going to have some people who want to discover,” says Siers. He recommends rotating new drinks on a monthly basis or on a regular

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TEA BA R P HOTOS BY CANDAC E MO LATO RE

Designing your menu is also an opportunity to revisit your brand. How does the layout of your menu fit into the design of your café? There are lots of ways to incorporate your menu into your space and weave company branding into the design (as evidenced by the cafés in this story). Many cafés choose to work with an artist or graphic designer to help create the vision, treating the menu as a design element of the café.

cadence that customers can look forward to.

Levi Anderson, a beverage product specialist with the Kerry Group, encourages cafés to consider a secret or alternative menu. He suggests even using a QR code for customers to access a secondary menu with drink specials and in-depth info on sourcing.

“It allows for lots more information to be included on the menu, to be looped into the bigger story,” Anderson says.

Specialty menus are best placed on the counter or in a spot easily visible to customers queuing to order. Offering new beverages for a limited time serves as a trial period for any beverage you might consider adding to the permanent offerings, without taking up valuable real estate on the main board.

To take a closer look at menu development, we’ll examine five cafés across the country whose menus are a seamless element of their brand, training, and customer engagement.

TEA BAR | PORTLAND, OREGON “Tea Bar overall is very modern, simplistic, clean,” says owner Erica Indira Swanson. “To have that translate in everything we do—our products and our menu—is so important.” The block lettering of Tea Bar’s logo, along with the powder-blue accents, carries over to their single-page menu that sits on the bar. The text is designed with a mix of fonts and weights to improve readability.

The menu changes every season to reflect new drink specials—using a laminated countertop menu makes it easy to update. Swanson views the menu as a dynamic tool to engage her staff and customers. “It gives the team an opportunity to be involved and give input on new recipes and lets people know they’re not just settling for the basic menu all the time,” she says.

More popular drinks take up prime real estate, like the selection of boba teas and the rotating seasonal drinks. According to Swanson, dedicating this space reflects customer preferences, but also serves to promote higher revenue drinks. Limiting prices to dollar and half-dollar amounts keeps things clean (Oregon has no sales tax, so change is easy), and offering only two sizes improves bar flow.

When it comes to decision-making, Swanson uses her Square software to assess sales and make any necessary cuts. “Less options is more appealing,” she says. “You get so many options and it gets even more confusing, both for the people working and the people ordering.” Part of keeping fewer options on the menu is training staff to be knowledgeable on all the ingredients and how they can be combined to meet a customer’s needs.

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THE WORMHOLE COFFEE | CHICAGO

With a staff that stands behind a peanut butter mousse (found in the Koopa-Troopa) as strongly as they promote a hand-brewed single-origin, customers have the opportunity to explore and learn about coffee in a step-by-step progression. For someone who likes a honey latte, Willhoff says they might suggest the Cool but Rude, which uses honey, but is a bit more adventurous with its ginger and curry flare. “If we can get someone to try that, we can get them to try something else,” he says.

In training, Willhoff and his staff spend a lot of time building tasting skills and learning to talk about flavors.

When customers come in, the baristas can better guide them through both menu and retail offerings by identifying specific flavor preferences and encouraging them to experience something new from the menu.

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REVOLUTION ROASTERS | OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA Revolution Roasters is the first specialty coffee roaster in Oceanside, California. In a community where many people are exploring coffee’s third wave for the first time, a menu loaded with visual cues makes a lot of sense. “We really want to be by the people, for the people,” says Revolution operations manager Isabel Bernegger.

“We’re really trying to make it so that people have extreme accessibility to specialty coffee.”

Co-owner Mariah Scheibe wanted the menu to be the first thing customers saw when they entered the space, something that was approachable and easy to read. So she recruited artist Megan Snedeker of Pearl and Pen to bring her vision to life.

The menu is as much functional as it is a design element.

Spanning the full wall next to the bar, an illustration accompanies each listing, letting customers know the size of each drink, as well as the type of drinkware. Four main categories make it easy to find what you’re looking for: espresso and milk, coffee, coffee concoctions, and not coffee.

“We take great pride in all the drinks that we make, but we really want people to come in here and feel like they’re at home, not just with our physical space, but with our offerings,” Bernegger says. Revolution made a choice to include a wide range of drinks. “If anyone walks in, we want them to be able to get exactly what they want and an excellent version of it, made with incredible ingredients,” she says.

Bernegger says the hope behind the menu, and behind Revolution, is to meet people where they are. By greeting customers with an informative menu, it sets a tone for education and exploration—people can glean as much or as little info as they like. “We wanted customers to feel like specialty coffee wasn’t something that was blocking them out,” she says.

WORM HO LE M ENU P HOTO C OURTESY O F THE WORM HO LE CO FFEE; RE VOLUT IO N P HOTO (TO P) BY HAN N AH W E STB Y E L ATE PHOTO; RE VOLU TI ON ME N U B Y CAHTE RI N E D RU KE N

In a Chicago café that proudly displays a Nintendo and a DeLorean, you might assume the focus on coffee got lost somewhere among the floppy disks and eighties movie posters. Yet Wormhole Coffee’s fascination with kitsch is matched by its enthusiasm for single-origins and the locally sourced ingredients found on their specialty drink menu. You’ll find drinks like Cool but Rude, Koopa-Troopa, and Cruel Summer under the “Top Players” side of the menu, which reads like the high scores of an old-school arcade game.

“We try to have fun with the drinks we create,” says café manager Andreas Willhoff. “The big thing for us is not just having the same sort of drinks you could get anywhere.”

For Wormhole, this translates to house-made syrups, local ingredients, and unique presentation—like espresso served in a scotch tulip. “It all comes down to feeling good serving whatever you’re serving,” says Willhoff.

TOBY’S ESTATE | NEW YORK CITY At Toby’s Estate, the menu is a strong design element reflecting the unique personality of each of their four New York cafés. While each menu follows a basic template— standard espresso offerings, single-origin selections, seasonal drinks, teas—customers will have a slightly different experience at each location. “Single-origins vary by location just depending on what’s available and what’s exciting.

It’s going to come down to the preferences of guests—we want to have something for everybody,” says Allie Caran, a coffee educator at Toby’s Estate.

TO BY’S ESTATE PHOTOS CO URETSY O F TO BY’S ESTATE; C OAVA PHOTO BY CYNTHIA MEA DO RS

COAVA COFFEE | PORTLAND, OREGON

Caran explains that the menu is merely a tool to present what’s available, but it’s the staff they really depend on to engage the customer and provide education about the coffee. “Our menu’s great, but it wouldn’t be anything without our staff,” she says. Caran describes the menu at Toby’s Estate as a living document, something they view as ever-changing. The staff at Toby’s participate in trainings at least two times a month, and the menu lays a foundation for what’s covered. She says, “The way we explain coffee, the way we talk about it—for us [the menu has] become its own catalyst for brewing better coffee and creating better specs.”

At their Flatiron location, white marble and a menu written on a mirror reflect the grandiose designs of Fifth Avenue. It’s elegant, but the enamel-painted menu requires any changes be made overnight. “We’ve gotten a lot better with our ability to change a board,” she says of their West Village and Vanderbilt locations. The Vanderbilt store features a long, narrow menu composed of panels, each of which can be removed individually when updates are required.

Coava didn’t set out to make any sort of statement with their minimalist menu. Their flagship café opened as a tasting room, and the space and menu were designed accordingly. “It was all built around that idea of a tasting menu,” says Jonathon Felix-Lund, director of operations for Coava. “Everything about this space, everything about the menu was about focusing on coffee. Being able to highlight the coffees we put so much time into sourcing and roasting, and we in turn try to highlight the producer as much as possible.”

The wooden menu lists the five preparations available at Coava: coffee, espresso, macchiato, cappuccino, and latte. Each day, two roasts are offered for both handpoured coffee and for espresso-based drinks (displayed on a smaller board on the countertop). Coffees often take names after producers, keeping focus on the coffee and its origins, and encouraging conversation with customers about the bigger story.

Felix-Lund explains that the decision to have only one size of drip coffee (ten ounce) allows for consistency; there’s less to think about when there’s only one cup size for each drink. There’s also less to stock behind bar and in storage, and each milk pitcher can be dedicated to a specific drink type. Condiments and lids are kept behind the bar, enhancing the interaction between staff and customer.

This menu design affords Coava the efficiency and consistency necessary to rotate through a high number of coffees.

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NYC COFFEE CULTURE: Celimar Suarez and Joseph Gonzalez at Taszo Espresso Bar.

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While the machinations of West Coast and Midwest transplants might catch the most national attention, New York City has grown its own coffee scene, with cafĂŠs and roasteries sprouting up far from Midtown and Williamsburg and featuring a staff and customers as diverse as the city itself.

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aking it in New York City is never easy. Operating a successful business here means navigating one of the most competitive markets in the country—competitive in terms of space, permits and licensing, and customer loyalty. It takes some seriously savvy hustle to translate success from another city to success in New York. Counter Culture’s wholesale program and training lab, Intelligentsia’s and Blue Stone Lane’s shops, and roasting operations by Stumptown, Blue Bottle, Toby’s Estate, and Devoción prove that what captivates coffee drinkers elsewhere can also win the hearts, palates, and dollars of New Yorkers. But it’s no guarantee.

Replicating success established elsewhere within the five boroughs is no small feat. Beginning a successful specialty coffee business from the ground up in New York presents a different kind of challenge.

Oslo Coffee Roasters, Café Grumpy, Gorilla, Joe, Birch, Parlor, the Pulley Collective, City of Saints, and Variety Coffee Roasters have all forged the way during the past decade, and specialty coffee is becoming even more quality-obsessed with the emergence of micro-roasters like Supercrown, Luft, and Lofted. Many of these companies have informed each other, with professionals learning a craft at one company then launching a new business. Apart from this network, there is a segment of coffee roasting companies and cafés building unique businesses in neighborhoods and sectors that traditionally have not been part of New York’s specialty coffee culture.

The Bronx, Harlem, and Queens have quietly built their own specialty coffee communities that reflect the cultures of the boroughs’ neighborhoods.

Haitem Weslati is the owner of Taszo Espresso Bar on 157th Street in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. “In here, attitude is illegal,” he says. The café’s multilingual staff serves coffee beverages made with Colombian beans roasted at Devoción in Brooklyn, beer from local breweries, and Latin-inspired lunch fare. “I love it. I love the people, and I want everyone who’s here to love being here—staff and customers. If you have an ego then this isn’t the place for you,” says Weslati.

The café is split, with communal counters and tables exclusively for laptop use in the rear and intimate New York-sized two-tops at the front for eating, reading, drawing, chatting, and savoring coffee.

“You see?” Weslati gestures to the shop’s patrons.

“Teachers, students, artists, construction workers, business professionals, families—everyone is here and they are all welcome. I come from Sweden, and I wanted to create a shop that serves delicious coffee

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and food and feels as comfortable as an extension of your home.”

Manager Greg Ellson believes that vibe is achieved. “I was a customer for about a month before I said, ‘I need to work here. It just feels like home,’” he says. Taszo is designed to serve all the needs of the neighborhood, with trained baristas crafting gorgeous lattes, but also with a self-service drip-coffee station set out in the mornings to expedite the rush of commuters headed to the subway stop just steps from the café. There is signage explaining the origin and process of the beans on bar, but it’s small and by no means the focal point of the

HAITEM WESLATI

shop’s eclectic décor. Ellson says, “Everyone here is a regular. I can’t walk from my house to the 1 train now without seeing someone I know, which makes this entire neighborhood feel like a real community. We’re seeing the beginnings of gentrification around here, but this is an example of a business that enhances the neighborhood rather than puts a stamp on it.”

Taszo’s newest barista is Joseph Gonzalez. As a native Bronx resident, father of two, and passionate coffee professional who uses his days off to take SCAA courses and attend Counter Culture training classes and cuppings, Gonzalez exemplifies how specialty coffee’s radius in New York reaches far beyond the nucleus of north Brooklyn shops and roasteries that ignited the city’s specialty movement. “I was so inspired when Lem Butler won the US Barista Championships this year,” Gonzalez says. “Like me,

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he’s also a parent. It showed that anyone can make it all the way as a competitive barista. That’s my goal.”

He’s getting chances to practice as more and more coffee competitions are held in more places around the city. Uptown Roasters hosted the first Uptown Throwdown in April and a second in July, both at the Bronx

There is no such thing as a typical New Yorker, and the Uptown Throwdown showed that there is also no such thing as a typical New York coffee professional. The participants ranged in age from college students to retirees, and curious patrons at the brewery’s tasting room were converted into latte cheerleaders by the end

There is no such thing as a typical New Yorker, and the Uptown Throwdown showed that there is also no such

thing as a typical New York coffee professional.

Brewery. The participants and observers packing the brewery space in the Port Morris neighborhood of the South Bronx represented a true cross section of the city: multiple languages, cultures, backgrounds, and styles all meshed organically.

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of the night. All of this—the people, the location—cut against the lazy stereotypes of New York coffee culture.

It also was a fulfillment of Uptown’s reason for existing.

“East Harlem and the Bronx are underserved in a lot of ways,” says Dan

Hildebrandt, owner of Uptown Roasters. Uptown Roasters launched in the Bronx in 2014 with the goal of making specialty coffee more equitable by serving in neighborhoods where it has previously not been available. They also hired locals and set out to train a new generation of baristas. “I’m from Peru,” says Hildebrandt, “and my business partner Paul Cebul and I started a project called Reach Trade working with innovative Peruvian farmers.

We approached fifty or sixty different roasters with the resulting coffee, but no one was interested because the quality wasn’t there. When we got to the point where we had good coffee, I decided we should be roasting and have our own cafés too, and we should serve the Latino community because not only is there that connection to origin, but everyone deserves access to high-quality products.”

Uptown started roasting in a storage space adjacent to the Bronx Brewery, and in July moved their San

UPTOWN ROASTERS

Franciscan roaster to East Harlem to be closer to their café on 110th Street.

The new roasting location is inside the farm-to-table Italian restaurant Neapolitan Express, owned by lifelong Spanish Harlem resident and entrepreneur Max Crespo. Harlem food and beverage is redesigning itself from the inside out, doing just what Taszo manager Greg Ellson believes a smart business should: enhancing a neighborhood rather than branding it. “We have the United Nations of barista staff,” laughs Hildebrandt. “Our employees speak Spanish, English, and Chinese, and it totally works.”

Uptown Roasters contributes to East Harlem while still supporting the larger New York specialty coffee community by collaborating with other start-up roasting companies. Solidarity Roasters and Eastlick Coffee Company both rent time on Uptown’s equipment.

Joel Eastlick has a more traditional specialty coffee background and demonstrates how companies pioneering

specialty coffee in new neighborhoods can seamlessly connect back to New York’s established coffee lineage.

“Growing up, coffee was Folgers, but after living in Spain my aspiration was always to own a neighborhood café,” says Eastlick. In order to realize this goal, Eastlick knew he needed to develop his skills beyond the café positions of barista and roaster. Shared roasting space Pulley Collective opened shortly after Eastlick’s move to New York, and there he roasted with Ninth Street Espresso for two years. In November 2015 he launched Eastlick Coffee Company. New York houses plenty of corporate headquarters, but the city is powered by family businesses and fueled by people with unwavering dreams like these.

Building a coffee brand in New York is about more than coffee; it’s always about the neighborhood. Because the city’s eight million inhabitants are packed so closely together within the city’s three hundred square miles,

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FOR FIVE COFFEE ROASTERS STAFF WITH CO-OWNERS TOM TSIPLAKOS (THIRD FROM LEFT) AND STEFANOS VOUVOUDAKIS (FIFTH FROM LEFT).

politics, policies, feuds, loyalties, and other factors complicate how a new business fits into a given location.

Starting a coffee operation in New York demands much more than knowing coffee—it requires knowing the city.

Across the East River in the Maspeth neighborhood in the borough of Queens, For Five Coffee Roasters is also revolutionizing New York specialty coffee, but through a different path than the community café. It’s working through wholesale distribution to the city’s most exclusive hotels, offices, and restaurants.

On a non-descript semi-industrial street just off Flushing Avenue, For Five’s roasting facility churned out a staggering 75,000 pounds of green coffee in June for its 1,100 wholesale accounts in the five boroughs and out of state. Headed by childhood friends Stefanos Vouvoudakis and Tom Tsiplakos, For Five Coffee Roasters is the smartest, sexiest coffee company you have never heard of.

“You see the mural in the loading area? That’s the Queensboro Bridge,” explains Vouvoudakis. “The vision of connecting the whole city is ingrained in our name and logo. For Five Coffee—coffee for the five boroughs. The

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logo is in the shape of the old subway tokens to show that just like the subway can take you all over the world by visiting the city’s different cultures, coffee can transport you across the globe in a cup.”

New York’s no-nonsense delis and diners are immortalized in countless TV shows and movies, and those lifeblood establishments are how For Five built their company. “We started with mom-and-pop shops to build our customer base,” says Tsiplakos. “You don’t want to start a company with four major customers and then lose one and it rocks the infrastructure.

The base was built on small hospitality businesses, which were our forte from our previous experiences—Stefanos’s in coffee distribution and mine in industrial linen.” Tsiplakos and Vouvoudakis respect their strengths and sought out experts in other fields, most notably hiring Billy Brogan as director of coffee.

Vouvoudakis says, “I remember sitting with Tom, looking at roasting companies UPSing coffee into New York from other cities. I asked him, ‘Why not us? Why not build this thing in New York, in Queens, where we’re from—for New Yorkers by New York-

ers?’ A year and three months later we’re about to open our first retail location on 46th Street in Times Square.”

The location of For Five’s first café is symbolically located in the heart of the city, at the convergence of the subway lines that inspired the brand.

The tagline on the iconic blue Anhora coffee cups—“it’s our pleasure to serve you”—remains true. New Yorkers are in the hustle together, and it is the honor of New York-born companies to serve other New Yorkers.

Shops like Taszo and roasters like Uptown involve their neighborhoods in all that they do, from the people they hire to the events they host to the ways they lay out their shops.

Wholesale companies like For Five are the arteries that connect these neighborhoods to each other, reminding that everyone—no matter where they live or work—equally appreciates a good cup of coffee.

Vouvoudakis is looking to the future. “This is a new-age coffee roasting facility, but still with that timeless New York work ethic. You open up that gate every morning, and you just smile. It’s fun. It’s exciting. There’s this buzz here that you just don’t get anywhere else.”

P HOTO BY DARYN BA RTLETT

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IDENTIFY MANAGEMENT POTENTIAL In most retail settings, and business settings in general, we promote people for the wrong reason. We make an employee the manager because they are exceptional at their job. When I managed at a large retailer, I was guilty of that. I thought, “Hey, this person is a phenomenal sales person, I am sure they will be a great manager!” I could not have been more wrong.

So, if not just picking our best baristas to manage a café, then what should we be looking for?

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START BY HANDING OFF SOME EASY MANAGEMENT DUTIES, LIKE LEADING CLOSING OR TRAINING A COWORKER TO PROPERLY STEAM MILK, AND SEE HOW THEY PERFORM. I learned to simply ask the person if they want to be a manager. I looked for someone who was excited about their current role and repeatedly asked for more duties, or just took initiative and did more than was asked of them. A forgotten but obvious resource is the candidates’ original job application and resume.

Do they have any prior management experience that I overlooked or forgot about, or did they offer any insight as to their future goals? I thank one of my favorite managers for this simple but brilliant insight, because it allows you to see if an employee has the drive to grow or if another company may have trained them for you.

Start by handing off some easy management duties, like leading closing or training a coworker to properly steam milk, and see how they perform. If they do well and are hungry for more, you may have a good candidate on your hands. Next, look at how they handle any customer complaints.

This is a good window into how they will deal with conflict in a leadership role. Are they able to easily diffuse the situation? Are they keenly capable at making an unhappy customer happy?

These are good indicators of communication and relationship skills, both necessary to be a great manager.

Another critical detail many café owners miss: are they nice? How

PH OTO BY ALEJAND RO ESCAMILLA

ou own a café.

Your coffee game is on point. Your shots are perfectly extracted, and your milk is as smooth as melted ice cream. However, you just can’t keep quality baristas or managers on your floor. Why are people leaving?

One of the answers could be a lack of quality leadership. Last year, a British firm called Approved Index released the results from a survey about why people quit their jobs. Top of the list, at 42 percent, was bad managers.

Why is it so hard to hire, train, or be a great leader? It shouldn’t be so difficult, but it is. Most managers learn to manage either by watching a really great manager or, more often, a really bad one. I definitely learned from the latter. I had lots of bad managers, and a few really great ones, and now, twenty-one years after I began my management career, I have some advice on how we can choose, train, and empower those in our leadership roles and stop losing good people because of bad managers.

Plus, wouldn’t it be great if your manager and your team were so strong that you could actually let your business run for a week while you were in the Bahamas? Well that only happens if you take finding and developing a great manager seriously.

many of you have had a jerk for a manager, that person who doesn’t care at all about you, just about the bottom line or their own authority.

ANOTHER CRITICAL DETAIL MANY CAFÉ OWNERS MISS: IS YOUR POTENTIAL MANAGER NICE? I know I have. Your manager needs to have emotional intelligence. Your managers need to be able to work with other people and genuinely care

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about them, not just focus on the tasks that need to be completed. Look for someone who the rest of your team actually wants to work with.

That can be a smooth transition into someone that they actually want to work for.

“Communication is key” is an old adage for a reason. Can your potential manager communicate? One thing all truly great managers and leaders have in common is their excellent ability to communicate. Everything about management requires communication.

They have to be able to convey the why behind the what. They have to be able to delegate. They have to be able to articulate your vision and expectations for the way your business is to operate. Without communication, the manager perishes. And then so does your team.

Let’s take a pause in our search, and look at your own management and communication. Are you a good

communicator? You must be able to spell out the vision for your company, and to describe and demonstrate the core behaviors you expect from all your employees. Do you have a vision and core behaviors spelled out for your business? If you don’t, do that before you hire a manager. Or if you already have a management team in place, step back and create your vision and core behaviors. There is no way you can expect someone to effectively lead your company if you cannot convey to them

the end results you’re wanting to achieve. It is never too late to do this. These goals should govern every decision you make, and every decision made by your team. It is the best and fastest way to course correct and get your ship headed in the right direction.

YOU PROMOTED THEM, NOW WHAT? You’ve identified an employee who is motivated, wants to lead, and has the emotional intelligence to do it well. Now you have to put in the effort to develop them! You can’t just promote them, give them the keys to the shop, and go on your merry way.

This happened to me in my very first management role. I was nineteen. I was a selling machine. I was a pretty good communicator. I always demonstrated enthusiasm for my current role and craved more responsibility. I would like to think I was pretty nice and that my coworkers enjoyed working with me.

But: I had no idea how to manage anyone! Yet, there

THERE ARE SO MANY GREAT BOOKS, AND PODCASTS, AND ARTICLES OUT THERE, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE TO NOT DEVELOP YOUR MANAGERS. I was, head of a staff of ten salespeople, holding the keys to the store. When I asked the owner to go over the duties and goals for my new position, I was told to write the schedule, make sure the team did their non-sales tasks, and make the sales goals. Oh, that’s it? How hard can that be? Apparently, a little harder than it looked.

I made a lot of mistakes. I tried to make everyone like me by doing their jobs for them, so no one took my orders seriously. I was over-reactionary and I didn’t triage problems or get full info before jumping in, so I looked (and was) frantic. I was young, which wouldn’t have been a problem, except

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I let my insecurity and need to be liked rob me of the power of effective communication. I was burning myself out and resenting my team. I wasn’t actually managing anyone. It was a recipe for disaster.

Back in 1993 when I was thrown into management, there were no TED Talks, no podcasts, and nobody had introduced me to Tony Robbins or John Maxwell yet. So I had to go it

TRUSTING AND EMPOWERING YOUR PEOPLE IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST GIFTS YOU CAN GIVE THEM. on my own. I had no mentor, no real example to follow, so I just made it up as I went along. Please, I beg of you, do not do that to your people. If you do, you are putting your business at risk. There are so many great books, and podcasts, and articles out there, you have no excuse to not develop your managers.

Most useful is a manager training outline. Create one yourself or make it easy and steal one off the internet, there are many out there. A good training outline details the responsibilities of the manager role, as well as a time frame to learn them. The time frame holds you and your new manager accountable for accomplishing the learning goals that you have outlined.

As you customize the outline, keep in mind that you have more than one option when you promote someone.

You do not have to give them all of

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the responsibility right away. You could create a manager-in-training position, letting you give them little chunks of responsibilities to master. However, in a busy café setting, we are usually in a hurry to replace someone who left, so we tend not to have the luxury of time. In that case, it is even more important that you are very intentional about communicating and teaching the skills that will set your new manager up for success.

All this being said, if you do not naturally possess these skills (some business owners don’t and that’s OK), put someone else in charge of grooming your new manager. Enroll them in a program; buy a management book and read through a chapter a week and discuss how they can apply the concepts. Spending the time and, yes, money to grow your managers is one of the essential keys to the success of your coffee business.

For a new manager, it can be hard to step into the role of the manager if they were the coworker the day before.

On the floor and behind the bar, it is crucial that you support them in front of their direct reports. Hold a company meeting to celebrate their promotion.

This accomplishes multiple things, most importantly, it establishes their new authority and gives them the chance to address your team as a whole before they start delegating tasks and being the boss. It’s critical for the rest of the team to see that you have confidence in the person you have promoted. It’s also crucial that you praise them in public and coach them in private. Do not let their team see you question their decision making or actions, they will feel defeated and the team will lose trust and respect.

CAN I GO ON VACATION YET? You’ve chosen your manager wisely.

You’ve done the research, spent the time and money, and developed a capable, motivated, and skillful manager, or at least one who is getting there. But you still have a hard time letting go of the reins and stepping

away from your business—your baby—for any length of time. Some of that fear is just part of being a business owner. You have poured your money, sweat, and tears into getting this café up and running. You have spent countless hours behind that bar yourself, and now you have to trust someone else to do it for you while you’re away. Scary, right?

It is scary. But it’s necessary.

Now, I’m assuming you aren’t a crazy micromanager, that you just want to make sure you have the right person in place and you have given them the proper tools for success.

You have to trust yourself that you have a manager who cares enough about your business and your people to make the right decisions for your business in your absence. If you’ve done the hard work of identifying a potential manager and developing their abilities, trust that they care about you, they absolutely care about the customer, and they care about the product they are serving to that customer. And then, you have to just do it. You have to leave. Will it be perfect while you are gone? No. Will they make mistakes? Yes. It’s what they and you do about those mistakes that matter in the long run.

Now it is time to trust them. And to trust yourself. Trusting and empowering your people is one of the biggest gifts you can give them. Empowering them, and then letting them make mistakes is even better. Empowering them, letting them make mistakes, and then using those mistakes as teachable moments is the best. You cannot be at your café twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In order for you to be the visionary, the entrepreneur, and to continually grow your business, you have to be able to step away from time to time.

Otherwise you will be a burned-out, ineffective leader yourself.

Now, you have done all the things necessary to choose, develop, and trust. Your manager is fantastic.

By all means, go to the Bahamas!

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Counter INTELLIGENCE DR. BEVOLUTION

SINGLE-ORIGIN SYRUPS Cater to customers who

The Bevolution Group,

desire the story behind the

a portfolio company of

ingredients with DaVinci

Highlander Partners, has acquired Dr. Smoothie

Gourmet All-Natural Sin-

Brands. Bevolution Group is a leading manufactur-

gle-Origin Syrups. Crafted

er of shelf-stable and frozen foodservice beverage

using premium single-ori-

products. Bevolution CEO Sam Lteif is excited about

gin ingredients, these syrups can be used to create

the acquisition. “Our customers are looking for in-

specialty drinks with a story. Ideal for both hot and

novative products and solutions, and Dr. Smoothie’s

cold applications, single-origin flavor varieties in-

offerings are uniquely positioned to help us satisfy

clude Hawaiian Salted Caramel, Madagascar Vanilla,

the demand in the market.” bevolutiongroup.com

Turkish Hazelnut, and Pacific Northwest Raspberry. davincigourmet.com

TEA THAT TUMBLES The sleek and modern traveling

WEIGH YOUR OPTIONS Stainless steel bench scales from Fairbanks Scales Inc. are ideal for a range of sanitary applications within the food and beverage industry. Designed to the Scale Manufacturers Association standards for shock and overload protection, the QuickSilver stainless steel platform features a lowprofile, shock-resistant base. The scales are perfect as a check-weighing system or for blending and

tumbler from Teabook makes it easy to take tea on the go. The tumbler holds 9.5 fluid ounces and features a stainless steel filter suitable for all types of tea, removing the need for cumbersome tea baskets. With a convenient carrying strap for on-the-go use, the tumbler is a convenient companion for any destination.

Double-walled glass controls temperature for hours without introducing harmful toxins. teabook.co

batching applications. fairbanks.com

PUT IT IN THE CART BlueCart’s web and mo-

PLAN ZERO

78

bile ordering platform Concordia Coffee Company an-

allows food and bev-

nounced the launch of Plan Zero,

erage establishments to place orders in one click,

an

that

improving communication between cafés and their

covers their lineup of coffee ma-

suppliers. BlueCart helps back-of-house operators

chines from installation to preventive maintenance,

keep orders accountable, reducing the time spent

to repairs, all for a low, fixed monthly payment. The

ordering, and minimizing unnecessary food waste.

plan features an exclusive 90-day profit guarantee,

Software includes in-app messaging, customizable

and is designed to pay for itself by selling only six to

order guides, cut-off time for orders, and detailed

ten drinks per day. concordiacoffee.com

analytics. bluecart.com

all-inclusive

September 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

program

» People & Products «

A WAVE OF COLD-BREW

SUSTAINABLE ROYALTY

WhiteWave Away From Home

Royal Cup Coffee and

introduces new SToK Single

Tea was presented two

Serve Cold-Brew Coffee to its

awards for commitment to

coffee bar portfolio. SToK is

sustainability: the Commercial Conservation award

brewed low and slow for a min-

from the Alabama Environmental Council for the

imum of 10 hours to bring out

company’s goal to be 99 percent landfill-free, and

every drop of smooth, bold, one-of-a-kind SToKness.

the Outstanding Business award from My Green

Made with a proprietary arabica-based blend, the

Birmingham for efforts to reduce waste and cut

cool steeping process removes bitterness, result-

air emissions. These efforts have saved Royal Cup

ing in a smoother taste. Single-serve, 13.7-ounce

over $180,000 and 2.5 million pounds of avoided CO2

bottles are available in Mocha, Vanilla and Not Too

emissions. royalcupcoffee.com/sustainability

Sweet Black varieties. stokcoldbrew.com

ALOHA, SWEET VICTORY Greenwell Farms captured top

EL VOYAGE Blended from five regions of Gua-

honors at the Hawaii Coffee

temala, El Voyage coffee offers a

Association annual conference

natural and pure flavor that brews

and statewide cupping compe-

with a unique aroma and acidity lev-

tition. The farm won Hawaii’s

el. The coffee is cultivated 3,000 to

top award in the Creative Division for its Signature Series Elizabeth J, a pacamara varietal; the same label also won the District Award Division. Greenwell Farms is managed by fourthgeneration Tom Greenwell in the heart of Kona coffee country. greenwellfarms.com

4,500 feet above sea level in diverse regions where local farmers have been growing some of the world’s finest coffee for over 100 years.

Every purchase supports Coalicion Guatemalteca del Deporte. elvoyage.com

CERAMIC SOURCE The Ceramic Source announces

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PACKAGE

the release of a tea tumbler and

As new markets open up for

vacuum mug to their lineup. The

specialty roasters in major

sixteen-ounce tea tumbler and

retailers, Plexpack Corp. has

infuser allows you to brew loose-

been a first-hand witness to

leaf tea directly in the cup, while

this change in the market,

double-walled insulation regulates temperature.

providing expert solutions to thirty different cof-

Choose from six different colors of tea on the go.

fee roasters in the last two years alone. Visit their

Ceramic Source’s new fourteen-ounce vacuum mug

website to read an in-depth case study on how they

features insulated stainless steel and excellent tem-

helped Coffee Express find the right packaging for

perature retention. Ward off spills with an easy-twist

their product, resulting in a payback of only one year.

lid. ceramic-source.com

plexpack.com

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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Trade Show & Events CALENDAR SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER 7–9 COTECA HAMBURG Hamburg, Germany coteca-hamburg.com/en

SEPTEMBER 25–26 CANADIAN COFFEE AND TEA SHOW Vancouver coffeeteashow.ca

SEPTEMBER 10–11 COFFEE AND CHOCOLATE EXPO San Juan, Puerto Rico coffeeandchocolateexpo.com

SEPTEMBER 27–29 FLORIDA RESTAURANT AND LODGING SHOW Orlando flrestaurantandlodgingshow.com

SEPTEMBER 14–17 GOLDEN BEAN NORTH AMERICA Portland goldenbean.com

SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 2 COFFEE FEST ANAHEIM Anaheim coffeefest.com

OCTOBER SEPTEMBER 16–18 NEW YORK COFFEE FESTIVAL New York City newyorkcoffeefestival.com

SEPTEMBER 20–22 FALL FOR TEA/ NORTH AMERICAN TEA CONFERENCE Ontario, Canada tea.ca

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OCTOBER 13–16 LET’S TALK COFFEE Puerto Vallarta, Mexico letstalkcoffee.org

OCTOBER 17–20 MOSCOW COFFEE & TEA EXPO Moscow expocoffeetea.ru/en

» 2016 Coffee & Tea Trade Shows, Classes & Competitions «

OCTOBER

OCTOBER 20–22 TRIESTESPRESSO EXPO Trieste, Italy triestespresso.it

OCTOBER 20–22 WORLD TEA & COFFEE EXPO Mumbai, India worldteacoffeeexpo.com

OCTOBER 20–24 CHINA XIAMEN INTERNATIONAL TEA FAIR Xiamen, Fujian Province, China teafair.com.cn/en/

OCTOBER 26–28 NCA COFFEE SUMMIT Miami ncausa.org/coffee-summit-2016

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 2–4 INTERNATIONAL COFFEE & TEA FESTIVAL Dubai, UAE coffeeteafest.com

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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ADVERTISER Index Go to freshcup.com/resources and click on “Fresh Cup Advertisers” to view the Advertiser Index and the Websites listed below.

ADVERTISER

CONTACT

Add a Scoop 415.382.6535 Aerobie 650.493.3050 AIYA America 310.212.1395 ASHE 844.722.4968 Barista 22 info@barista22.com Barista Pro Shop 866.PRO.LATTE (776.5288) Big Train 800.BIG.TRAIN (244.8724) Cappuccine 800.511.3127 The Chai Co. 888.922.2424 Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters 916.451.5181 Coffee & Tea Festival 631.940.7290 Coffee Fest 800.232.0083 Coffee Holding Co. 800.458.2233 Coffee Shop Manager 800.750.3947 Curtis 800.421.6150 Custom Cup Sleeves 888-672-4096 DaVinci Gourmet 800.640.6779 Dillanos Coffee Roasters 253.826.1807 Ditting 810.367.7125 Fresh Cup Magazine 503.236.2587 Frozen Bean 855.837.6936 Gaviña Gourmet Coffee 800.428.4627 Ghirardelli Chocolate 800.877.9338 Golden Bean 310.266.2827 Gosh That’s Good! Brand 888.848.GOSH (4674) Grounds For Health 802.876.7835 Healthy Kids Concepts 916.730.5275 Hollander Chocolate 800 467 7142 Holy Kakow 503.484.8316 Host-Fiera Milano 39.02.49971 International Coffee & Tea Festival-UAE 971.4.3355001 Java Jacket 800.208.4128 Josuma Coffee Company 650.366.5453 KitchenAid 800.541.6390

Let’s Talk Coffee/Sustainable Harvest 503.235.1119 Monin Gourmet Flavorings 855.FLAVOR1 (352.8671) Mountain Cider Co. 800.483.2416 Mr. Espresso 510.287.5200 Organic Products Trading Co. 888.881.4433 Pacific Foods 503.692.9666 PumpSkins 877.994.4600 RetailMugs.com 970.222.9559 Routin 1883 800.467.7142 Sea Island Coffee 44.207.735.4473 SelbySoft 800.454.4434 SerendipiTea 888.TEA.LIFE (832.5433) Service Ideas 800.328.4493 StixToGo 800.666.6655 Sustainable Harvest 503.235.1119 TEA House Times , The 973.551.9161 TeaSource 855.320.4832 Theta Ridge Coffee 800.745.8738 Toddy 970.493.0788 Umpqua Oats 877.303.8107 UpShot Filters by LBP 800.545.6200 Vessel Drinkware 855.883.7735 Vio by WinCup 800.292.2877 Your Brand Café 866.566.0390 Zojirushi America 800.264.6270

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ONLINE

PAGE

addascoop.com 77 aerobie.com 48 aiya-america.com 11 ashellc.com 62 barista22.com 55 baristaproshop.com/ad/fresh 23, 63 bigtrain.com 27 cappuccine.net 7 chaico.com 13 chocolatefishcoffee.com 63 coffeeandteafestival.com 81 coffeefest.com 51, 64 coffeeholding.com 73 coffeeshopmanager.com 22 wilburcurtis.com 2 customcupsleeves.com 77 davincigourmet.com 19 dillanos.com 55 ditting.com 57 freshcup.com 48, 67 thefrozenbean.com 83 gavina.com 41 ghirardelli.com/maximo 84 goldenbean.com 39, 81 goshthatsgood.com 15 groundsforhealth.org 62 healthykidsconcepts.org 74 hollanderchocolate.com 77 holykakow.com 17 host.fieramilano.it/en 56 coffeeteafest.com 72 javajacket.com 65 josuma.com 37 kitchenaid.com/countertop-appliances/ coffee-products/ 6 letstalkcoffee.org 20 monin.com 3 mountaincider.com 36 mrespresso.com 21 optco.com 41 pacificfoods.com/foodservice 5 pumpskins.com 36 retailmugs.com 77 1883.com 49 seaislandcoffee.com 22 selbysoft.com 17 serendipitea.com 77 serviceideas.com 49 royalpaper.com 71 sustainableharvest.com 75 theteahousetimes.com 81 teasource.com 75 thetaridgecoffee.com 77 toddycafe.com/schooling 23 umpquaoats.com 9 upshotsolution.com 4 vesseldrinkware.com 11 wincup.com/vio 35 yourbrandcafe.com 14 zojirushi.com 25