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Strong independent sips — Squamish’s coffee culture
— Squamish’s coffee culture Strong independent sips
PAT JOHNSON
A town that pulsates with adventure, activity and vibrancy can’t live on adrenaline alone. Caffeine helps.
“We’re just such an active community up here, whether it’s biking 20 kilometres or running off to go kiteboarding or operating your own small business, I find that everybody just has so much going on,” said Grace Dwight, general manager of Cloudburst Café. “There is no rest. I find that everyone relies on that coffee habit to get them through all of these amazing activities that they love.”
One of the things that makes Cloudburst’s space especially appealing, she added, is simple: “We just have a lot of it.”
The large venue, with long tables, allows customers to feel comfortable staying for longer periods than they would in a smaller place where demand for turnover is greater.
“People just have the ability to stay here longer and work from home essentially,” she said.
The location doesn’t hurt, either, she adds.
“We are central to a lot of the bike trails or on your drive up to Whistler,” said Dwight. “We are lucky to be here right in the action. People find it a great meeting spot.”
Across town at Sunflower Bakery and Café, co-owners Jamie Brandon (manager) and Ryan Newton (chef/baker) push caffeine and carbs.
“Our whole focus is just really nice coffees with a pastry really,” Brandon said.
The bakery has been around 25 years and the new team took over in October 2019, just six months before the pandemic changed everything. They pivoted on a dime.
“When COVID hit, we switched from a café to a quick-serve,” he said. “We just learned how to adapt quickly and be very fast and have everything prepared to go instead of made to order.”
As things slowly return to normal, Brandon and Newton hope to get back into a more usual vibe.
“What makes us different from the other places is hopefully the whole experience, the energy, the fun and the passion behind the food and the coffee,” he said. “You’ve got two local families who took over a bakery that we really love and we love to make coffees and really good food.”
If Squamishers as a species take their joe seriously, Tim Knutton takes it to another level. With wife and business partner Emily Lehnen, he started roasting coffee as a hobby but almost instantly the pair threw themselves into it as a career. Their place — Counterpart Coffee — has a small café in front and a coffee roasting operation behind in an otherwise nondescript industrial park on Discovery Way.
“We source raw coffee, green coffee,” Knutton said. Dealing with brokers, they import from around the world but strive to build relationships with particular farmers, because they know that the vagaries of climate, weather and political conditions can make coffee
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TIM KNUTTON, FOUNDER, COUNTERPART COFFEE farming an uncertain undertaking.
They already provide their locally roasted product to cafes in Squamish and beyond, but when COVID hit, they started delivering to homes. Knutton realized this was a service people appreciated pandemic or no. A subscription service lets customers anywhere brew Counterpart’s beans.
Is coffee roasting an art or a science?
“It’s a bit of both,” he said. “For a given coffee, we need to be able to produce a particular profile for that coffee, so it needs to get heated up in a very specific way, with fairly tight controls and we need to be able to reproduce that week after week with a certain amount of consistency. We use an app that runs on a big iPad and we are able to control the temperature so we produce a consistent product week after week. If you are buying a particular coffee of ours, it should be the same whether you buy it this week or next month or whenever.”
Wind Knutton up and he can riff about the history and sociological trends around coffee — many small towns in Wales, he’ll tell you, have for decades been home to superb espresso and cappuccino joints, a result of Italian prisoners of war who were released from an Allied camp in 1945 and hung around — but is all this fancy mud just a fad?
“To begin with, there are always more people starting to drink coffee than stopping,” he said.
But while Knutton seems reticent, he gives credit where due.
“For all of the derision, sometimes justified, that Starbucks gets, one thing they did do was bring all those kinds of terms into the common vocabulary,” he said. “Thirty years ago, those terms weren’t all that well known. Now they are household words. Companies like Starbucks have done a lot of our marketing for us, whether we like it or not. They’ve created this sector of the industry.”
For a town the size of Squamish, said Knutton, we’ve got an unusually vibrant independent coffee scene.
In addition to the association of coffee with many of the outdoor pursuits at which Squamish folks excel, there is also a large contingent of conscientious consumers.
“One of the things I think about a lot is, by the time the average person is sipping their coffee, that product is at least 90% non-local,” he said. “It’s a very global commodity. It’s grown elsewhere, it’s shipped here and, I think, one of the things that people can do to try to increase the locality of it is by drinking locally roasted coffee, fresh roasted coffee, or coffee from small independent cafés. We really have a fascinating array and spectrum of small, independent places in town. There is lots to choose from, at all ends of the town. I generally encourage people to find small independent suppliers of good quality coffee.”
