We’ve been treating each and every one of you to a most delicious and affable coffee in the form of Handsome Coffee Roasters out of Los Angeles, Calif.
Hand-brewed within the parameters worked out by our guest coffee program managers (Otter and Canaan) and baristas, it’s been impressive to say the least and Super Hero-like to say the most.
Notes like these have been flying around: “We have been playing around with the samples you sent and the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” wrote Otter during the build-up to offering Handsome Coffee Roasters here at The Wormhole. “At what temperature are you guys pulling the Los Naranjos as an espresso?”
Answer directly from Handsome Coffee Roasters co-founder, Tyler Wells: “We’re pulling Los Naranjos at 18-18.5 grams in and 27-29 grams out. About 25 seconds. It’s fruity, creamy and pleasantly balanced.” It’s no surprise he’s taking the time to answer emails such as ours personally, when we spoke with him over the phone for this article he was out making deliveries.
“I do it every Monday and Wednesday and it’s my most productive time of the week,” says Wells. “I make a big loop, visit coffee bars and restaurants; it’s a nice way to stay in touch with our customers even though they’re surprised to see me showing up personally.
“[But] I’m the service guy and I like to know what’s going on, to drink the coffee at your place and hear what’s going on first-hand,” he continues, discussing his changing role within the company as Handsome expands. “At this point in the business it’s very interesting. I’ll have a meeting with the creative director from a hotel and then go back to the shop and have to repair a fetco.”
These guys are good. Now, more.
Nascent coffee scenes are fledgling and fun, and you can get some of such a thing in Los Angeles these days, at–you guessed it–Handsome Coffee Roasters.
They’ve recently opened up in L.A.’s Arts District at 582 Mateo Street in a cafe with open views of the roasting operations that’s already a coffee geek destination, no doubt. The space is sleek and eminently viable. “The new space turned out better than I imagined,” says Wells.
The human aspect of the vibe, however, is more fuzzy-warm panda bear than order-correctly-or-else. A mixture of “coffee geek” and non-judgmental drink slinger define the hospitality that pervades the company, says Wells. “Two things: one, we know we’re not going to be everything to everybody, so we’re not going to try. We have a core group of customers who absolutely love what we do and we’d rather be amazing for fewer people.
“[The second thing]: In the coffee bar, the motto is to treat everybody how they deserve to be treated,” he continues, espousing and crediting inspiration for this to well-known New York City chef, Danny Meyer. “You can go spend $400 on a meal at one of his spots wearing whatever you want, and they’ll treat you how you deserve to be treated,” says Wells.
This is regularly reinforced at the cafe, top to bottom. “We talk about not losing sight of the value of every single customer that comes into the cafe,” says Wells. “They’re paying for something and have expectations. We have people who fly in from Australia and we’re their first stop. I flew to Chicago to go to Intelligentsia Coffee and it was my first stop, and if someone had been [rude] or sloppy, I’dve been like, ‘I flew to Chicago for this?’
“[We’re constantly] trying to get across to our staff the different expectations people have, whether a coffee geek or someone who’s just tired and headed to work. If people want to nerd out about coffee, we’re all about it. If they just want it to-go, we’ll do it quick and with a smile.”
That pays dividends, notes Wells. “I’ll read online reviews and people will say we didn’t have this sugar or that milk, but we were really nice, and I can stand that review.
That’s the philosophy and that’s customer service side of Handsome. Well, here’s their actual philosophy/mission statement as writ by them:
“We will make amazing coffee the way we think it should be made. Full stop. Our way may not be for everyone, and that’s okay: we’re not making coffee for everyone…we’re making coffee for you. For those who value craftsmanship and quality over convenience and cost – we’re your huckleberry. –HCR”
As far as the on-site product, they keep it near-perfect simple. They basically offer three drinks: espresso, brewed coffee and espresso with milk. They each come in three sizes (three-, five- and ten-ounce). Simple. And good. “We buy really sweet, delicious milk that’s responsibly raised; [we] buy the best coffee beans in the world, then roast them really well. That’s the situation and that’s what we do.”
There is method behind the method. “Before changing the perception of what coffee is to people who drink it, our customers, we’re really trying to have a pure representation of what coffee is. In our coffee bar we have only whole milk, no substitutes,” says Wells. “[We offer] four items made from two ingredients. We don’t charge an exorbitant amount but we ask what it’s worth, because we pay more so the farmers can make a living and invest in their coffee. It’s a commitment to supporting people who are doing good work. There’s a difference between saying it and doing it.
We’ll be saying and doing Handsome Coffee Roasters all during the month of May, 2012, but you’ll find it being gracefully (and hospitably) slung here at The Wormhole from time to time, much as we can. Handsomely, in fact.
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Photo Credit: http://www.stumptownmag.com
We’ve been carrying beans from Stumptown Coffee Roasters for a few days only and you have really responded, no doubt. So much so, we doubled our order to meet demand. We can see why you’re flocking, we flocked, too; and will continue to flock to spiritually nutritious beans like these absolutely anytime. Yes, we will.
In addition to being vurry popular within the friendly confines we proffer you here at Wormhole Coffee, Stumptown is getting nods from all directions, but is still fairly hard to procure in the Chicago area–obvi. You can also pick it up at Heritage Bicycles, a fairly new and happy-making fusion of cafe and bike shop that we could do with more of, and will. So, we mentally connected with Jon Feldman, Stumptown’s director of operations, based in NYC. Without technical assistance and using the power of the collective mind trust that resides daily here at Wormhole, drinking coffee and disguising themselves as customers, we connected with Mr. Feldman to get the latest on Stumptown for you. And posterity, of course.
First, Chicago. “We’re really having fun with [the] coffee [scene] in Chicago,” says Feldman. “We have team members from there. The food scene is fantastic, as well, and we’ve had a lot of people reaching out to us about [bringing Stumptown Coffee to Chicago].” Obvi. “We decided to partner up with Heritage Bicycles and while we were there, [we] went around to some of the better shops in town,” remembers Feldman. “We walked in Wormhole and were pretty much immediately blown away by the Delorean, then we were blown away by our drinks. We met with a few members of the team, dropped off some coffee, and told them to get in touch and I think it was Otter who reached out to us not too long after about having us as a guest roaster.”
The goal in Chicago isn’t to sign up a slew of accounts, says Feldman, but to find solid partners who want to be serious about coffee and have fun at the time–right up our alley here at Wormhole. “I like the Wormhole, it’s just fun by default. You walk in there and it’s so unpretentious, about getting back to the basics,” he says. “It’s a great example from my perspective of how to do things at a high level but make it really approachable. It’s possible.”
Stumptown carries wholesale accounts distributed in NYC, Philly, Boston, and Washington, D.C., but the majority of their wholesale accounts are in their hometown of Portland, Ore., and up/down the West Coast. Portland is home, more so as we speak. “As we continue to grow, lot of exciting things happening in the company,” says Feldman. “We are moving into a large HQ space in Portland, which we’ve never had before. It will give us a tighter handle on operations.”
That’s important, because “we want to grow with integrity,” says Feldman, noting it’s in Stumptown’s DNA. “We will never change the principles that matter: how we source our coffee, for example.” One of those principles is to buy raw coffee beans from farmers with whom they can work with directly,” he continue, referring to the sometimes misunderstood, often misused label, direct trade. When well-concepted and -executed, it can be a game changer for the farmer and those of us who like mightily fine coffee, which comes from mightily finely treated coffee beans, of course. “[Stumptown has] formed and maintained relationships with a number of farms abroad; almost all of our coffees are direct trade,” says Feldman. “We’re going to these farms and working to make sure the products are consistently good quality product year after year, and making sure the people we’re working with are well taken care of, are paid a good price, have the equipment they need, including ideas and philosophy behind growing they need. That will never change about us.”
The other thing that won’t likely change is that Stumptown doesn’t buy any coffee beans that fall under the 85-percent mark when cupped and scored. “We’re never going to deviate from that,” says Feldman. In addition to the beans, Stumptown has an active wholesale program that works to support retailers and/or shops with equipment and training. “We’re excited that we can feel good about growing and not feel we’re going to compromise the quality of our product. “It’s about having fun, being passionate about what you do and connecting with people. Wholesale is kind of an awesome thing if you think about it, helping change the conversation about what quality coffee is all about,” continues Feldman. “We take a lot of pride in what we do. The amount of detail and scrutiny that goes into making sure we have great coffee is unbelievable.”
Open up, don’t be snooty, says Feldman, a long-time sommelier and restaurant operator. “The public is becoming more and more aware of quality coffee. Why would we want to [stop people from] people changing their methods or what they buy? We collectively really need to make [specialty coffee] approachable.” It seems you’re finding Stumptown Coffee fairly approachable here at The Wormhole and we appreciate that. We’ll be featuring Stumptown throughout the month of April in the year 2012, as supplies last. Double that order!
Stumptown Coffee Roasters: “Our Coffees” Roasting Philosophy! Brewing Guide Find them on Facebook and/or Twitter.
The Bedrock: an iced latte made with cereal milk and infused with a house-made fruity pebbles syrup. “It’s like watching cartoons all amped up on caffeinated, sugary milk,” says Wormhole general manager Sara Travis.
Mexico, this month’s regional profile, is the seventh largest producer of coffee in the world, and the number one producer of organic coffee by volume. Organic, Fair Trade, and Shade Grown coffee all fall under the category of sustainable coffee. The difference between these and what we at the Wormhole, as well as many thousands of roasters and retailers throughout the world, consider to be specialty coffee, is that there are almost no qualifications regarding quality when it comes to sustainable coffee. Specialty coffee, on the other hand, has no environmental or ethical prerequisites, but is simply coffee of a higher level of quality in all links of the market chain – production, roasting, and preparation. Organic coffee has nonetheless made a huge impact on the way people perceive and consume coffee in the past ten years, and has drawn much needed attention to the places and people from which it comes. In Mexico, the organic method and the Fair Trade market system have been adopted so widely by farmers that most of the information I was able to find for this article was written about these particular demarcations of coffee. Because the future of coffee farming, across the entire spectrum of quality, is affected by the same forces that are causing farmers to adopt these methods, in this article we will be mainly focusing the organic movement in Mexico, its history, and its concurrent impact on specialty coffee.
Being so far above the equator, Mexico does not have the best geography for coffee production in terms of basic growing requirements, with the exception of the southernmost provinces, most notably the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. Chiapas is responsible for the majority of the specialty coffee on the market today, followed by Oaxaca (see sources below). 98% of coffee grown in Mexico is of the Arabica sub-species, with the most common varietals being Bourbon, Mundo Novo, Caturra, and Maragogype. Specialty coffees of notoriety are mostly grown in the southeastern corner of the country, in the mountainous regions that border Guatemala, and share many of the same flavour qualities as good high grown Guatemalan coffees. The coffees from this region are typically light in body, with mild chocolate and floral notes, and crisp acidity. The name ‘alturra’ is used in Mexico to indicate high-elevation coffees. Most Mexican coffee, over 82% in one study, is processed using the washed method. The majority of high quality coffee you’ll see from this region uses this processing style, as it tends to have greater consistency and less defects. Due to water shortages and conservation concerns, some Mexican coffees are processed using the semi-washed, or pulped natural method, as it is sometimes called, which uses about a third of the water as traditional washing techniques, and typically has more body and slightly less acidity than fully washed coffees.
With most of Mexico’s over half a million coffee farmers growing on less than 12 acres of land, it is a working population that sees subsistence as its primary motivator. The efforts of a whole year’s worth of labor are often traded for less than a family needs to survive, leaving many coffee farmers struggling. Chiapas, the state responsible for producing the majority of the country’s specialty coffee, at over 40% has the highest rate of malnutrition in all of Mexico. In more recent history, with so many families losing members to migration, the cost of labor has increased, which already represents about 90% of the cost of production for most farmers. Many coffee farmers lacking access to cooperatives and without means of transportation end up selling their coffees at below-market prices to intermediaries, or coyotes as they are called in Mexico, most of whom work for foreign multi-national corporations.
To give this rather depressing set of facts some historical precedence, in the late 80’s the Mexican government abandoned a state-run coffee institution that had been primarily responsible for the commercialization and export of coffees by smallholders. By the early 90’s, all state-owned coffee processing plants were closed and power was transferred to farmer’s co-ops and the private sector. This transition was difficult and fell at a time when coffee markets around the globe were suffering from over-saturation due to the United States pulling out of (and thus effectively killing) the International Coffee Agreement. The ICA, which regulated how much coffee was to be allowed onto the global market at any given time and by whom, kept countries from flooding the market when they had excesses, keeping market prices relatively stable. Between ‘89 and ‘93, during this time of global deregulation, coffee production in Mexico fell by over a third with a corresponding loss of farmer income of 70%. As a result, many farmers turned to organic and fair trade methods in an attempt to stay afloat in a sinking market. This fallout, which was affected in part by actions on the international level, in particular those of the United States, is key to understanding why Mexican farmers have taken this distinct approach to keeping their livelihoods viable in an unstable market. For example, from 1985 to 1995, the United States, the main international buyer of green coffee from its southern neighbor, saw the retail price of coffee increase by 30%, while during that same period the amount of money per dollar that went to producer countries went from $.38 to $.23, a 40% reduction. This time period saw increasing grower unrest and the advent of the organic and Fair Trade movements as we know them today.
Because the organic movement in America has been broad and at times vague in its approach to consumers, and since more than half the specialty coffee from Mexico is organic, understanding what defines a product as organic is an important step in appreciating this region. Like all agricultural products sold in the United States that are certified organic by the USDA, organic coffee must follow certain guidelines regarding its cultivation and processing that are environmentally sustainable and safe. These include, for example, using only organic fertilizers instead of petrochemicals, implementing crop rotation, ensuring the proper handing of waste materials, and in general following procedures that will maintain or improve the natural resources of the area under cultivation. Organic coffee must be produced, processed, shipped, roasted, and retailed under strict guidelines in order to carry the little green sticker. Organic coffee must not come into contact with commercial coffee, even residually, meaning roasters cannot roast an certified organic coffee directly after roasting a commercial one – they must roast a ‘buffer batch’ in between, that cannot be sold as organic, to essentially ‘purify’ the roaster of the harmful residues of the commercial beans. Some of these standards can be difficult and costly to follow, especially for growers, such as ensuring the coffee does not come into contact with any equipment, materials, or surfaces that are not compliant with the organic standard, for example the bags the coffee cherry is picked into and the tables on which it sorted. Many farmers also struggle with the certification fee – $350 a year – as well as finding a buyer for their organic coffee, a large percentage of which ends up being sold to commercial exporters for lack of a buyer.
The organic market, like the commercial one, has its own fluctuations from year to year, and may not provide enough of a price incentive for some producers for whom the transition to and regulations of organic production come at too high a cost, such as the poorest farmers and those without co-op membership. Instead of, or frequently in addition to, the organic market, many farmers choose to sell their coffee as Fair Trade, a label distinct from organic but emerging from the same concerns regarding commercial practices and market instability. Fair Trade coffees are guaranteed a price-per-pound that does not change from year to year, allowing farmers to avoid the risk of losing everything on a bad year. Additionally, the regulatory agencies that oversee Fair Trade co-operatives provide premiums above the FT price for those organizations that give back to their communities by investing in improvements in such things as roads, schools, and social infrastructure. The drawback is that when the conventional market value goes above the FT price, as it has done the past couple of years, farmers can potentially lose money, discouraging growers and which may dismantle the long-term development plans of many communities. Many have criticized the Fair Trade system for failing to bring communities out of poverty, claiming that they hold them at a certain level where they are essentially treading water. Fairtrade International, the umbrella agency that oversees roughly 20 partner agencies in countries around the globe, in response to market conditions as well as these and other criticisms, has recently announced an overall raise in the Fair Trade minimum price, up from $1.26 to $1.40 for washed Arabica, increases in premiums for Fair Trade coffee that is also grown organically, and additional premiums for community development.
Shade grown coffee, another buzz word that emerged in the early to mid nineties, was created in response to growing concern, mostly from consumer nations, about the damage to ecological diversity, in particular bird species, that is caused by certain cultivation techniques. When coffee is grown in open fields without natural shade, many animals that normally inhabit these regions can no longer survive for lack of food, shelter, or due to environmental toxins that are introduced due to coffee production. Farmers in Mexico have traditionally grown coffee using shade trees as a way to control the development of the coffee’s growing cycles, meaning Mexican coffee farms generally exhibit greater biological diversity than coffee from other countries, such as Costa Rica, who rely heavily on petro-chemicals and more robust varietals such as Catuai, which can handle direct sunlight. Many of these cultural-environmental factors that already existed made it relatively easy for Mexican farmers to convert to sustainable production methods, since their practices were passively organic from the beginning.
Organic and Fair Trade coffees, although offering price stability and environmental and community benefits for those who are able to participate, are still highly reliant on intermediaries, often require costly certification processes, and are not available to all farmers. Buyers for these markets, motivated by consumer demand, are also increasingly concerned with quality, something many growers are unaware of or uneducated about and for which there is an increasing need for outreach and grower education. Specialty coffee offers the greatest farmer compensation of all the various markets, however, Mexico has not turned to increased quality as a source of farmer profits the way other Latin American countries have done, instead relying heavily on the organic and Fair Trade models. With the best tasting Mexican coffees keeping stride with their southern competition, one can only hope that there will be more efforts made to increase grower awareness and support so that more of us here in the US can enjoy them as both organic and delicious.
Hernandez, Gabriel, and Mark Ford. United States, Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agriculture Service. Mexico Corners the Market on Organic Coffee Production. Global Agriculture Information Network, May 2010. Link here.
Eakin, Hallie, Catherine Tucker, and Edwin Castellanos. “Responding to the Coffee Crisis: A Pilot Study of Farmer’s Adaptations in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.” The Geographic Journal, Vol 172, No. 2, June 2006.
Beadle, Kristian. “Chiapas Coffee: Price, Politics, and Precipitation.” Miller-McCune. Oct. 25, 2011. Link here.
Dill, Mike. “From the Ground Up: Organic Coffee Certification, Production, and Processing.” Coffeetalk Magazine. Nov. 2009. Link here.
Clay, Jason. World Agriculture and the Environment: A Commodity-by-Commodity Guide to Impacts and Practices. World Wildlife Fund. Island Press, 2004.
Calo, Muriel, and Timothy A. Wise. Revaluing Peasant Coffee Production: Organic and Fair Trade Markets in Mexico. Global Development and Environment Institute, Oct. 2005. Link here.
Worm has been revamped. You seem to like it. Now we’re sweetening the pot with guest beans from Noble Coffee Roasting, out of Ashland, Oregon. You will like these beans greatly, yes, you will.
As you know, we have a proclivity toward NOTES. Our guest roaster program managers, Otter and Canaan, have taken this to the extreme when utilizing these notes of which we speak to decide upon and most fruitfully interact with our guest roasters. In the case of Noble Coffee, this was appreciated.
“Otter and Canaan sent us descriptions that were spot-on, exactly the way we feel about those coffees,” says Noble’s founder, Jared Rennie. “We appreciate obviously legit coffee people tasting our coffees and appreciating them, I just want to say that.”
First off, the Noble folks are situated in the Rogue Valley, “a really beautiful place to live, a little gem,” says Rennie.
Before he founded Noble, but already in the coffee business, he had offers to work for various other companies, but “the hallmark of our company is that we really, really love where we live a lot,” he says. “Sure, we could have a bigger company in a larger area, but this place is so beautiful and it’s home base.” By the way: Rennie went to high school and college in the Rogue Valley. It’s home.
It’s also a much-visited tourist town and plays host to the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Noble lives and breathes in a main coffee house and roasterie (opened in 2009), and also slings beans from a “walk-in closet-sized” coffee bar serving espresso and chemex pours. They also do their thing weekly during the summertime at the local farmer’s market.
From there, it’s about the coffee. “We are the only coffee company in the world that blends the level of quality we do with the dedication to sustainability we have,” says Rennie, noting it can be the high-end kind of difficult to reconcile the two. He explains:
“One of my majors was international studies and I spent a lot of time in Latin America and have seen the way societies are affected by doing business with the United States and Europe,” says Rennie. “When I visit farms, I care about how what we are doing as a company affects not just the well-to-do folks, because in South America there is a small and powerful upper class, and one of the reasons I started the company was to make sure those folks at the lower levels are increasingly doing better.
“[I've] been a judge for the Cup of Excellence in Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Columbia; I’ve visited farms in Panama, Costa Rica and all the places I’ve just mentioned, and every time you go, you can figure out who the big dogs are, who are the people who care about quality social change, who just cares about quality, and who cares about both,” says Rennie. “I’ll be on a bus with coffee buyers from all over the world and they’ll say, ‘What a nice guy!’, and I want to say, ‘He’s also married to the daughter of the ex-president.’ The point is a lot of folks in specialty coffee are buying from people that are already really, really well off.
“What also happens is that those sorts of people are established and also conservative and kind of mechanized,” Rennie says, and focuses in on his subject. “What we know is that coffee is the number-two most chemically laden crop in the world that we consumer. Cotton is number one.”
Rennie and his team work to look deeper into situations and make decisions based on those facts. “We like to research and get into the entire situation,” he says. “Are there other animals on the farm or are they just mono-cropping coffee? How is the coffee itself being treated? Are the owners of the farm living a decent life? How are the pickers being treated? If it’s seasonal labor, where are they sleeping and what’s it look like? Their compensation? We want to find fantastic coffees and compensate the farmers accordingly, but it’s not just about compensation,” continues Rennie.
“This all happens once we’ve deciphered that the coffee is amazing,” he says, his voice becoming even more animated. “Number one, it has to be blow-your-mind, awesome, awesome coffee.
“It’s not true that it’s hard to find great coffee. [You] get out there, figure out who to talk to, and [there is] awesome coffee everywhere,” says Rennie. “The tricky part is to find awesome coffee, with a good story behind it, that’s sustainably produced.”
Obviously, what Rennie is talking about doing is harder than he makes it sound. There are reasons why. He was a high school Spanish teacher for eight years (his wife, Carolyn, is too). He judged his first Cup of Excellence in 2008 in Nicaragua, was on a large panel of experts and was the only one who spoke Spanish. He ended working as a go-between for multiple roasters striking deals with producers. People noticed and he got offers to work for top companies that were much appreciated, but Rennie knew Noble was his destiny.
Rennie begat Noble Coffee Roasting in his garage in 2007. He bought a Probat, started roasting coffees and giving them away, then got busy with wholesale accounts and residential coffee delivery before going through the aforementioned expansion into the current space.
Everyone on the relatively small staff at Noble can handle almost any position within the company at a moment’s notice. “We all do everything, right? I’m a barista, I work the bar, I roast, I cup.
“We don’t hire roasters, we hire bar backs, train them to be baristas and when they’re great baristas, we consider teaching them how to roast. Everyone here is multi-skilled, which is really cool,” says Rennie, noting that with such dedication comes a fair bit of pain. “We are so dedicated to these ideals, the core values I’ve set for the company (quality, service, sustainability), it’s unending,” he says. “It’s about uncompromising quality and dedication to service for our customers, employees, suppliers.
“It’s an unending quest,” he says, a noble one we think. Also, Noble Coffee is about gratitude: “My wife, Carolyn…this company wouldn’t exist without her,” says Rennie. “When I was teaching and had this dream, she was the one that said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s give it a go.’ She’s very supportive.
“Also, big props to Caleb Peterson, our wholesale manager, fantastic barista, and all-around good guy,” says Rennie. “Reed Bentley is doing most of our roasting now, is a fantastic barista and a wonderful roaster.
“Peter McCarville is our retail manager and he’s somebody I couldn’t live without. Also, Marjie Gosling, our director of sales. She’s the reason we have this relationship with Wormhole Coffee,” says Rennie. “She’s also a fantastic barista, has baked for us at times and generally does a lot of stuff.
“We have five key people and three of them know how to roast, and we’re all tasting coffees at the bar, checking the roasting–whatever it takes.”
And that’s what it comes down to, whatever it takes. Come try Noble’s beans at Wormhole Coffee all through this month of March in the year 2012.
Noble Coffee Roasting: award-winning coffee!
Hey Folks,
Things are on track to ensure we come back to your right on time. Our artists, laborers and layabouts are straining mightily to open the bean vats back up to public consumption. This should be happening on or just after Saturday, March 3. The following is…progress. Finality will come sooner than you know. For now…
A look inside the revamp
Advanced Delorean Hoisting
Espresso table delightfully customized and brilliant in all aspects—we think.
Nathan Lyle Black at Wormhole Coffee |
Girl In A Bubble |
We’re looking forward to it.. and we’re not looking forward to it.
| The Wormhole Coffee (that’s us) will be closing up shop not for a rest, but for a re-do. We love our space, but we’ve been living in it for a couple years, so we’re bringing in an off-planet construction crew that’s been researching hull shapes and such for decades now, anticipating this moment. We’ll leave them to it, for the most 1. The whole place is going
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2. The DeLorean is going airborne.It’ll likely leave its spot in the front window and head up, up and up–seriously, above the bathrooms at the back of the shop. We’ll be reinforcing the supporting wall, obvi, and hoping it’ll end up in full flight mode with some advantageous strokes of lighting falling here and there.
This’ll also open up about ten, count ‘em ten, new seats in the front of the shop, the better for you to lounge and laze or have corporate-type meetings or whatever it is that you’re trying to do here.
3. The Custom Espresso Machine TableOne of our ‘Mad Genius’ staffers designed and built our custom espresso machine table. Ice and other extraneous-yet-needed accoutrements will be on-hand, perpetually. Water will flow, efficiency will grow, your drinks will be “Better…Stronger… (and likely) Faster.” Awesome-nova.
We’ll have a new line of sandwiches, healthy & completely
tasty OJ, yogurt, and highly-specialized granola.
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All that said, the whole point of the new space will be to make life better for our baristas, allow more room for stretching out to our peoples and to…evolve. We don’t ever want to tamper with the fact that The Wormhole Coffee is about comfort…a comfy, calming, productive space with couches. The better for you, and for us. We will continue to alert this planet to our re-opening factoids and keep you updated on the process throughout.
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Stay tuned to The Wormhole on Facebook and Twitter, of course. We will also be dispensing data on a new social platform not yet readily available on Earth (besides here) and will let you know about that sometime in the past, but you’ll think it’s the future, and…okay the DeLorean’s working. Gotta go. But yea, see you again soon. Thanks for enduring this critical transformation with us!
Our hearts will be with you.
Always.
We’re going to talk about the beans being sprayed our way by Portland, Oregon-based Coava Coffee. But first, we have to admit, we kind of want to go there for a visit and then just kind of not leave. Ever. Never ever.
We talked to one of Coava’s original team members, Sam Purvis, about the new’s and the next’s and the were’s–but first, about working there. “Coava is very small and very much like a family,” says Purvis. “Our staff meetings involve chicken wings and Coors Light and lots of fun times, [while] talking about getting better.
“We all roast and make coffee in the same space. We share life together and are growing up in this industry together,” he continues. “We have a really good [coffee] community here [in Portland], a lot of good friends at different coffee roasting companies and cafes. We hang out and see each other at regional competitions. It’s a great market to be making and roasting coffee, to say the least.”
It gets better. “We kind of just keep it simple. We really enjoy the coffees and farmers we work with, that’s our bread and butter. Three years in, we’re getting opportunities to work with farmers that usually take a long time to get into relationships with, and I think people just appreciate our company because our focus is on sourcing and roasting phenomenal coffee. We don’t get caught up on anything else…no drama, no bragging.” So we’ll be doing it for them.
Founded by best friends Matt Higgins and Keith Gehrke in 2009, Coava is now operated by Higgins while Gehrke is putting his efforts into a new brewing company. According to Purvis, Higgins was a long-time figure in the Portland coffee scene and in the Bay Area before that. “For Matt, especially starting as a barista and working up to a point where he was really falling in love with coffees based on their region and terroir, he got to a point where he wanted to source and roast his own coffees,” says Purvis. Thus, Coava.
Obviously, Portland was ready to receive this caffeinated frequency. Coava procures and roasts only single farm, single producer coffees “that can stand on their own two legs,” says Purvis. “When Matt [Higgins] was working in coffee ten years ago and beyond, it was all about blends. He’d come across beautiful coffees from time to time, but didn’t have the availability of these coffees from producers focused on lot separation and such.
“As those coffees became more and more available, Matt felt the way people roasted should accommodate that. We don’t find a need to blend at all because there’s so many beautiful coffees that stand on their own and are grown properly.”
Higgins is the head roaster and still puts in heavy hours at the roaster (new 12-kilo roaster coming!). Purvis also roasts, and, in a quick aside, met Higgins while the two worked at a coffee bar in North Portland right as Higgins was starting Coava. “He had taken a job consulting for a coffee bar that was just getting off the ground,” remembers Purvis. “He taught me a lot about coffee and I started helping out with Coava in the baby stages, then went and worked for a friend of mine who owns coffee bars in Portland, then came on full-time at Coava 14 months ago.
“For me, it’s imporant to enjoy what you do and not get caught up in any of this being our identity, but enjoying people [who are] doing the same thing and give people props when they deserve them. Every one of us leaves our ego at the door.”
See what we’re talking about in regards to possible future employment at Coava Coffee? Looking for the HELP WANTED! sign still.
As noted above, things are being upgraded at Coava as we speak, equipment-wise. They are currently in the process of building out to accommodate their new roaster, a Probat 12-kilo L12 that “we just received in the mail,” says Purvis. “Right now, we’re roasting on a 5-kilo that’s sitting in our cafe space; the new roaster should be operational in about a month [March 2012].”
Coava currently has around seven or eight people working the cafe side of things with only Higgins, Purvis and their office manager, Laura holding down all aspects of their roasting operations.
At this juncture in the space-time continuum, and such, Coava distributes wholesale mostly in Portland and then in a few other major coffee markets: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago with yours truly being the only destination in Chicago as you know and love it today. We wouldn’t be surprised–or chagrined–if this situation doesn’t last. The more ridiculously quality beans that flood the city of Chicago, the happier we’ll be about it all.
Come get’em at Wormhole while you can; Coava Coffee is our Guest Roaster of the Month for February, 2012. Drink it.
Other Fun Things We Found ‘Bout Coava Coffee
Seriously awesome post on Coava Coffee by the blog, Dear Coffee, I Love You. You can find this article and many more on Coava’s About Us page.
