SOMA by SDAE on Cambie

SOMA by SDAE is a new development at West 62nd Ave & Cambie, centrally located to connect to the airport, downtown, UBC and more. Surrounded by beautiful parks, trails, and minutes away from shopping and entertainment. SOMA offers 32 residential 1-3 bedroom units. SOMA’s striking contemporary architecture has been designed to complement its natural surroundings. Abundant landscaping around the exterior provides privacy at ground level, while Soma’s rooftop gardens bring the natural beauty of the surrounding area to your home.

 

 

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Brooklyn: The Mixtape Shop Combines Coffee And Vinyl In Bed-Stuy

Stroll past The Mixtape Shop, and you’ll know straight away that it’s a shiny new cafe—but that’s only the half of it.

“The brightness, the white walls—they became steps to make it more welcoming for more people,” says owner Brian Thomas, seated in his new cafe-cum-record-store in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

Well over a decade ago, as mom-and-pop record shops succumbed to the MP3, Thomas’ opening might have seemed ill-timed. And while record sales have actually gone up, record stores are still teetering—which is why Thomas hasn’t opened a record shop (or at least, not only a record shop).

Think of The Mixtape Shop like the mullet of concept stores: Business in the front (a minimalist cafe), party in the back (a hidden record shop, complete with a DJ booth). A cafe has an easier time standing alone, while a digital-age record store will benefit from the buzzy habitat.

It’s an evolution of a story that began in 2009: While Thomas was in art school in California, he co-founded MixTape Club, a website which regularly published batches of mixtapes. It started as a way to bring artists and amateurs together, to share new tracks.

Thomas moved to Brazil in 2012, and later, at a party in London, met Erica Roden, a member of MixTape Club. They moved to Australia one year later (Roden is Australian, hence their ensuing interest in coffee shops), and then to NYC in 2014.  Around this time, they began to consider bringing the MixTape Club into the physical retail space, inspired by other mixed-use businesses they’d seen anywhere from NYC to Berlin and Tokyo. They dipped their toe in the water last year, opening an online record shop, and after learning the ropes, they eventually found a storefront in Bed-Stuy for their brick-and-mortar.

But they knew that record stores had the tendency to intimidate the casual music fan.

To them, classic record shops were known for being a bit worn around the edges, a clutter of titles in various bins, which were only fun to browse if you knew exactly what you were digging for. The everyday passerby might hesitate to explore such a place—which was usually dim, dusty, and far from welcoming.

They opted for a complete refresh.

Insid The Mixtape Shop, the cafe’s clean-lined interior is minimal and airy. Plank floors are painted white, and surfaces are all light-wood accented with leafy green plants and cacti. The tin ceiling, painted black, is highlighted with a succession of thin overhead bulbs which flood the space with light.

The coffee bar, helmed by a shiny La Marzocco Linea that is visible from the street, serves Intelligentsia Coffee (Black Cat for espresso, and Frequency for drip) while a case of treats from nearby Saraghina Bakery offers a range from speck and Robiola croissants to sausage and fennel biscuits.

Brian Thomas

Once you’re inside, you can’t miss the music.

Beyond the bar, about halfway through the shop, the space eases into an open layout where vinyl is stocked in the spotlight. For most, there’s no need to explore beyond the cafe area, but Thomas and Roden’s intention is that, while customers await their latte, curiosity might just handle the rest.

“People will order their coffee and then do a loop and around the store and look,” says Thomas. “But after visiting a few times, they’ll start asking questions and start picking things up—it can spark the interest.”

Unlike timeworn shops with miscellaneous finds, there’s a pristine order to the small collection, all encased in tidy rows and right-angles. A long, jet-back DJ booth punctuates the back wall and hosts DJs every few weeks, while two listening stations are permanently up for grabs.

Along the walls, a handful of featured records are propped on shelves. It’s no panoply—beats for sale are a special curation, largely house, dance, and techno music along with a sprinkling of music that helped birth those genres, like soul, jazz, and folk. It gets personal, too, with Brazilian funk and boogie, influenced from the owners’ time in the country.

It’s a distilled approach to the classic record shop experience—paid for by the modest price of a great cup of coffee.

The Mixtape Shop is located at 1129 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Keith Flanagan is a freelance writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, contributing to Condé Nast Traveler, Tasting Table, USA Today, Paste Magazine, The Robb Report, and more. Read more Keith Flanagan on Sprudge.

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Stand.earth Is Staging A Protest At Starbucks HQ Over Their Cups

There’s a protest going on right now at Starbucks Headquarters. No, it’s not because someone took exception to them wanting to use their international platform to hire refugees or because their holiday cups aren’t Christmas-y enough. This protest is in response to Starbucks’ unrecyclable cups.

Started on Monday, #BetterCup is a five day protest being staged by Stand.earth, a Bellingham, Washington-based environmental group that is “calling on Starbucks to live up to its 2008 promise to make a 100% recyclable paper cup.” From Stand.earth’s press release:

“Nine years ago, Starbucks made a promise to give us a 100% recyclable cup. But to this day, they’ve left us with nothing but broken promises,” said Jim Ace, Corporate Campaigner at Stand.earth and the lead organizer of the protest. “Starbucks’ own leadership has said their unrecyclable cup is their biggest environmental liability. So why does Starbucks continue to kill more than a million trees each year to make their paper cup — just so customers can use it once and throw it away?”

The protest will include handing out free Starbucks coffee in prototype recyclable cups to all Headquarters employees, multiple appearances of a 12+ foot tall “monster” made of more than 1,000 used Starbucks cups, and erecting a wall of 8,000 used cups, representing the number of the company’s to-go cups that get discarded every minute.

The efforts of Stand.earth are laudable, and to be quite honest, if there’s an American coffee mega-chain that would make this sort of environmentally friendly change it is Starbucks. The company is no stranger to taking on causes; it certainly would not be shocked to find out they’ve already invested a lot of time and money into developing a recyclable cup that can be made on the scale needed for such a large company. Only time will tell.

For more information on Stand.earth or the protest, visit their official website.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

*top image via Earth911

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She's Such a Drama Queen

November.......

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Mia Coffee Shop: A Tiny Little Cafe Brings Specialty To Malaga, Spain

Tucked away in a cute little square of the old city of Malaga is Mia Coffee Shop, one of a growing number of specialty cafes in southern Spain. It is owned and run by 32-year-old Leo Linares, who arrived in the country in his late teens when his family immigrated from Venezuela. The place is small, unpretentious, and not immediately noticeable. The flamboyant church across the street draws away most of the looks and photos from tourists passing through the area.

Every now and then, you can see Linares’ head popping out of the shop’s main window—beautifully adorned with fruits and plants—saying hello to passers-by, and serving quick flat whites to tourists and regulars. “At first, most of my customers were foreigners,” says the waiter-turned-barista. “Specialty coffee is a new thing here in Malaga. Locals are used to their traditional coffee shops and are generally unwilling to change their routines when it comes to eating and drinking,” he adds.

Indeed, southern Spain and Malaga in particular seem to be tough markets for specialty coffee venues. Scattered through the city, you can see posters that proudly present the way you are supposed to order a local cuppa: a milk-heavy nube (cloud), a mitad (half milk, half coffee), sombra (literally “shadow”—kind of a cappuccino), solo (a 120mL Americano), or a crema (an espresso shot). This is also torrefacto (sugar-glazed, dark-roasted, low-quality beans) territory.

Linares began his specialty coffee journey in 2013, a turning point in his life. “I had some ups and downs that year, with some powerful issues in my personal life. I wasn’t happy with work either,” he admits. It seems things started to click for him when he met his wife. “She made me a better person, straight away. Then at work, I saw a colleague pour a heart in a cappuccino. I thought it was pretty cool, so I asked him to teach me. 2013 made me slow down, become more mature, and show passion and care for what I really wanted to do in life,” says Linares. “I got the Mayan sign for the year tattooed in my arm, as a reminder,” he adds.

Fast forward to 2015, he decided to quit his well-paid barista job in Seville to plan the opening of a shop in Malaga and prepare his participation in the 2016 Spanish Barista Championship. For the signature beverage part of the competition, he looked to his mixed Latin American-Spanish roots for inspiration and prepared a concoction made of honey-processed Colombian espresso with panela (a sugar cane powder) and vanilla-infused olive oil.

“The beverage had great reviews from the judges, although I ran out of time and was eliminated from the competition. It gave me massive confidence going forward with coffee,” says Linares. His wife Maria—after whom he named Mia Coffee Shop—helped him execute the idea for the drink and continues to support him with the business. While Linares competed in Madrid, she was busy talking to sales representatives, trying to secure quality equipment for the cafe.

Mia Coffee Shop is basically a one-man operation, where drinks and food are prepared with delicate care and at the owner’s pace. There is a Wega Pegaso with Compak E6 grinders and coffee from Spanish micro-roasters like, Mr Chava from Seville and Puchero Coffee Roasters from Valladolid. Linares’ ability to convey expertise and love for the job he does is certainly a factor behind his recent success attracting coffee aficionados traveling through Malaga as well as luring the more traditional local crowd to specialty coffee.

Other places flying the Third Wave coffee flag in the city include pioneers Bertani Café, along with more recent openings such as El Último Mono and Santa Canela. Linares also runs improvised cupping sessions for anyone willing to learn. “It may sound cliché, but all the new friends I’ve made here, the regular customers who fall in love with Mia Coffee, they are my new family and this is my house, because I open 10 to 12 hours per day, Monday to Saturday,” he says.

And a family atmosphere is exactly what you feel in this cozy little place, especially when you see his eight-month-old son hanging from his shoulders, reaching for the grinder. “He loves its smell [coffee], because it reminds him of me,” says the proud father.

Mia Coffee Shop is located at Plaza de los Mártires Ciriaco y Paula, 4, 29008 Málaga. Follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jaime San Martin is a freelance journalist. This is their first feature for Sprudge.

Photos courtesy of Robin van Calcar.

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Department Of Brewology’s Sequence No. 3 Box Set Is Now Available

Just in time for the holiday season, the Department of Brewology has returned with third coffee box set series. Sequence No. 3 is a six-month subscription featuring a roster of coffee roasters from around the world, brewing essentials, and Department of Brewology swag, all in a perfectly giftable format.

Delivered on the third week of each month beginning in January, Sequence No.3 includes American roasters Methodical Coffee, Sweet Bloom, Metric Coffee, and Black & White Roasters—the new collaboration between the current and last year’s US Barista Champions Kyle Ramage and Lem Butler, respectively—as well as offerings from international roasters The Barn and Koppi. Each month’s box will also include a capsule of Third Wave Water, a tube of Coffee Blossom Honey, a brew guide, a box set series pin, and an exclusive print.

Additionally, each full series subscriber will be automatically entered into monthly giveaways from ACAIA, Comandante Hand Grinder, notNeutral, Baratza, Melo Drip, Kruve, Pullman Coffee Tampers, and Fellow Products.

To sweeten the deal, as if it needed to be any sweeter, the first 200 subscribers will get a Gesha coffee roasted by Black & White, and the first 100 subscribers will be entered to win a Ratio Brewer.

For those looking to give Sequence No. 3 as a gift, a Department of Brewology pin and card confirming the subscription will be sent out by December 15^th, in time to wrap and present to the lucky duck in the “To:” line.

For more information or to order your box set while there’s still a chance to win the Ratio, visit the Department of Brewology’s official website. If you need my address to send me a box set, lmk.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

*top image via Department of Brewology

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What is it

About this time of year and being busy? Seems to keep me from posting here even when I want to.

It is as if we aren't doing anything and yet we are doing it all day long. I started looking for the office desk yesterday. I know there is one down there somewhere. However, a veritable blizzard of paper has fallen.....from the sky I guess....and there isn't a single spot where you can see the faux wood of it.

I suppose if I had actually filed anything since last April it might not be so bad. 

But I didn't. 

So here is a post....an Amish corner post in fact. They are nothing if not clever....

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#CoffeeToo: Speaking Out Against Sexual Harassment In The Coffee Industry

On October 15, the sexual harassment and assault hashtag #metoo went viral, taking over Twitter and Facebook feeds around the world. While the US watched a cascade of powerful men get ousted from jobs over allegations of sexual harassment and assault, the coffee world waited for the next step: acknowledgment that if experiences of sexual harassment and assault are universal to other industries, they must exist in equal measure in coffee as they do in politics, food, media, and food media. But how would the specialty coffee industry—which at times feels like it functions like a small town or a large family—go about addressing these same issues while causing the least harm? Working with a certainty that specialty coffee has the power to eliminate harassment within its own ranks, industry veteran Molly Soeder worked with colleagues to found the new organization #coffeetoo, a volunteer-run grassroots community project dedicated to gathering and sharing information and resources with coffee professionals on the topics of discrimination and sexual harassment within the coffee industry.

While attending a major coffee event this past fall, Soeder both witnessed and experienced harassment. “Unfortunately,” she tells Sprudge, “this wasn’t surprising.” Throughout her 13 year coffee career, she’s experienced and heard endless stories of harassment and discrimination; this time, she and other attendees started a conversation about it. “We agreed that something had to be done to stop the toxic behavior we’d endured, so we drew up a plan that same night.” She found out about the #metoo movement the next day, and it solidified for her how truly ubiquitous the experience of her and her colleagues were. “It’s essential that we all do our part to combat these problems. Looking at them in an industry-specific way breaks them down into a manageable size. I believe that if we all continue to speak up and say, ‘We will not tolerate this any longer,’ we will see change.”

Soeder, who currently works as a barista at Broadcast Coffee Roasters in Seattle, is responsible for guiding the project, which is currently focused on establishing a diverse leadership team that can see and tackle the whole spectrum of issues of harassment and discrimination, which manifest differently for different groups of people in coffee. The two specific goals of #coffeetoo (a temporary name the leadership team says will eventually change) are 1. to inform coffee pros of their rights, including information about what to do if those rights are violated and about acute self-care after discomfort or trauma occurs, and 2. to reduce the actual incidence rate of sexual harassment and discrimination in coffee by arming individuals with this knowledge.

As their main project, leaders of #coffeetoo plan to host a nationwide live-streamed event featuring talks from and an HR rep, a union rep, a lawyer, and a mental health professional. While working towards this goal, #coffeetoo will regularly share the information they amass to their Facebook page, along with reposts of videos, links, and followers’ #metoo #coffetoo stories.

For interested folks both in and out of the specialty coffee industry who want to support #coffeetoo, you can help by reading about #coffeetoo, following their page, and getting in touch if you want to contribute. “We would love to hear from anyone who wants to be a contributor, financial supporter for events, and/or sponsor,” said Soeder.

By creating space for people to engage around these issues, #coffeetoo is doing much-needed work to further an important conversation on harassment and discrimination in coffee. An information-focused approach with clear, specific goals can have a huge benefit on an industry that often feels too small for open conflict, and Soeder is excited to do that work and empower people to do their part to end toxic behavior in coffee.

Follow #CoffeeToo on Facebook or reach out to the organization via email.

RJ Joseph (@RJ_Sproseph) is a Sprudge staff writer, publisher of Queer Cup, and coffee professional based in the Bay Area. Read more RJ Joseph on Sprudge Media Network.

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The Ultimate Coffee Gift Guide Under $100

The holidays are here, bringing with it the simultaneous joy and burden of gift giving. Now is the time to stock up on coffee-themed gifts for all of your coffee loving friends and family. Because when you give the gift of coffee, you’re really giving the gift (don’t laugh!) of love.

We here at Sprudge want to make sure your coffee gift buying is easy and pain-free, and so in what’s become a much-loved tradition at the site, we’re rolling out a series of gift guides to serve our readers (and their families). Our first guide was all about books, because books rule, but now let’s get into the rest of it.

Is your great aunt Ruth stumped on what to get you this year? Send her this link. Here are ten perfect holiday coffee—and coffee-ish—gift categories for under $100.

Coffee Class In New York City

Get your coffee loving friend/family member something they’ll remember forever: an instructional class and/or event in New York City!

Toby’s Estate Brooklyn can host a private cupping for you and your friends for $75. “We can hold a private brew class just for you and four guests at our Williamsburg and West Village locations. Classes are available Monday through Saturday. You may book up to five people in this class. Classes are 90 minutes.”

Joe Coffee offers a roaster tour and cupping at their Red Hook roasting facility for $75. If you’re traveling from outside the city this gift *will* cost a little bit more, but hey, then you get to visit New York.

Bag of Coffee With Dunkable Ball ($16)

Stumptown Coffee recently rolled out a refreshed packaging look, but they’re bringing back their iconic kangaroo bag for a special Portland Trail Blazers blend collab. This coffee bag includes an actual ball for dunks. 

A Warm Winter Sweater

Tis the season for wearing a snuggly coffee sweater. Cuddle up by the fire and a nice, cozy jumper (that’s what they call it outside the USA) from these folks: Dogwood Coffee Bear Hug Sweatshirt ($30), ReAnimator crew-neck number ($35), Olympia Coffee Roasting Co. gym class sweatshirt ($32), and the awesome/ugly Onyx Coffee Lab Ugly Sweatshirt ($30).

Holiday Blends

You really can’t go wrong with a nice holiday blend, and our partner roasting companies have got a handful for you to choose from: Populace Coffee Joyeux Blend ($19, 12oz), Pilot Coffee Roasters Holiday Blend ($20 CAD, 12oz), Counter Culture Coffee Iridescent ($18.25, 12oz), Equator Coffee Holiday Blend ($18.25, 12oz), Ferris Coffee Winter Avenue Blend ($13, 12oz), Verve Coffee Holiday Blend ($20, 12oz), Reunion Island Coffee Holiday Blend ($20 CAD, 12oz), and the Batdorf & Bronson Holiday Blend ($15, 12oz).

This is just a smattering, just a surface scratching of the wonderful holiday blends available, and that diversity of options means you can buy a blend that suits your family just right. Happy brewing!

Soft Tees

Get your coffee loving family member a nice looking t-shirt from a nice coffee company. We like the Maquina Coffee Roasters “Maquina Bleeds” Tee ($25), which feels like it could be sold at the merch table of a very fun punk rock show. Elsewhere the Department of Brewology Joy Division Tee ($35) directly plays with a fusion of coffee and music themes. DoB are industry design leaders and you may well get stopped on the street wearing this.

Last but certainly not least we’ve got heaps of new Sprudge Tees ($15) in our very own Sprudge Shop.

Gear

Coffee nerds don’t just love gear: they need it to continue surviving as a nerd. Fortunately there’s plentiful gear to be had. Let us recommend a Stagg Kettle ($69), the nerdy Brewista Smart Scale ($99), the beautiful and industry-adored Kruve Sifter ($45), a timeless Cold Brew Toddy System ($39), and for something a little different, the Blue Bottle Waterproof Journal ($19).

Vessels

Every coffee drinker needs something to drink it out of, and we’re big fans of the Flight Coffee Blue Space Person Mug ($17) out of New Zealand, the beautiful throwback Intelligentsia 20th Anniversary Demitasse ($12), the licensed Star Wars line of coffee tumblers from KeepCup—our favorite is the Chewbacca KeepCup ($22)—the stylish Klatch Coffee Glass Can ($7), and the Japanese Phil & Sebastian Kinto Mug ($16.50) by way of Canada.

Clubs, Subscriptions, and Box Sets

Why settle on just one coffee when you can set your loved ones up with a subscription, club membership, or box set? April Coffee Roasters Membership Club (140,00KR) can get you set up with whole bean or capsule coffee from Denmark, Five Elephant Box Set (31.47 Euro) will let you customize a colorful package from Berlin, and the Moustache Coffee Club Subscription (Starts at $26) can get you sorted with weekly shipments of quality coffee from Los Angeles.

Bejeweled Starbucks Tumbler ($50)

Jennifer Lopez has been seen around town with a Swarovski crystal-encrusted Starbucks cup, custom made by Taylor Made Bling Embellishments. It’s this season’s must-have bejeweled coffee product. You can order a custom cup from Taylor Made via their Instagram for around $500 or you can get a similar style: hand-glued rhinestones on a Starbucks cup for around $50 on Etsy.

Drink Some Tea 

Try as we might, mankind cannot live on coffee alone. But if you love coffee it stands to figure there’s a bunch of other stuff you might love. One of those is tea. Tea is good! San Francisco’s Song Tea is home to some exceedingly rare small lot teas that might change how you think about this stuff, with a founder who travels regularly to Taiwan and China on sourcing trips. Prices range from the Song Red ($15), a blend of tea cultivars from Fujian, to the Mr. & Mrs. Chen’s Oolong ($92), a truly distinctive oolong tea from a tiny production husband and wife team from Nantou County, Taiwan, with a dozen or so other teas priced between. Unsure what to buy? Song offers a gift card option as well.

Drink Some Wine

We are pretty strong believers that if you’re into coffee, you should be into wine, too. Wine—and especially wines made in the minimal intervention, no added ingredient style sometimes called “natural wine”—is fast divesting itself from “that Frasier Crane shit” and is today, perhaps for the first time in America since the Gold Rush, a fun and tasty thing for young people to enjoy. Imagine that!

If you’re new to natural wine, and don’t happen to already live somewhere like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Melbourne, Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, or what-have-you, web stores are your friend. We strongly recommend the online wine shopping at Chambers Street Wine of NYC, Domaine LA of Los Angeles, and Flat Iron Wines (SF & NYC). All three of these shops offer gift certificates, and for less than $100 you can gift the gift of a mind-blowing wine experience. Just be forewarned that the ensuing rabbit hole will cost more than $100 in short order.

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Campbell Residences at Cambie Village

Campbell Residences is located in the heart of Cambie Village, introducing a limited offering of eight townhomes with the modern luxury of new construction to create a true one-of-a-kind home ownership experience.Campbell Residences is set along a serene tree-lined street in Cambie Village, with convenient access to urban amenities, shopping, restaurants, and parks

 

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The Ember Is The Mug You Didn’t Know You Needed (But Also Maybe Don’t)

Mugs are great. They hold coffee and make it easy for the coffee to make it to my face. But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: why can’t coffee mugs be overly complicated? A new mug called the Ember looks to solve the over-underly-complicated nature of cups and the problem of cold coffee at the same time… with the addition of a heating system.

According to Popular Science, the Ember is a ceramic mug with a stainless steel core and a “microprocessor-controlled heating system [that] gathers information from four separate temperature sensors.” When the liquid in the cup goes below the desired temperature—set using a smartphone app that connects to the mug, because everything connects to a smartphone now—the Ember “activates its adaptive dual heating mechanism” to keep and hold the liquid at that temp.

It also has an LED light to tell you when your coffee is at the ideal drinking temperature and also when your coffee cup is running out of batteries, something I never thought I’d say. The Ember is also able to detect when there is no liquid in the cup and will put itself to sleep (to save the one hour battery life) and even has “a three-axis accelerometer to recognize movement and wake the mug back up.”

Call me old fashioned, but I actually enjoy the way a cup of coffee changes as it cools. Part of the dynamism of great coffee is how the flavors evolve as the temperature shifts. And sure, maybe people don’t like drinking cold coffee, but if you can’t get through 10 ounces—the size of the Ember—before your beverage is room temperature, then you most likely forgot about your cup and let’s face it, that one hour battery life isn’t probably going to be long enough to save your forgotten friend.

But what do I know? Time gave it a Best Inventions of 2017 award. And I used to think cell phones were stupid, “because why would I want people to get of a hold of me no matter where I was?” Now I can’t live without it. Maybe I just don’t understand how much I need the Ember because I don’t have one yet.

The Ember retails for $80, and if you buy me one for Christmas I’ll use it. I’m willing to be wrong. But for now, I’m going to keep my coffee warm in my Zojirushi thermos; those things are actually magic.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

*top image via Popular Science

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Melbourne: Acoffee Is A Coffee Showroom In Collingwood

Sometimes when I hear of another cafe opening in Melbourne, the skeptic in me often wonders: is there even space for more in this town? There do seem to be more and more cafes popping up that do pretty much the same thing, but it’s refreshing when something different actually comes along. Enter Acoffee. Walking along Sackville Street in the inner-northern suburb of Collingwood, Acoffee is located within an eclectic mix of a brewery, a mechanic, a nursery, and housing.

Acoffee, which opened in April 2017, is a strikingly minimal space with one not-so-simple focus: coffee. The Acoffee brand began as a stand-alone roastery close to a year before the Collingwood space opened, when Byoung-Woo Kang (known as BW around Melbourne, formerly a roaster at Market Lane) set out on his own, turning beans brown on his brand-new Probatone 12 in a corner of the Sensory Lab production facility in Port Melbourne after his initial space fell through.

Over time, through supplying folks such as Slater St. Bench and Little Rogue, a unique partnership was formed with Frankie Tan, Nick Chen, Clay Tobin, and Joshua Crasti, which led to the collaborative opening of the Collingwood location (and the permanent home for Acoffee’s roasting operations).

Designed by the team of owners themselves—and with architectural and building experience and insight from Crasti specifically—Acoffee was transformed from an empty warehouse shell to a purposeful coffee haven, echoing the simple and transparent nature of the company’s goals. This process led to a design aesthetic that is largely minimal with one long white bench down the middle, encompassing the espresso machine, filter coffee brewing, and seating. Upon entering the space, this long line leads your eye toward the coffee roaster and the green storage at the back (sourced from Melbourne Coffee Merchants, Cafe Imports, Shared Source, and Caravela), making it incredibly clear what the focus of Acoffee is.

Talking to BW, it’s clear that every element of the place is incredibly deliberate. “A lot of people think of this place like a cafe, but it’s actually not—it’s a showroom where we showcase our product,” he says. “This is meant to be a place where people can enjoy our product and enjoy themselves as well and have a seat and do some work. So I’m hoping that this is a place where you can focus and just go into yourself.”

The brand design and packaging for Acoffee’s retail offering was done in collaboration with Remy Ventura Horta with a goal to keep the information to the essentials and nothing more. That same intention translated into the starting point for the Collingwood location’s operations.

Here, the offering stays in line with the aesthetic and is minimal—espresso coffee is brewed using a La Marzocco Linea PB (flanked by Victoria Arduino Mythos One grinders), while filter coffee is brewed exclusively using Hario V60s and Baratza Forte grinders. Pastries come from Penny for Pound in Richmond, with unique savory treats in the cabinet from Kolache Cravings in Preston, including delightful Czech-inspired items such as bread buns with fillings like pulled pork, or even ham and cheese.

This simple but deliberate ethos has gone over well with the busy Melbourne coffee world, with Acoffee showing up as guest coffee at places such as Lune Croissanterie and Market Lane Coffee, and Collingwood locals (among those further afield) finding their way there regularly.

“People come in here, and they don’t really see much, but to make it work we pay attention to a lot of the details,” says BW. “We just wanted to do something that we could do well, and we could do better.”

Acoffee is located at 30 Sackville St, Collingwood. Visit their official website and follow them on Instagram.

Eileen P. Kenny is a coffee professional, winemaker, and Sprudge Media Network contributor based in Melbourne. Read more Eileen P. Kenny on Sprudge.

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