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| The Heifer Mow |
On a recent warm morning in West Oakland, I walked into a sunlit warehouse by the freeway and was presented with what I believe to be the future of cold coffee.
The space—Four Barrel‘s new roasting warehouse—is, like all of their shops, beautiful. Artsy lights dangle from the ceiling, casting a warm glow over the enormous German roaster and the crew getting business done. The exposed ceiling, leftover from the nightclub that once occupied the warehouse, is sandblasted down to its original wood. It looks, remarkably, like the ceiling of Four Barrel’s original space across the Bay, on 14th and Valencia in the Mission District.
Four Barrel sees the space as a launchpad for not only its next retail iteration, but for a new take on how the world enjoys cold coffee. The company hopes, with the help of new technology, to offer a cold coffee product quite different from what’s currently on the marketplace.
Eight years ago, when the revered San Francisco roaster threw open the doors on its gorgeous, and now iconic, shop on Valencia, its contemporaries were Ritual, Blue Bottle, and soon Sightglass—big names in specialty coffee that have each gotten bigger. The Bay Area’s coffee scene has had a breakneck pace in the years since, and Four Barrel has done the hard work of keeping up with it. The indie roaster’s beans are served in some 400 coffee shops nationwide. Their bread and coffee spot The Mill is one of San Francisco’s most popular coffee shops; they’ve opened a second Four Barrel location just off San Bruno, in Portola; and their original location still draws a line of epic proportions on most days. Still, amongst those who care to prognosticate the future of speciality coffee shops, Four Barrel’s has always been a mysterious one. The moves they’ve made—like the purchase of De La Paz a few years back—come slowly, making respectable ripples in the Bay before being subsumed by whatever coffee-related story pops up next. What their followers really wanted to know was: when was Four Barrel going to make its power play?
Expansion, as normal as it seems in San Francisco’s money-bleeding clime, is a scary thing—and doubly so for an independent small business like Four Barrel, which is owned jointly by Tal Mor, Jeremy Tooker, and Jodi Geren. “I remember Jodi saying, ‘when we hit 10,000 pounds a week,’ and Jeremy responding, ‘14,000 pounds,'” says Mor. “To do that, we had to reach this point where we were busting at the seams. The small to the big, that’s the scary moment,” Mor tells me. “You can fail.”
With tech money exploding the market, a big enough space to house the production area they dreamed of was nearly impossible. “We kept getting outbid by these crazy people, time and time again,” Mor says, speaking of the three years they searched for a proper space in San Francisco proper. “Finally it was like, let’s go to Oakland.”
The owners, along with a selection of staff and friends, built out the Oakland space almost entirely with their own hands, and their own money. For six months, the trio worked through every challenge on their own—sprinklers, floors, flying to Germany to help design a control panel for their roasters. The build-out of the warehouse became everything. And in challenging themselves through the creation of this new, giant baby, another realization crept up.
The owners of Four Barrel were getting bored.
“Doing the work to find incredible coffee and roasting that coffee well is still exciting,” Mor assures me, “but that excitement about learning you can make coffee taste like [this or that]—I hadn’t experienced that for a long time.” That is to say, until they started tinkering with cold coffee.
Let’s be frank: there is a schism growing in the coffee world. Some people love cold brew—the flavor spectrum it offers, the convenience and scalability it represents, and the coffee cultural boom time it is wrapped up with. But others feel that most cold brew coffee, as popular as it may be, isn’t all that good. A casual coffee drinker or average Sprudge reader might be surprised by this schism, but for coffee professionals (or professional coffee watchers), this topic is the stuff of piping hot debates across the coffee Twitter and Instasphere, and nowhere hotter than here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter and Instagram.
Yes, the icy brew so many shops—small, big, and huge—serve on hot days as an alternative to the hot, nuanced beverage we associate with coffee drinking, isn’t always the subtle, layered beverage you’ve been sold on. As ground coffee steeped in water for a long period of time, cold brew uses time instead of heat to extract a coffee’s basic flavors. In this expression, the resulting product can lack a distinguishing flavor, or so say the anti-CB partisans. It may taste old; it may even taste like the beans’ last stop after aging past optimal freshness and being relegated to the cold brew vat.
In the industry they call the non-flavor flavors of cold brew “tasting the process” and if you’ve had the majority of cold brew currently being served in America—especially right now, as we enter a time of peak cold brew—you, my friend, have tasted that process. But Mor, Tooker, and Geren thought: wouldn’t it be nicer if you just tasted the coffee?
“Cold brew wasn’t something we wanted to drink,” Mor admits. He says the team wanted to try and make cold-kegged coffee “that we felt confident in, that upheld our green buying and our roasting.” It was Brett Whitman, Four Barrel’s Head Trainer, who gave the idea the push it needed. “Brett asked, ‘What do you need?'” Mor says, “And we said, ‘someone to build the [cold] coffee program that we want.'” Whitman, a Sound Engineering major in college and a tinkerer by nature, was that someone.
For the last six months, Whitman has worked almost solely on creating a new process for chilling coffee so it can be placed into kegs and shipped to wholesalers. “Right away, we knew that we had to throw cold brew off the table,” Whitman says, “With cold brew you couldn’t tell origin, you couldn’t sense acidity structures—you always tasted the process.”
The difficulty in making cold, keggable coffee, Whitman says, is the cooling-down process. To make fresh, hot-brewed coffee into cold coffee, you have to lower the temperature of hot coffee from 200 degrees down to a “cold” 40 degrees within a 10-second window, without allowing variables like oxygen contact to affect the flavor of the brew. To do so, Whitman reached into the world of beer and liquor brewing, a field that had found success in lowering temperatures quickly and efficiently. “At every turn,” Whitman says, “from pumps to everything else, we found passionate, craft-oriented, family-owned businesses who wanted to help with the build-outs, to solve the problems, to engage with us.”
Though the actual process and technology behind Four Barrel’s new cold coffee is a proprietary secret, Whitman offers a general explanation: “We are transferring heat from the mass of hot coffee to a mass of very cold liquid. The efficiency [with which] we can move the heat is what allows us to cool it so quickly. And if you can cool it down fast enough, which we can, you also activate these volatile aromatics,” he says. “It’s a much more refined and enlightened way of doing it.” In the simplest terms, Four Barrel has developed a method to cool coffee very, very quickly without unfortunate variables that affect the taste. As dumb as it sounds, they’ve created a method of reliably making hot coffee—and all of its many flavors—cold.
In the samples I tasted, Four Barrel’s characteristic light-roasted, bright and citric coffees shone through just as they did in their hot iterations, capturing their essence as intended. I tasted several different batches of both Kenyan and Ethiopian cold coffees, straight from the keg, and each one of them, though subtly different, expressed the sort of lively, round, fruity taste these points of origin have traditionally been associated with.
This product won’t be for everyone. For every person who wants a subtle wash of flavor with their coffee, there’s another who wants the nostalgic, burnt ochre of darkly roasted beans, ready to be drowned in milk or its alternatives. But after years of drinking cold brew and not loving it, tasting cold coffee that maintained the flavor characteristics of its original form felt like a revelation.
What’s more, it’s not just the flavor of this coffee that heralds a step forward into the cold coffee future. It’s the ability to keg, and therefore preserve, those flavors, creating a sort of varietal system for cold coffee. Wine and coffee are oftentimes placed in a similar sandbox, but with Four Barrel’s new system, the gap between the two grows infinitely smaller. “Using this process,” Whitman says, “means we can bottle this and shelve it indefinitely, with the aromatics intact.”
So perhaps one day years into the future, coffee aficionados will be able to open the door to their dimly lit cellar on a warm summer morning, strut on down, and grab a bottle of Four Barrel Peru from 2017 that, when opened, will taste the way Four Barrel intended it to when it was originally bottled. What’s even crazier, the process theoretically allows for the coffee to be heated up again without the flavors changing drastically. Four Barrel has, in effect, created a way to maintain the flavor profiles of specific vintages of coffee into the indefinite future.
In the definite future, however, Four Barrel has plans to open a new shop in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. Beyond that, rumors are swirling about a Four Barrel expansion into another major North American market later this year. In the Bay Area, kegs of cold coffee began arriving at Four Barrel’s cafes in mid-June. Bottled versions are destined for the shelves of select grocers. The shift is perceptible. It feels as if after years of pleasantly keeping pace, Four Barrel has finally pushed the needle of coffee in a big, discernible way. Their way.
Noah Sanders (@sandersnoah) is a Sprudge.com staff writer based in San Francisco, and a contributor to SF Weekly, Side One Track One, and The Bold Italic. Read more Noah Sanders on Sprudge.
Four Barrel is an advertising partner on the Sprudge Media Network.
The post Four Barrel Fights For The Future Of Cold Coffee appeared first on Sprudge.
Roll on, ye Build-Outs, roll on! Our globe-spanning series on new cafe openings continues today from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, home to the city of Marquette. Coming soon is Velodrome Coffee Company, a new roaster/retailer bringing modern coffee to Yoopers in need of a tasty cup. This is our first Build-Outs of Summer feature from the UP, and indeed, the first story in nearly eight years of Sprudge to hail from across the Mackinac Bridge.
As told to Sprudge by Brice Sturmer.
For those who aren’t familiar, will you tell us about your company?
Velodrome Coffee Company is a new coffee roasting company trying to bring specialty coffee to a town that hasn’t been acquainted with it yet in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our motto is FAST | SIMPLE | FRESH and we hope to help more people appreciate well roasted, traceable craft coffee by first of all, offering quick service. We want to feature coffee in the simplest way so we have broken each of our coffee offerings down into three categories: One Speed, Three Speed, and Ten Speed. We are also taking a simplistic and straightforward approach to our menu and getting away from the traditional drink names, but relying more on the makeup of the beverage itself… latte=espresso+milk. Not only will our coffee be freshly roasted on-site, but we are also going to create a fresh space for people to hang out in. Or aesthetic is bright and clean, with some nice soft natural wood elements and since our shop is laid out in little sections, each seating area will have its own vibe.
Can you tell us a bit about the new space?
The space is located right across the street from a very progressive natural food market called the Marquette Food Co-op. The shop is located on one of the busiest streets in town and along with the other businesses on our block, we’re determined to make the end of our Washington Avenue the best place to be downtown! The space features large street facing windows, original hardwood flooring, as well as original vintage heat radiators. Upstairs is a sick Airbnb. The whole building used to be an old single level duplex, and now as a commercial building it maintains this obscure floor plan… we’ve decided to play off the spaces we have to work off so our cafe will feature a little roasting room, a main area with the bar, and two other seating rooms, each with its own distinct vibe.
What’s your approach to coffee?
Even as a small startup we will source all our coffee as directly and relationally as possible. We plan to always be serving at least one coffee from a farm we’ve already visited. Our other coffees on the menu we will have met the producer, or have a close relational connection to them through a trusted colleague. So, that is to say, we plan to serve only single farm and completely traceable coffees. As for roasting, we plan to sit somewhere in that happy middle between medium and light. We want to bring out sweetness and will rely on regional characteristics to help maintain a wide range of flavors in our offerings.
Any machines, coffees, special equipment lined up?
We’re starting small and lean! To start we’re rolling out with a custom powder-coated La Marzocco Linea EE single-group paired with a Eureka Zenith 65e. We’ll be rocking an under counter mounted FETCO XTS 2131. For ergonomics and the sake of faster service, milk for espresso drinks will be stored in an ice bin next to the espresso machine.
What’s your hopeful target opening date/month?
August/September 2017
Are you working with craftspeople, architects, and/or creatives that you’d like to mention?
Yes! We’d like to thank our good friend Rebecca Vanderlinden for her hard work in conceptualizing our logo and branding feel. Our architect and landlord Dax Richer of RG Design Company. We’re working with Michele Dupras of Revisions Design Studio for lighting and decor and with Josh Masserang for some custom furniture elements. Last but not least, we plan to work with David Rossow for some custom painting and signage.
Thank you!
No, thank you for the opportunity to share what we’ve got planned!
The Build-Outs Of Summer is an annual series on Sprudge. Live the thrill of the build all summer long in our Build-Outs feature hub. Got a Build-Out of your own? Get in touch.
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| Liz noticed that he had injured his leg on the chain, which is probably why he was lying flat out when the boss saw him. Cows usually don't. |
I’m working a new beat for Sprudge, covering the “major Washington State progressive coffee bar openings not in Seattle” scene. It is my favorite beat. As a lifelong Pacific Northwestern and native Tacoman, I’ve long resigned myself to looking to Seattle—or occasionally Olympia—for big coffee news. And it makes sense: Seattle’s place in American coffee culture is the stuff of legend, and I (mostly) loved my time living there as a coffee drinker. Our 2016 Sprudgie Award winning Best New Cafe is in Seattle, and that’s not a fluke. (BTW that cafe, the La Marzocco Cafe at KEXP, is dialed in like whoa right now, and worth the trip alone.)
But as the Seattle I grew up with and lived in for a decade morphs into some sort of Gotham City/Paul Allentown/SimCity 2000 Arcology parody of itself, all the cool coffee stuff is happening outside its limits. This feels big and important to the 253 area code imprinted on my soul, and so I’m thrilled to be able to write stories like this one, about the wonderful work happening with Narrative Coffee‘s new cafe in Everett, or this one, about Olympia Coffee Roasting Company‘s coming flagship in Tacoma’s lovely Proctor District. And today I’m thrilled to show off the new Camber Coffee cafe/restaurant/sweeping hospitality chill zone, located in the quaint little northern seaside heart of Bellingham, Washington.
Camber’s Bellingham cafe occupies some 2000 square feet at 221 W Holly Street, on the corner of Holly and Bay, a few short blocks from the picturesque Bellingham Bay. The cafe is designed by Michelle Banks of Spiral Studios, with architectural work by Dan Welch of Bundle Design and construction by Chuckanut Builders. The project has attracted a unique collection of talent to Bellingham, drawn in equal parts from the worlds of coffee and fine dining, including Assistant Manager Natalie Stevens (formerly of Canlis and Vif), Head Barista Rose Shahbaghlian (formerly of Slate Coffee), and Retail Operations Manager Kevin Rosencrantz (formerly of Blackberry Market).
The space’s extensive beer menu is overseen by barista Stephen Wiederspohn, and Camber’s food program was consulted on by Kiel Kleeburg, a West Coast fine dining veteran who was part of the opening staff at Bay Area nouveau-kaiseki destination Single Thread. There’s even a daily fresh flower program by Miranda Bowman of Wildrye Farm.
Not bad for a former comics shop in a sleepy northwest college town. After a weekend soft service Camber is now officially open, serving espresso from a three-group Synesso MVP espresso machine, filter coffee via a three cup Poursteady brewing deck, and a deep bench of teas (Natalie Stevens’ passion) and tisanes sourced from Kilogram Tea of Chicago. There are beers by Holy Mountain, Urban Family, and Mollusk. There are milkshakes. There’s a promising opening day wine menu that should push some boundaries in Bellingham. There’s farmstead cheese, and sweet corn soup with dumplings, and a half chicken dinner set—unthinkable in an American coffee bar setting even a few years ago, but here we are.
So let’s keep it going. More, I say! More big openings in Washington State that aren’t in the city of Seattle. Who’s going to open the adorable small town coffee bar with real deal espresso in Roslyn? Those arts weirdos in Tieton probably need a good new cafe, and so do the college kids in Ellensburg. Who wants to go in with me on a little slice of PNW modernist mid-century dreaminess on the shores of American Lake? Let’s keep the trend going, from Bellingham to Walla Walla. I want this to keep becoming a thing, because it is a good thing, and so that I may work this beat forever.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Photos courtesy of Caleb Young (@keepitcinematic) and Camber Coffee.
Camber Coffee is an advertising partner on the Sprudge Media Network.
The post Camber Coffee Is Now Open In Bellingham appeared first on Sprudge.
The Best of Panama auction concluded last week, and the “a cup of coffee shouldn’t cost $3” crowd may want to stop reading here (or, y’know, stop holding such a narrow view of such a wide-ranging product). The highest selling of the 51 lots went for a staggering $601 per pound, setting a new world record.
A naturally processed Geisha, the 100lb lot came from the Cañas Verdes Farm—part of the famed Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete—and scored a whopping 94.115 on the cupping table. The lot was purchased by Jason Kew of Kew Specialty Coffee Co LTD of Korea. The $60,100 total price tag is nothing short of impressive, unless you are Daniel Peterson, the owner of Hacienda La Esmeralda, who is quoted in Panama Today as saying, “We were not impressed.”
And though it was the clear winner of the day, the Cañas Verdes natural Geisha was but one of many lots to make waves at the 2017 Best of Panama auction. There were a total of four lots to eclipse the $100/lb mark, including a washed Geisha from Finca Sophia, a farm owned in part by Equator Coffee’s co-founders Helen Russell and Brooke McDonnell, which sold for $254.80/lb. This is the same farm that produced the coffee used in Talya Strader’s third place finish at the 2017 US Barista Championship. This second-highest priced lot, along with the third highest from La Mula, was purchased and split by Japan’s Saza Coffee and Aroma Coffee.
While a majority of the lots up for auction will be finding their way to Asia, Specialty Coffee Association of Panama President Wilford Lamastus notes in a press release that a total of 13 countries from four continents were represented on the winners list:
In total, the 5,950 pounds of coffee sold a whopping $368,771, an average price of $61.98/lb.
It’s hard not to be impressed by these numbers (I’m fighting every urge to be Debbie Downer and talk about how little this affects specialty coffee as a whole or how the coffee prices have stagnated and are artificially low, so please bear with me). This auction represents the very tip-top of the coffee pyramid and show the sort of heights coffee prices can reach. They’re probably never going to change the minds of the “a cup of coffee shouldn’t cost $3” crowd, but they nonetheless speak to the legitimacy of high-end coffee in terms universally understood: dollars.
A full list of auction lots and sale prices can be found here.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
*top image via Best of Panama
The post Best Of Panama Coffee Breaks World Record Price appeared first on Sprudge.
