"Sophisticated Southern" is the best way to describe Prevail Coffee, and also how owners, Wade and Megan Preston, would prefer to do so.  In a culture of Northwest-style coffeeshops, Prevail stands outs for its distinct southern charm, and it seems to be working.  With three locations and a fourth location being built right in the center of Montgomery's historical downtown, Prevail has been essential to Alabama's third-wave coffee industry.  

In February, Wade won first place in the Brewer's Cup Qualifying Competition in New Orleans.  He will be moving on to the National competition this year in Seattle.  I talked to Wade to learn more about Prevail, how he chooses his coffee for competition, and his award-winning brew method.

Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Congrats on placing first in the New Orleans Brewer’s Cup Qualifying Competition.  Can you tell me a little bit about how you got started in coffee?

It’s kind of a crazy story.  My wife and I had always worked in the nonprofit sphere, and we had both really enjoyed coffee.  We were working with a nonprofit in West Africa doing some micro-finance stuff, and we really saw how the best way to affect change in those places is for there to be viable economic structures that are sustainable and scalable.  The traditional charity model can only go so far, and it completely falls apart, like in 2008, when the economy collapsed.  People just stopped giving to charity.  We looked at coffee and cocoa, kind of being the only two commodity crops that came from these places, and we just started scratching under the surface a bit more.  We had always liked the idea of coffee, the idea of the community aspect, the coffeehouse, and kind of tying that together with this newfound realization of the impact that coffee can have globally.  We just couldn’t get it out of our heads.  The fun part of the story is, we were living in Atlanta at the time, and Megan was seven months pregnant with our first child, who is now six, and we had a West African refugee living in our basement.  We thought that would be a great time for me to quit my job and become a barista, so that’s what we did.

I cut my teeth in coffee in Atlanta working for Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Roaster’s Dancing Goats Coffee Bar.  I had a really awesome experience coming up with them, and after working with them for a couple of years, we opened our first shop in Auburn.  It did really well, and about eighteen months after that we decided to open a roastery.  We started roasting coffee with a San Franciscan roaster, and we’re now in Auburn and Montgomery.  We moved our wholesale roastery operation over to Montgomery, and we have retail locations in both Auburn and Montgomery.

What is your approach to choosing your coffees for competition?

What I was really looking for in coffees is, I like coffees that are just really interesting.  I think that there are coffees that are objectively good, incredible coffees that I really like, but they’re kind of predictable.  When we were cupping coffees for competition, we had some coffees on the table that were like that.  Coffees from farms that you’ve heard of that had won awards, and they were super good coffees.  They scored super high on the table, but the coffee I ended up choosing was one from a farm I had never heard of and just sort of a random coffee I ended up with.  It’s a natural process Colombian geisha, and it is so wild and complex.  We were cupping it today, and it’s almost hard to wrap my head around it.  It’s one of those coffees that is really good, there may be coffees that are objectively “better”, but this one is so interesting and it’s got a lot of layers to it.  It takes a lot to figure it out. 

How did you prepare for Brewer’s Cup, and is there anything you’re doing differently to prepare for the national competition in Seattle?

The coffee is different, but I’m keeping it similar as far as the brew method.  I’ve been working on this brew method for over a year now, so I’m tweaking it to the coffee, but things are close to the same for Nationals [as for Qualifiers].  The biggest difference is the grinder I’m using.  La Marzocco USA is loaning me a grinder so graciously.  One of the new Mazzer ZM grinders.  I went to Qualifiers and really wanted consistency with my grind, so I just used a Baratza Forte, because my goal was just to finish in the Top 12.  It pulled me through for Qualifiers, so now I got a big, huge, heavy grinder which is more fun to play with.  I was really happy with what we were able to brew with it today.  

Can you tell me about Prevail?

The word “Prevail” we pulled out of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.  He has this really eloquent line where he says, “I decline to accept the end of man...I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not only endure, he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an exhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of passion and sacrifice and and endurance”.  Sophisticated southern is the brand mark there, and we’re trying to be an authentic southern brand that feels at home in the south but isn’t too kitschy and homespun.  In our region, it’s either we have a lot of coffee companies trying to bring a northeast or PNW vibe into the south, or it’s really folksy and home-y.  So we’re trying to be a coffee brand that fits authentically southern but also high-brow.  The culinary scene in the south has gotten so big in the last few years, and a lot of incredible chefs have been coming out of here.  Southern cuisine has been huge, and people respect it in this way that they didn’t ten or fifteen years ago.  I think that we can do the same thing with coffee.  We don’t have to hide behind the veneer of a Pacific-Northwest shop.

What is the coffee industry like down there?

It’s weird.  There’s this old term in the south – a word that like, my grandfather would use – “carpetbagger”.  After the Civil War and reconstruction, there were all these business men that came to the south, and because the south had been so decimated, their dollars went further.  They saw opportunities, so they came and dumped a bunch of money into these businesses.  The thing is, they didn’t really understand southern culture and the dynamic of things.  The carpetbagger image is the rich guy who doesn’t understand the culture and just tries to throw a bunch of money into something.  All that to say, there’s a fair amount of that in southern coffee.  The idea that, “Oh, coffee blew up [everywhere else], I want to go make the Blue Bottle of the south”.  You have a lot of that carpetbagger mentality, and they’re trying to capitalize on that market opportunity.  So we have to deal with that, but we have southern hospitality too.  We raise our eyebrows, but also if you’re trying to do good stuff, we’ve got grace for that and we’ll come alongside each other and work together.  I think some companies have come in from outside and done really well, because they’ve kind of picked up on [the culture].  And then other companies have come in and tried to exploit it and have been relegated to the corners.  All in all, I’d say southern coffee is fun, because it seems like there is not a whole lot of us who have been at it for just five, six, seven years.  It’s blown up so much in the last three years.  When you find people who have been at it for ten years, we all seem to know each other and where each other came from, and it’s a really tight-knit group.   

I saw that you are opening a new location – what are the plans for that space?

That space…I think that might be the most important coffee shop in America.  If you walk out the front doors of that space, if you look up to your left, you’ll see the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.  If you look to the right, you can see the bus stop where Rosa Parks got on the bus.  If you look across the street, there’s the building where the command to fire on Fort Sumpter was sent and began the Civil War.  We’re like two doors down from where Jefferson Davis held his inaugural ball to become the President of the Confederate states.  We’re about a mile away from where Hank Williams learned to play guitar.  This is something nobody knows, the Wright brothers opened the first civil aviation school in the country right down the street from us too.  There’s this weird, crazy history and we’re just smack in the middle of it. 

There’s a lot to this, but downtown Montgomery kind of got abandoned for a long time.  There was no real culture, no one was living down there, it was just kind of desolate.  A lot of these buildings that were in the middle of all this history were becoming decrepit, and lately some developers have been putting some money into restoring these places.  We’ll be one of the first ones in this newer development to kind of bring that back. 

There’s a group in Montgomery called the Equal Justice Initiative, and they are opening up a museum at the end of the month, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  The local name is the Lynching Memorial, [it’s] a real powerful thing.  At the end of the month, we’re kind of gearing up for this.  Al Gore, Jay-Z, Oprah, all these people are coming into town for the opening of this museum.  The craziness of this national conversation and all of this polarity…when people hear that a place such as Montgomery exists, that this is where all this stuff happened, it blows their minds.  The Equal Justice Initiative is headquartered there, the Southern Poverty Law Center is headquartered there, but Roy Moore’s office is right next to the Rosa Parks bus stop.  These things exist together in a square mile.  Some of those things are awesome, some of them are terrible, but the fact that they exist together and we don’t throw rocks at each other, I think it takes people aback.  We’re seeing a spike in tourism in downtown Montgomery, people are interested in the story, and Montgomery is finding better ways to tell that story.  It’s cool to have a café space, a community gathering space, dead in the center of all of that.

What is your favorite coffee you’re roasting right now?

This competition coffee is haunting my dreams, it’s so ridiculous.  It’s not even fair to say that’s my favorite coffee… but I’ll tell you my favorite coffee, and it’s always my favorite coffee, that I almost take for granted.  I kind of forget about it, and then I drink a little more, and I’m like “oh that coffee is so comfortable and nice”.  I also have sentimental attachment to it.  It’s a Guatemala from a farmer we work with, Finca San Luis.  It’s just such a good coffee, and it’s not bonkers crazy, punchy, sweet, and super bright or really complex.  It’s just like, the coffee you want to drink in the morning.  Like, if we still read newspapers it would be the greatest cup of coffee to have.  We have a fantastic relationship with the farm.  The daughter of the farmer actually went to Auburn on a tennis scholarship, and she lives in Alabama.  She babysits my kids from time to time and comes over for dinner, so it’s just a coffee that we love.

Anything else you’d like to say about Prevail?

I can tell you all the reasons I love the San Franciscan roaster.  One, the transferability from the SF1 to the SF25 is ridiculous.  I can profile something on the 1 and get the same exact thing on the 25.  That gives you a lot of levity to play around with a bunch of different profiles.  The other thing is I love the responsiveness of a direct-flame roaster.  I don’t have to mess around too much with air-flow as a mode of heat transfer.  I can just work the burners and as long as I’m able to anticipate what’s going on, I can keep my air-flow steady and roast really clean coffee, because I’m not pushing any bad air in.  It’s so responsive.  I really dig it.

Wade’s Brew Method from Brewer's Cup Qualifying Competition

This method] creates these really saturated flavors.  The idea comes from, when you brew cold brew, it creates these syrupy but kind of dull, mono-flavored thing, but there’s lots of sweetness there, and it’s super smooth.  But espresso and hot brew coffee has lots of acidity, bitterness,  complexity, all of the things that make coffee interesting.  We’re kind of isolating both sides of that extraction. 

*Note: You are looking for an 11:1 ratio of water to coffee.  

Aeropress + Fellow Prismo attachment

Coffee, super coarsely ground and sifted

50 g of 145° F (63° C) water 

210° F (99° C) water

Attach the Prismo to your Aeropress.  Place cup and aeropress on your scale.  Add the coarsely ground coffee and tar scale.  Add 50 g of 145° F (63° C) water.  Bloom for 2 ½ minutes.  Add 210° F (99° C) water to Aeropress.  You want an 11:1 ratio of water to coffee.  Brew for 2 ½ minutes, and then press.

Prevail will be pulling shots at our Expo booth on Friday, April 20 from 4-5 PM.  For more information on Prevail Coffee, visit their website, Facebook, and Instagram.

All photos courtesy of Prevail Coffee.

Although new to Tacoma's industry, business has been booming for Manifesto Coffee.  The company, opening less than two years ago, is already expanding their business in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood.  Their space, a cozy dwelling for locals, has just a few seats, and their walls are covered in friends' artwork.  They offer the essential, specialty beverages along with a few unique options, such as the cola syrup, made by craft bartenders from 1022 South J bar.  100% owned and operated by a group of four friends, Manifesto is a team effort that clearly shows the dedication and passion behind their work, whether it's an Instagram post, a cappuccino, or a bag of their organic roast coffee.

I talked with Jadin Bulger, co-owner of Manifesto Coffee, to learn more about their growth and expansion.

Interview has been edited for clarity.

I saw that you have 4 different owners – how did you guys all get together to open this business?

It started off with my buddy Israel and myself.  We’ve been friends forever, our dads were best men in each other’s wedding, so we’ve always been around each other all our lives.  I came in, and he was roasting for anther company.  I was like, “Man this stuff is really cool, are you ever gonna do this for yourself?”, and he was like, “Yeah that’s my plan at some point.”  And I was like, “Cool, we should think about opening a shop”, and it was kind of a spitball thing.  And then, from that point there was just a moment where I guess it made sense, and he was like “Yeah, I wanna give it a shot”.  We went around, looked for a space.  It was really fast, it was kind of a whirlwind.  It took us four months from the inception of the idea to when we had the doors open.  San Franciscan, obviously, a super-huge part of that, because that was the roaster he was used to roasting on.  Originally, we wanted a [25 lb. roaster] to start, but it made way more sense for the space and the scope of what we were doing to get a [6 lb. roaster].  And now we’re in the realm where it’s like, we’re really close to needing the [25 lb. roaster] so it’s all worked itself out pretty naturally.  At first it was the two of us, and then a few months into the project, before we actually got opened, [Wesley] wanted to join us and be a café manager – we weren’t going to run an espresso bar or anything, we were just going to be wholesale – so he came on, and we were like, “I guess we just make this a little bigger and add an espresso bar shop with the coffee roaster”.  So we did that and then Jack came about two weeks later, and he was going to bring us all the social media aspects and video camera footage – all that kind of stuff – so we picked him up, and that’s the team!

Is this something you all do full-time?

Yeah, Jack runs a little bit of his own video business on the side, but Manifesto is everybody’s baby right now.

I saw that you’re expanding your location.

Yeah, it took us one year to get to the point where we were like, “Oh we’re going to need more space”.  It’s been about a four-month process to do that.  It’s really close to completion now, we’ve got like, just a few more things to do over there, and then we’ll be in final inspection.  But it will double our space, so we’ll have about thirty-five customers in the space instead of like, thirteen.  And it gives us the ability to put the [SF25 roaster] in here.  We had no way to get it in here without remodeling the building. 

What’s the plan [with the new space]?

The bar will go over to the new space, and then the original space will be partitioned out for new production and storage. 

How did you come up with the name & branding?

Israel really had his eye on [the brand] being gold, black, and white so the color scheme was already there.  We have a couple of artist friends who helped us dial in what the logo was going to look like.  He had an idea that it would be a crest, and it would look more Old-English, or old in the writing-style.  We used a couple of his tattoo designs to incorporate into the signage, there’s a lion and a few other things that ties it all together.  As far as the name, I guess is was a little bit of a joke, but maybe not?  When Israel talks about a thing, or when he figures out how to do a thing, it’s kind of like a manifesto.  It’s like, “I’m doing this thing, here’s why it’s this way, here’s why it’s good…”, you know?  He has his reason, and he’s pretty adamant about them.  It was kind of an inside joke on that.  It seems to work, we’re doing really well right now.

What’s been your favorite part of working in this industry and owning a business?

For me, I’ve been in a lot of businesses.  I didn’t start in coffee, I didn’t even have a coffee background when we started this.  It was more, having been an accounts manager for a fairly large company, and I’d done inventory management, accounting, sales…I’d done a bunch of stuff for a fairly large company.  I was like, well all those skill sets apply to what I’d be doing as far as growing a wholesale account, keeping up customer relationships, and making sure the inventory is all handled.  I think the whole idea of being in control of where things go, and I always come back to the same thing, of being able to make ethical and moral decisions as a company.  Every company I have ever been with I’ve butted heads with those issues.  I always feel like people are not top on the priority list, they’re the first things to get sacrificed, and I just don’t see the point.  It’s nice to be in control of how that’s going to go in a company.  It definitely makes it more worth it when you can go home at the end of the day and it’s like, “wow, I don’t regret anything or feel bad about anything that I was a part of”.  I can’t say that’s been true of any other place that I’ve worked.  That’s probably the #1. 

What’s next for Manifesto?

I think we’re just looking to settle into a larger space.  We’re already busting at the seams right now so we kind of need it.  I think our plan is just to grow the storefront, figure out what that’s going to look like, and then of course get the [SF25 roaster] in here.  That’s like, our next big goal.  We have a lot of irons in the fire.  Our website just got finished, and we can ship anywhere in the US now, and that’s starting to happen.  We ship to Texas, Ohio, Iowa, different places, so there’s starting to be a customer base not in Washington which is kind of cool. 

Favorite coffee you’re roasting right now?

That’s a good one.  Probably the Sidamo.  Everything we do is a single-origin, it’s all free-trade, organic.  It just pretty much tastes like blueberry pie.  You get it on the smell, you get it on the taste, it’s really strong.  That’s what I do as a French press at home right now.  We did it on espresso for our anniversary blend.  We had our one year, and we were like, “let’s do something special”, so we went and found Sidamo.  We just did one bag, so we had 150 lbs. and that was it.  We got done, and there was this really weird acclaim that it had, everyone wanted it, so we put it in the rotation.  We even incorporate it into our espresso.  Before we had a Yirgacheffe, and we swapped them out, and everyone thinks it improved the flavor profile of the espresso. 

Anything else you want me to know about Manifesto?

The only other thing we’d probably want to add is our entire business is pretty much due to the fact that Israel learned how to roast on a San Franciscan.  That is pretty much integral to what our success is, we believe.  We’re pretty appreciative.  Every time we’ve had an experience with San Franciscan, it has been positive.  We’ve had times when the motor broke on the weekend, and [the company] responded immediately, and we had a motor Monday morning.  We’ve had a couple of challenges, and it’s always been a very pleasant experience doing business with [The San Franciscan Roaster Company].

Manifesto Coffee will be pulling shots at our Expo booth on Friday, April 20 from 3-4 PM.  For more information on Manifesto Coffee, visit their website, Instagram, and Facebook.

  All photos courtesy of Manifesto Coffee.

PSA: Augie’s likes dogs.  That’s the first thing they want you to know.  They also happen to roast coffee and own four cafés with two upcoming locations sprawling throughout Southern California.  But that’s just a side gig…

The company, originally founded in Redlands, has gained a rapid following on the outskirts of Los Angeles, with current locations in Redlands, Riverside, Claremont, and Temecula.  Owner, Austin Amento, and his father, Andy, opened the space in 2009 with the idea of selling the best coffee to cool people.  Their company puts green coffee buying at the forefront, ensuring that they are providing the highest-quality and optimal transparency while promoting community.

I talked to roaster and green buyer, Tim Maestas, and production roaster, Lydia, to learn more about Augie’s commitment to brewing good coffee and having fun.

Interview has been edited for clarity.

I saw that you guys talk about “pushing boundaries” in the coffee industry?  What makes Augie’s different from other shops?

Tim:  Good question.  I think that what we really try to focus on the communities that we’re based in, and we kind of ingrain ourselves in these cities.  We’re in a handful of cities in Southern California.  We try to serve those cities as well as we can and hire managers and staff that can follow-through with that idea of becoming a part of their city and making that Augie’s really vital.  On the production side, we are definitely huge believers in trying to make sure that all of the coffees that we’re bringing in are brought in fairly, whether that be with an importer – which I’m all for, we love using importers that we believe in – or if someone from Augie’s is traveling, meeting the producers and building a relationship which is always fun.  We have quite a few coffees from relationships that are more our friends than not. 

How do you think Augie’s has changed, starting from its earliest location and now moving on to six locations?

Austin: Well, I mean the bills definitely got larger.  Hopefully not a ton, just more people, more fun…

Lydia: More resources to do bigger things.

A: There you go.  I feel like it’s changed a lot, but it’s also very similar still.  I’m still working all day every day, we’re always here working on new projects, having fun.  When we got the San Franciscan, it was nice, because we were able to use Cropster and have a lot more variable control on drum speed, fan speed, all of those different toys so that was very exciting  – Cropster, integrated with the San Franciscan, and everything being repeatable as you have notes – it’s interesting to then use your notes from past coffees that are similar density or similar region to then influence how you would approach a new coffee.  The big thing is – did you guys mention dogs?

T: I didn’t do my preface of dogs.

A: We like dogs a lot.  I just wanted to make sure that was on record.

T: And recently sometimes cats, maybe?

Can you tell me a little about your green-buying policies?

T: I wouldn’t say we’re really strict in the way of how we have to buy coffees.  We don’t have like, “Oh we have to replace this natural Ethiopia with another natural Ethiopia before it runs out”.  We’re strict in the way of quality.  We accept samples from any importer, anytime, and sample roast them.  I think a lot of roasters don’t allow open samples to be sent to them, but we’re very much like, “send us whatever”.  Because of that, we taste a lot of coffee here, and on average, we probably taste 40 or 50 coffees before making a purchase.  That’s just from here, the roasted samples and cupping samples side of things, which is a lot of our time, but doesn’t necessarily add up to a lot of coffee that we buy.  Like I said, we’re doing more and more with coffees at origin and that we’re able to cup there.  We get a larger pick of what we want there, so we’re cupping tables of dozens of washed Ehtiopias from one region today, so we can make a purchasing decision from that.  [We’re] always in mind of who the farmer is.  It’s always nice to see that there’s good projects going on for that farmer or co-op.

I saw that Augie’s has some competitors this year [Austin Amento in Taster’s Cup, Blair Smith in Brewer’s Cup] – how has it been getting ready for Expo, and what are you most excited for?

T: All of the parties.  No, it’s been good.  Blair is here a handful of times a week for a couple hours putting in time, tasting her coffee, growing her coffee, and having us taste it.  She’s been using the coffee from the same farm for the past couple of years so that’s been really interesting for her to travel with them.  They’re a younger farm, they’ve only been around for four years now, so she’s been using them for like two and a half of those.  A lot of work, a lot of time goes into that.  Austin has been doing Taster’s Cup as well which is not an easy thing to practice for.  I have to brew X amount of coffees and line up coffees and mark all the bottoms.  After he does one set, we have to re-set it all and do it again.  It’s a lot of extra work, but we take it easy in other areas around this time to make up for it.  [Blair] is grinder-testing right now so she has three or four grinders in there with her right now, and she’s brewing them all. 

L: I think I’m excited to be there with a company that’s so deeply involved in the coffee community.  I went last year, and the shop that I worked for at the time didn’t pay all that much attention to the coffee community, so I look forward to meeting the people that Augie’s knows and for networking and hanging out with my coworkers. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your background in coffee?

L: I have been in specialty coffee for a year and a half now total.  I worked at two companies.  I’ve been at Augie’s for close to three months now, but I’ve been roasting for a little more than a year.

T: I started in coffee six years ago at Klatch.  I was only there for approaching a year, but they had a great training program, I really enjoyed my time there.  I got to learn from Heather Perry.  And then, I came to work at Augie’s when they were opening their second store in Riverside.  I was on bar there for a year, and the [roaster at the time] was moving north up to San Francisco, and I wiggled my way into the roastery. 

What is your favorite coffee you guys are roasting right now?

L: I have really been enjoying a Costa Rican we have from a farmer named Adrian Hernandez.  It’s really delicious.  I think it’s from Central Valley.  It’s quite fruity and floral and tasty to drink.

T: My favorite is a washed Peru we just got from Moyobamba.  This is our first Peru, and I’ve just been really stoked on it.  We haven’t worked with this importer before either.  It’s a new relationship, they came out and visited us a month and a half ago and came back with samples.  We cupped them together, and it’s really good, so we made friends with them.

Anything else you’d like to say about Augie’s?

T: We just love dogs.

L: We’re for sure one of the best coffee shops in the country.  No question.

T: You did not hear that from me.

Tim and Lydia will be pulling shots at the SFR Expo booth on Friday, April 20 from 1-2 PM.  More more info about Augie's visit their website, Facebook, or Instagram.

 

All photos courtesy of Augie's Coffee.

Valhalla Coffee, located in Tacoma, Washington, was originally founded in 2004 long before you heard the terms 'micro-lots' or 'third-wave' being thrown around coffeehouses.  Owner, A.J. Anderson, started his coffee career at Starbuck's before learning to roast at Queen Anne Coffee, later renamed Metropolitan Market.  I sat down with A.J. to learn more about how Valhalla has changed over the past 14 years.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Can you tell me a little about Valhalla?

Valhalla Coffee started in 2004 with a [SF 25 roaster] I use now and purchased from my previous employer.  I’ve been in the coffee business for about 25 years, I’ve had Valhalla Coffee for 14 years.  We started with just wholesale and then moved to another location about five years in and expanded then to wholesale and retail, so we have a storefront where you can get coffee by the cup or pound.  We basically do all things coffee.  About a year ago now, we opened our second location which is inside the 7 Seas Brewery – it’s a large brewery complex with a several-thousand square foot tap room.  In that taproom is our second coffee shop with a little SF6 roaster and next to us is a little restaurant so it’s a unique set up in there.

How did you come up with the name and branding for Valhalla?

In a nutshell, I always found it odd or amusing that so many companies from the Seattle-Tac area  were trying to associate themselves with an Italian name.  [Everyone] added an o to the end – just one of those funny things I noticed in the coffee business.  When I went to create a name and a brand for my own company – I’m Norwegian-Swedish, all my family immigrated here about two generations ago from Norway or Sweden.  My first name is Arvid, that’s about as Scandinavian as you can get –so actually I think the name Valhalla, I was never into Norse mythology, but I think I saw an episode on the history channel on Norse mythology and thought it was a cool sounding name.  I’ve learned more about Norse mythology since then, but it’s marketable – we have a Viking Blend and a Valkyrie Blend, and it just looked good in print so that’s where I came up with it.

I noticed you started back in 2004, I guess before sustainable coffee really became, I don’t want to say trendy, but more mainstream?

The first start I got was in 1992.  I was a senior in high school, I got a job at Starbuck’s.  I am the first of my family from many generations not to go to college so I got out of high school and had to get a job.  Starbuck’s was an interesting job, it seemed cool and trendy in the early 90s.  I got interested in the roasting side of it at Starbuck’s.  I interviewed and got through the orientations and all that, and that was right when the Seattle roasting plant was going to completely automated systems, which I found far less interesting than the hands-on roasting and the creation of coffee.  So I guess at that time, Queen-Anne Thriftway [now Metropolitan Market] – it’s a very high-end bougie grocery store, and they had just opened up in the neighborhood here, this huge grocery complex, and they were roasting inside.  They had that Model 25 SF roaster, which I thought was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life, and I had to get a job there.  I started as a barista, and that was my second job out of high school, and a few months later, I got an apprenticeship roasting.  Sadly, the first person I apprenticed with died of cancer, and I was kind of thrown into his job.

And that’s what kind of got you brought you into coffee-roasting in general?

Yeah, I got the interest at Starbuck’s and saw an opening at this grocery store coffee company [Queen Anee Coffee] and it just seemed to suit me. I’ve always been very mechanical and hands-on with a little overactivated brain.

So you started your own place with their old roaster?

Yeah, so long story short, that company got bought out by a larger, more corporate company.  And they were fazing out the in-house roasting.  They had three stores, and I was based out of the Tacoma store, and I was a corporate employee so I ran their department, Queen Anne Coffee.  When that kind of came about and the corporate changeover and name change, I saw an opportunity to go out on my own which was a plan I had been working on in the back of my head for a while.  It was kind of fortuitous timing, so I scrounged up all the money I could and made them an offer on the roasting operation they had – so the SF roaster, a big afterburner…They accepted my offer, I came in and leased a little 400 square foot warehouse space and started just a one-man operation of Valhalla Coffee in February 2004.

What has been the most rewarding part during the growth of Valhalla?

I guess just the growth itself going from a one-man operation, just a pie-in-the-sky dream of being self-employed. I loved what I was doing but I didn’t love being employed by a grocery company.  They didn’t really understand a lot of what I was trying to do.  So from a one-man roasting operation to a storefront, and a few employees to now two locations and fourteen employees.  I’ve got my own private office that I pace around in and it’s the only place I can find some quiet.  In a booming coffee shop, I could no longer make phone calls or do anything with any peace.  I basically have an apartment in the back of the building.

What is your favorite coffee you’re roasting right now?

It’s a fair-trade, organic Ethiopia Sidamo.

What’s next for Valhalla?

I’ve always been an opportunist instead of forcing things to happen, I kind of just keep my eye on things.  We might expand a little further…Right now it’s just trying to keep the fourteen employees and two locations.  We’re branching out into a little more of equipment maintenance – espresso machines.  We buy, sell, repair.  I have a service department now; I hired a full-time service technician who’s rebuilding machines.  Buying some cheap, beat-up [machine], refurbing it, and selling it on Craigslist.  And all of our whole sale accounts are growing, so we need to be able to service their equipment.

Valhalla will be featured on our Expo espresso bar on April 21 from 3-4 PM.  To learn more about Valhalla, visit their website, Facebook, and Instagram.

With terms such as 'fair-trade', 'relationship', and 'quality' being thrown around in the industry, it's easy to get lost under the umbrella that is third-wave specialty coffee.  It seems as if these terms have muddied over the years, and many people don't really know what happens at source.  To some extent, most of us are probably guilty of this.  However, one company is working to redefine producer-client relationships: 575 Café, a family-owned specialty coffee farm from Palocabildo, Colombia, and one of our good friends, is striving to educate consumers and reinvent what it means to export coffee.  575 Café will now bridge the gap between farms and cafés and establish genuine friendships between producers and roasters, all while maintaining complete transparency and accountability.  

In addition to redefining coffee exporting, member and director of quality, Herbert Peñaloza Correa, is changing the notion of what it means to be a roaster at origin.  "There’s a paradigm in the coffee industry that origin countries can’t roast, because of the altitude, because they don’t know how, because the coffees are too fresh, or because they don’t have the machinery.  We’ve just surpassed all that; we roast in altitude, we have an amazing roaster, we know how to roast our coffees, so we’re trying to become a force in roast coffee as well".  I interviewed Herbert to learn more about their commitment to implementing horizontal growth in the coffee industry and becoming a roaster-at-origin. 

This interview has been condensed for clarity.

What did you do before coffee, and how did you get involved in the coffee industry?

I worked as a photographer for around 13 years.  I was doing mostly product and a little bit of architecture photography and I had a branding agency, so that’s semi why I got into coffee. My family bought a coffee farm about seven years ago and they gave me a call one day and said, “hey we need some pictures and branding for a new coffee brand” so I began reading about coffee – I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to something new. And that was my approach back then when I was working advertising – immerse myself in the product we’re going to ad or the branding we’re going to do or the photography I was going to take to understand a little bit more.  So I did it with coffee and when I arrived to the farm – I knew a little bit so I took, I think I took like, five pictures the whole week I was there.  I was mostly working and picking coffee and I came back to my studio with a lot of coffee. I was drying it on a terrace, I roasted it on a broiler, and that was my first cup of coffee from my farm and I fell it love with it I think.  I started working a quarter of the time, a third of the time, half the time and I was working half the time and I was trying to move 100% to coffee, I think three years ago.  We bought our San Franciscan and the same day it arrived, my uncle had an accident and he died, so I had to face the choice of getting fully into coffee or sell the farm and not continue it, so that was basically it.

Tell me a little about your coffee operation – specifically the farm.

575 actually started as a roast coffee business.  The main focus from the farm was selling to the [National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia], to the regular Colombian market.  So the main focus of the farm at the beginning was the commodity market that ends up in regular coffee shops, it has nothing to do with specialty coffee, lots of Starbuck’s.  So that was the main focus and I just had like 10% of the production of the farm to do crazy stuff, to go roast it, do some honey, do different processing.  So I started learning about roasting, and we found out that our green bean wasn’t as good as some clients were asking, and we couldn’t aim for the international market.  We focused 100% on local market and after roasting with several roasters in the country and going to several places, fighting with some roasters, disliking a lot of roasting styles, I worked with a very good friend of mine.  He’s a roaster from the US, and he was working here for a couple years.  We had a chance to roast on a San Franciscan in 2014 – the only SF-6 in the country at the time – and he loved the machine.  He had more experience than I did – I didn’t even know how to operate the roast, I was just copying.  He loved the machine he said it was really responsive, everything was happening when it was supposed to.  We were shopping for roasters, we ended up buying the San Franciscan, and that was really the turning point for our business.  We became proud of our production, we became aware of the quality we were producing by roasting our coffee and learning how to roast it, and that was only achievable because the machine we had.  So that was the beautiful part – we were making these great coffees that were getting rejected in the international market, because most roasters didn’t know how to treat them.  So we started the green coffee business and now we do both.  We do green coffee and roast coffee for local and international markets. And we started the sourcing project La Real Expedición Botánica – that project is a consulting and associative product with several other coffee growers who are walking the same path we walked a couple years ago trying to find their place as coffee growers and trying to see if they can export.  So we’re trying to teach them in ways we’ve been doing things for a while and selling their green coffee as well. 

Where does the name 575 Café come from?

The name comes from the coordinates of the farm. 5, -75 is the location of our new farm, and it comes from the theory that there’s no two places in the world that are the same, and the only thing we have as a coffee grower is the piece of land and the people that surround it.  For me, it’s everything.  All of our advertising is in Spanish.  The idea was to create a brand that was very Latin, very Colombian, very farm-like and we created the brand.  Everything is in Spanish, because when I was doing advertising, everyone was talking in English terms, and we hated that.  We thought “we’re Colombians, we need to talk in Spanish”.  So we’ve avoided English at all costs.  We work with people all over the world, but we didn’t change the language.  We tried to rediscover Spanish words, and we kept that for the brand.  When clients meet us, we speak English, and they ask why we advertise in Spanish, but international clients only like the pretty pictures.  There are coffee growers in Latin America, and they want to know what we’re doing, and we teach them over social media.

What is your favorite coffee that you’re roasting right now?

There’s one I’m sharing with you, that has to be one of my favorite ones.  It’s a micro-lot from a woman called Edilma Urresty – I go ultra-light with it, it’s like so floral and so bright and so fruity.  I really like that one and it’s been my favorite.  There’s another called Borrachito – in Spanish it means ‘the drunken boy’.  The name comes from the processing – it’s an under-ripe coffee, we do special processing like long fermentation, and yeast we create at the farm, and homemade liquor; and it’s been weird, interesting, strange, it’s been challenging.  I haven’t been able to tame it, but it’s one of my favorites.

You talk about how your roaster is the highest roaster in the world.  What are some of the challenges of roasting at such a high altitude?

[The Roaster] is at 8,990 ft. high.  The air-flow is one of them.  I’ve always roasted in high altitude, so lately that I’ve been roasting in the US a little bit, I found that reactions happen a lot slower than here.  Everything here happens fast, so you can do really fast and aggressive roasts with good developing and without burning stuff cause it just goes.  I’m a really aggressive roaster here, in Colombia, and that’s mostly because of San Franciscan and what it allows me to do at high altitude.  We actually changed the fan this week finally, I carried it in my backpack from one of my last trips back to Colombia.  We just installed it, so it will change the whole air-flow game once again.  The main challenge is trying to tone down aggressiveness cause you can end up with some pretty underdeveloped coffees but at the same time, if you know how to anticipate some moments, I believe you can develop coffees really well and have really clean roasts because of the shorter time.  That’s something you can’t always get at sea-level, so we don’t have to compromise.

What has been your favorite part of traveling around the world meeting different people in the industry and seeing their shops? 

It wasn’t the intention at the beginning, but I honestly got a little bit tired of the industry in Colombia, in the coffee-scene, it wore me out really fast.  I haven’t been a huge city fan, I’m a farm boy, but when I went out the first couple times and spoke with really good roasters and had time to share with good coffee professionals, I started going to shops where people really understand the craft and really respect the bean, and that’s something you don’t see in Colombia.  We’re a coffee producing country but coffee is so common you’re just a coffee grower and that’s it.  When you go to a coffee shop in the US and meet roasters and people who work in coffee and really love coffee, like damn, you’re a coffee grower –they want know everything.  I love that they respect my work.  And of course having really good coffees you don’t see here – especially origins, things you can’t taste in Colombia. I love meeting professionals, seeing what they do with coffees, some people really work magic and do amazing stuff and really love what they do and are really passionate about it.  Coffee, for me, is a social beverage – you meet a friend at university, and you don’t want to seem like a drunk guy, so you meet for coffee.  You’re interested in a girl, you invite her to have coffee. Or you meet people, want to hang out and talk about something without getting inebriated, you get coffee.  It’s a really social beverage.  It translates into the industry, it’s a very social industry as well.  A lot of people joke that there’s a lot of rejects in the specialty coffee industry, and it’s true of course, but it’s so universal that it allows people from a lot of different disciplines to get into it and that’s great when you meet interesting people within the industry.  It’s great to see people you’ve seen before and they recognize you.  I go there, and I don’t speak of business, I just chill, drink beer, and hang out, and it becomes trips to visit friends more than just working.  The fact that most of us are rejects from other industries, is that we chose coffee and made that decision because we love it, we’re good, it’s profitable – which is a lie it’s not profitable at all.  There’s a saying in Colombia, the only ones who make money are the ones doing the machines, so good for you guys – but we chose to be in coffee so it’s interesting to go around and meet people, it fits your soul.

Where do you see your company going, and what are some of your goals?

We’re mainly coffee growers, without our farms, we couldn’t do anything else.  If we lost the farm, we won’t continue coffee, that’s the heart of everything, what allows you to understand the process of coffee from beginning to end but also people and what you have to go through to produce coffee.  Growing coffee, more than a privilege, is a responsibility with our community and our labor.  The main goal is to grow the farms; we just bought a new farm it’s 54 acres, maybe 15 of that is protected rainforest, we have some rivers and a water fall.  But that’s the main goal: to bring the farm ahead.  Coffee farming is not that profitable, to be honest, unless it becomes profitable.  So I’m starting from scratch; the farm has nothing, not even a road, so we have to bring some machetes and a couple shovels and open a road to get into the farm.  We’ve been having to get 60-70 lbs. of coffee on pulleys on our shoulders up the mountains, we’ve been using mules, horses, we’ve been doing everything by hand.  We want to be able to show that you can start everything from scratch and make it profitable, but at the same time we’re putting like 19 different varietals, a lot of things that aren’t common in specialty coffee, so that’s going to be interesting as well.  But in order to have capital to make that farm work, we need to expand our green coffee business.  This year we will not have production, so we need to make sure everything will grow next season.  Of course, we want to grow the roast coffee business, so we’re looking for a new office right now.  We want to grow everything.  We want to keep the farm as the main goal, the community out on the farm, because we don’t only work with the farm, we work with neighbors as well.  We want to do farm community, grow the green coffee business, and grow our roast coffee business.

Find 575 Café on their website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

To learn more about La Real Expedición Botánica, visit their Instagram.