On Main St. in Davidson, North Carolina sits the original Summit Coffee.  Since 1998, Summit has resided on this corner in a 19th century two-story building with a green, wooden frame around the doorway.  If you walk around the side, you’ll see a large brick wall with a colorful mural and customers lounging with their coffees.  Summit has left a large impression on this community.  They now own four locations and a roastery.

Transitioning from a second-wave to a third-wave coffee shop can be incredibly challenging, but Summit has been able to do it with grace.  Since opening their roastery about four years ago, the company has remained committed to sourcing organic coffees from micro-lots around the globe.  They have perfected their craft and have managed to change North Carolina’s coffee industry in the process.  I talked to wholesale director, Matt McDaniel, to learn more about Summit’s growth.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you tell me a little about Summit Coffee?

Summit started as a coffeeshop in 1998 on Main Street in a Davidson, North Carolina.  Davidson is a college-town with a very small liberal arts college.  It was just a shop for a long time, and we bought wholesale from another company.  About four years ago, we started roasting.  A lot of that was due to our owner, Brian.  Brian’s brother, Tim, had owned Summit previously, and Tim brought Brian [into the company] in 2012 to be a little bit more entrepreneurial with the business and think about smart opportunities for growth.  That kind of started us on this journey that eventually led to us roasting and becoming a fully-fledged coffee company instead of just a coffee shop. 

How do you think that Summit Coffee has changed the coffee industry in North Carolina?

I first became involved in specialty coffee in 2004, which was still a long time ago, but I’m trying to think back to where things were in ’98, and it’s like the dark ages.  I think that we were so comfortably second-wave for a long time and kind of epitomized the old-school coffee shop.  It was between 2012 and 2015 where we really started to think about what was happening in coffee on a broad level and wanting to be a shop that was competitive in terms of quality objectively and not just in relation to what was happening around us. 

I actually used to work for Counter Culture Coffee, and I was a customer support rep for them for a long time.  One of my accounts was this awesome shop in Davidson that was making really big strides and working to focus more on quality and start using single-origin espresso, trying to take things to the next level.  I became so impressed with Summit, I was looking for a way to work with them directly. 

What is your approach to coffee?

First of all, that it’s important to be community-minded and to really view the experience of coffee as a social experience.  It’s not something that’s happening in a vacuum, it’s something that is often shared with friends or loved ones.  Taking that community approach of originally being from a small, tight-knit community and then expanding that into the way we source coffee, in creating strong relationships with the importers we work with, and even sometimes more directly at origin.  With wholesale relationships, it’s the same thing.  It’s founded on trust and relationship, it’s a true collaboration and partnership.  It’s not something we view as a transactional engagement, it’s something that we really strive to carry forward in a personal and human way.  Related to that, you can achieve great coffee, and coffee can be fantastic without alienating people.  I think one thing that we really aim for is to be accessible while maintaining the standards of quality that we think are important.  A lot of people don’t get specialty coffee yet, because they haven’t been exposed to it or it hasn’t been explained to them in a certain way.  Through our education and engagement, that’s something that I’m always aware of.  How can we help people make sense of what we do, so they can connect to it. 

There’s a snobbery to the industry that turns people off but could be used as an educational opportunity.  I think that’s becoming more important in the industry.

It’s so important.  It’s an opportunity to meet them where they are, and then help educate them in a way that is not snobby.  If someone says, “Do you have a dark roast?”, they’re not necessarily talking about roast profile, what they’re actually talking about is a flavor profile.  They want something that is chocolate=y and nutty, with some sugar-browning characteristics and is not super fruit-forward or citrus-y or floral.  I think then, I’m able to know where they’re coming from and choose a coffee that is going to meet their needs. 

We’ve really taken a page out of the craft beer industry’s playbook, because beer is something that, until recently, not a lot of people were aware of.  I’m based in Asheville, and we have a huge craft beer scene, and everyone drinks these beers.  The companies themselves have done a great job at being accessible, and people are able to experience beers that don’t taste like the Miller High Life or PBR that they might have grown up drinking.  It’s offering new experiences to people that are outside their comfort zone, but then helping bridge the gap. 

What were you doing before coffee, and how did you get started in the industry?

I started working as a barista when I was 18.  I was a week out of high school, and I knew I didn’t want to go to college immediately.  I walked into a shop in my neighborhood in Atlanta called Octane.  We didn’t even know what third-wave coffee was at that time, but it was kind of the first independent coffee shop in Atlanta to make a big impression on the community.  I pretty quickly fell in love with the craft aspect of coffee.  We were a Counter Culture customer there, and I ended up working there until 2011.  I basically grew up there; from 18 to 25 working behind the bar, seeing my regulars, and seeing the WBC in Atlanta in 2008 which was a huge eye-opening experience because suddenly, all these international barista champs were ordering espresso from me.  I had to make sure the ristrettos we were making at the time were good enough and dialed-in for them.  It’s been a journey.

After Octane, I took about two years off from coffee, and I lived in Brazil for a while.  I did some traveling, finished school, and then ended up moving to Durham, North Carolina.  It wasn’t long after that I got a job at Counter Culture as a customer rep for 3 ½ years until I came to work for Summit.

What has been the most rewarding part to you?

For me, it’s exploring all the different aspects of our supply chain.  I love that coffee is inherently an international product, and that there’s so many links in that chain to get coffee from seed to cup.  Just by participating in this industry, you are participating in this inherently beautiful, mysterious, complicated process that so many people are involved in.  When I brew coffee, I think about what it took to plant those trees and take care of them long enough to start producing.  To harvest that coffee by hand, fermentation, wet-mill or dry-mill processing, then getting that coffee to a port and exporting it and importing it, and all the logistics that go into that.  And then roasting that coffee and getting it to customers.  And the barista that’s the last link in the chain who’s actually preparing a product and giving that beverage to an individual.  I love being a part of that, I think it’s totally magical.  Zooming into my own role in that, being able to work with human beings on a very human level, having real relationships and interactions that are essentially mediated through coffee.

 Favorite coffee that you’re roasting right now?

My favorite is a Colombian coffee called El Tambo.  El Tambo comes from an all-female producing cooperative.  I love that aspect of it, but I also love how it tastes.  It has delicate brown sugar sweetness, nice apple acidity, a clean body, and a really clean finish. 

Anything else you’d like to say about Summit Coffee?

We are going to be at SCA brewing on the San Franciscan brew bar in addition to Café Imports and La Marzocco.  I’m really looking forward to being in Seattle and at Expo!

Summit will be pulling shots at our Expo booth on Saturday, April 21 from 12-1 PM.  Learn more about Summit on their website, Facebook, and Instagram.

Photos courtesy of Summit Coffee.

"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.