Boston boasts more than its fair share of specialty coffee purveyors selling world-class beans and brews.
But as more so-called third wave cafés enter the scene – that is, those promoting the craft of coffee as more than a mere mid-afternoon fix – some of the city’s most notable shops are looking for new ways to stay competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Three local haunts, Barismo, Gracenote, and George Howell Coffee, are adapting to our time-crunched world of online ordering and instant gratification, which means serving world-class coffee, and serving it fast.
“It used to be you go to the hipster coffee house and it takes you 20 minutes to get a cup of coffee,” said Ed Doyle, president of Cambridge food consulting firm RealFood Consulting Inc. who advised the Japanese cafe Ogawa Coffee as it chose Boston for its first foray into the U.S. market.
There’s an interesting relationship in coffee between a beer-driven coffee culture and a wine-driven coffee culture.[/pullquote]
“There was an alternative psychology to the very early stage of independent coffee houses that almost made the process a part of the experience,” Doyle said.
Consumers, now habituated to meticulously crafted caffeine drinks made with single-origin beans, have more options, less time and higher coffee standards. It’s a witch’s brew of customer demands that Doyle said has entrepreneurs striving to carve out a niche among their peers.
The competition is heating up. UK-based Caffé Nero in 2014 planted its first U.S. location in Boston after amassing 650 globally. In the span of just two years, Nero opened six additional cafes in and around town. Alongside a funding announcement of $45 million in new series C financing, Philz Coffee Chief Executive Jacob Jaber said last week his San Francisco chain will be opening a cafe in Boston.
Consequently, some cafes around Boston are developing new hardware and brewing methods. Cambridge café Barismo developed a patent-pending cold-brew injector that produces hundreds of nitrogenated cold brew kegs per week, according to founder Jaime van Schyndel. Last year, Schyndel bought the financially struggling Voltage Café from owner Lucy Valena and turned it into a Barismo. Innovating new drinks, like a hot-draft nitro that’s also stored in kegs but this time pumped through heated, food-grade tubing, is how Barismo stays ahead of the competition, Schyndel said.
“It’s not about completing a project and saying that we won, it’s about the process of finding new ways to serve more good coffee with less labor,” Schyndel said.
An explosion in packaged cold-brew has helped companies like Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Blue Bottle Coffee Inc., and Austin-based Chameleon Cold-Brew become players in the ready-to-drink coffee industry, a market with double-digit year-over-year growth that Euromonitor International analysts expect will reach $3.6 billion by 2020, according to a Bloomberg report. Though far below the $75 million in funding Oakland, Calif.-based Blue Bottle disclosed in an SEC filing last year, Boston’s Barismo raised $100,000 that Schyndel said may be used to launch a ready-to-drink line of canned or bottled nitro cold brews.
Aiming to sell customers consistent coffee quickly, Schyndel said that someday he wants to render obsolete a mainstay of the modern coffee shop: the espresso machine.
“It’s such an energy sink and so craft-dependent,” Schyndel said of the 30-amp La Marzocco espresso machine sitting on the oval bar of his Columbus Avenue location, one of three Barismo cafés in the Boston area. After 12 years in the coffee industry, Schyndel said, “you get sick of people on the other side of the counter judging your self worth by how well you’re drawing little circles in their milk.”
In its place, the Virginia native sees a cold-brewed shot of equal caffeination that can be quickly heated to order.
At Gracenote, a standing-room only coffee bar in Boston’s Leather District, a decidedly different philosophy has taken root. Though the requisite nitrogen cold brew is on tap, Gracenote’s vision runs contrary to that of a commercial-scale bottling operation.
“The bottling thing is not the right direction for specialty coffee,” said Alessandro “San” Bellino, who operates Gracenote Boston Espresso Bar, the retail side of Gracenote Coffee Roasters in Berlin, Mass. “It’s taking away a lot of the culture around coffee drinking.”
Bellino once spent his days helping South Station commuters caffeinate on-the-go while he was running The Coffee Trike. He sold the trike to Brad Pillen earlier this year. “Two years was enough for me,” Bellino said.
Someday Schyndel wants to render obsolete a mainstay of the modern coffee shop: the espresso machine.[/pullquote]
Come early September, the Trike was back on the market. Pillen said he’s gotten inquiries from prospective buyers, but declined to discuss the matter citing nondisclosure agreements.
Gracenote café will celebrate a year in business Oct. 13. Its interior boasts many of the trappings of a European-style cafe; customers converse over small cups of espresso-to-stay, while the absence of laptop-squatters lets three baristas behind the bar crank out upwards of 400 drinks a day, Bellino said.
Working within the same specialty coffee industry, Gracenote and Barismo have divergent visions of success. That divergence, according to veteran coffee entrepreneur George Howell, can be summed up by comparing two drinks of equal and irreplaceable import.
“There’s an interesting relationship in coffee between a beer-driven coffee culture and a wine-driven coffee culture,” Howell said. “Beer is not so much about origin, it’s about the craft of actually manufacturing the beer. You can do it on an industrial level, and there’s a lot of mythology that’s being produced with that too. That for me, that’s not terroir. That’s not a good representation of great coffee.”
The Howell name has been a mainstay of the coffee industry for decades. In 1975, Howell opened The Coffee Connection in Harvard Square. Serving coffee that was lighter and more complex than many of the day's most popular blends, Howell grew his business to 24 loactions by the mid-90s. By the time Starbucks came knocking 1994, Howell had solidified his reputation as a coffee connoisseur for the ages. “He’s kind of like a father to third-wave coffee,” Doyle said.
Starbucks acquired the Connection and the rights to his home-grown Frappuccino for $23 million, Howell said. Shortly after, he began consulting for the United Nations and launched Cup of Excellence, a program that helped Brazilian specialty coffee growers sell to American roasters at fair prices. The farmers he met were growing Arabica beans at higher altitudes. Their crops began fetching higher prices at auction, and Howell said consumers started to see the cost of their morning cup tick upwards.
“People became aware of the farm itself and were no longer asking for Peet’s Coffee or Starbucks Coffee, but rather asking for the farm name, quickly followed by the question, ‘Are you roasting it properly?’” Howell said.
If a $5.50 latte sounds a bit steep, Howell sees the price for premium coffees getting even more expensive thanks in no small part to climate change. According a recent report by the nonprofit Climate Institute, scientists expect the effects of global climate change will reduce the area suitable for coffee farming by 50 percent, lessening supply with no break in demand.
“If we don't take care of the farmer and incentivize them -- get them to a point where they are to coffee as vintners are to wine -- we’re ultimately going to see a real downgrading in the quality of coffee,” Howell said. “This cannot survive unless people are willing to pay far more.”
Images via the author.