12 Of Our Favorite Features From 2015

It’s a busy Saturday morning at Sump Coffee in South St. Louis City. A line forms behind a single paper menu that masquerades as a subway map. A brief synopsis is provided, and the customer places an order. No payment is collected. Instead, a single page of paper tracks the order. A Hario v60 pour-over bar with front row seating for three occupies the main room’s far side adjacent to a wall adorned with the company’s notorious bearded skull and crossed portafilter and coffee leaf logo.

Past two Steampunk Brewers and three Kyoto cold coffee drippers, a first-edition Slayer Espresso machine greets guests as it is worked in tandem. As one barista steadily pulls an espresso shot and pours everything into the awaiting vessel, the other churns a pitcher of milk into a maelstrom. Before finishing the espresso with velvety steamed milk, the cup is eyed up like a PGA golfer putting for the green jacket on the 18th hole of Augusta National. The drinkable masterpiece is framed on a saucer and raced to the patient consumer. The process quickly starts again; six more cups await their turn.

Amidst all of this, owner Scott Carey is diligently attending to Sump’s latest roast. He’s equipped with a stopwatch and pen. Every 30 to 60 seconds, he marks and tracks pre-established parameters to ensure a consistent roast every time.

Noma has, since inception, been about understanding, exploring, and sharing tastes through quality ingredients, careful preparation, and creative presentation. It’s this very concept that makes the Tokyo pop-up such an exciting venture for the team—it’s a chance to share their world-renowned creativity with a whole host of new, refreshing ingredients.

And coffee lovers can rest assured, when they sit down and stare out at the vast cityscape of Tokyo, that it’s not just the food and wine that makes the Noma experience interesting―they also serve a very fine cup of coffee.

Once considered a wasteland of abandoned buildings and crime, recent Market Street move-ins by tech companies like Twitter and Uber have upped this part of San Francisco’s profile, creating an ideal customer base for specialty coffee brands like Equator (Blue Bottle and Paramo will open spots in Mid-Market later in the year). “This is where tourists should come,” Equator’s Director of Training and Education Devorah Freudiger says. “Market should be a street that you want to walk from The Castro to The Embarcadero.”

And Freudiger wants Equator to be the coffee shop that treats them along the way, where everyone feels comfortable stopping in to place an order. To buoy this idea, Equator is happily serving a variety of specialty drinks, including a house soda bar, as well as an almost entirely gluten-free food program featuring arepas and fried chicken wraps. Also on the menu is a classic shakerato: a shot of espresso, some cream, a little brown sugar and ice, shaken till frothy. It’s like ‘drinking ice cream,’ Freudiger says. “We want to offer a menu that appeals to fans of Starbucks and Peet’s,” she tells me, but with “high quality and organic” ingredients.

Something truly terrible happened to me recently. In a fit of counting amidst the throes of laundry, I realized that I now owned more coffee tees than band shirts, causing in me a very real and none too pleasant existential crisis. Like most twenty-something males and—woefully more precise—thirty-something man-children, an entire identity statement can be formulated, tested, and ultimately concluded upon based solely on the frequency of the subject matter in my t-shirt collection, and as such, the shift of power from music to coffee was the bellwether of a similar shift in my life. As a person who still considered himself a musician, though “dormant musician” is still probably too generous a descriptor, I was understandably dumbstruck by the ontological gut-punch of who I now was, and more importantly, who I now wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, being a coffee guy is pretty great, and my version of being a coffee guy gets to include travel and writing, which is stellar. But I’d wager most people want to have a more active role in constructing their own persons, to Make Yourself, as Incubus once pleaded, and I am no different. And while you can’t change who you are, you can buy a ton of new shirts with ambiguous subject matter to gerrymander the results in your favor. And so we petulantly beat on, borne ceaselessly into our past selves with these coffee-music mashup shirts, ready to ameliorate any existential flare ups.

It’s an unusually sunny spring Sunday morning on King’s Road in Chelsea, London. Tucked away on the second floor of the Habitat interior design store, looking out over the chichi boutiques and mums with strollers, is a pop-up… but not a pop-up as you know it. There is no charmingly mismatched seating, no drinks in Mason jars, no hint of exposed lightbulbs or loveably last-minute decór. In fact, if you were to wander into this pop-up, you’d probably think it had always been a part of Habitat’s Chelsea store: an elegant, well put together, professionally-designed cafe. However, in the case of the Noble Espresso crew, they were there for one weekend only, yet this was no reason to do things by halves.

Wandering around Melbourne City Center, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by choice. Every street and corner has something new to look at, with many laneways filled to the brim with restaurants and cafes. Sometimes though, it’s the little hidden spots that are the most rewarding—like Sun Moth Canteen & Bar tucked away down the middle of Niagara Lane, identifiable from a distance by only an unassuming pot plant.

Upon entering Sun Moth, it’s immediately clear that making the curious venture down Niagara Lane is worth it. Surprisingly spacious and open, Sun Moth is an all-day canteen and bar that encompasses delicious and healthy food, quality coffee, and a carefully selected array of wine, beer, and spirits.

My first Dutch teacher, a tough strawberry blonde who wore a red biker jacket, was quick to teach us that her compatriots are zuinig. But being “economical,” I would come to learn, was a survival strategy in the Lowlands. Floods and famine had programmed inhabitants to dam and to defend, to save and to spare. And while the Netherlands today is well afloat, life in its capital city requires contending with a society still cast in cautiousness. Add to that Protestant modesty and moderation. Ergo “going Dutch.”

But there is one custom for which I have noticed the frugality ethos does not seem to apply: het koekje bij de koffie. That is, the complimentary small cookie or bit of cake served alongside, most commonly, coffee. In fact, sit down in any beverage-vending business in any town in the Netherlands, order coffee, tea or cocoa, and see how it is the rule, not the exception, to find a one- to two-bite sweet perched on your saucer. Frequently, it will be of the mass-produced polypropylene wrapper-encased speculoos variety. But sometimes it will be extraordinary.

It was day four of the 12-day backpacking trip. The night’s campsite had been the most exquisite: atop a ridge overlooking an entire valley. In the morning, I saw an Arctic fox cruising through, maybe on his way to scout out his first meal of the day. The first few hours would be all uphill, we would be hiking up to the highest point on Kungsleden, Tjäktapasset. Our guidebook said that the north side of the pass almost always had a little bit of snow, but this guidebook hadn’t been written for this specific year. There wasn’t just “some” snow; the entire approach to the pass was covered in snow. But here’s the thing about snow: in the heart of winter, when the air is constantly cold, walking on a snowpack can be quite easy. A snowpack in summer that has started to melt a little? A much more difficult endeavor, one that involves breaking through the snow every few meters or so. If luck isn’t with you, you might break through and hit your knee or shin on a rock. Or you might break through and find your leg right in the middle of a stream flowing beneath the snow. All of the above took place, and by the time we reached the pass, we were soaked all the way to the socks, despite waterproof mountaineering boots.

“We have to have a fika break,” said Luc.

So what’s it like being a barista on staff in a restaurant like Canlis? Natalie Stevens estimates that 40 percent of her time is spent preparing coffee, with the rest spent “doing whatever needs to be done” in the restaurant, including delivering food and clearing plates. “I enjoy being in the middle of the action and hustle and bustle while functioning as a singular entity,” she says. “I get to play games of efficiency and time management with myself.”

That balance might shift on a busy weekend night, when she fills up to 20 coffee orders simultaneously. “A giving mentality must be had as a barista here, and personally, I welcome it,” Stevens says, later describing her floating role as a sort of “lone wolf.” This is how you help justify having a barista on staff, and the costs that incurs—the barista must be versatile.

Wrecking Ball emblemizes a shop driven by its neighborhood and the pursuit of delivering it quality coffee. And yet, when it comes to trends, owners Nicholas Cho and Trish Rothgeb aren’t interested. This is perhaps what separates great coffee shops from good, this clear understanding of what’s actually important rather than simply what other people say is. So while the self-described fuddy-duddies will put out an iced cappuccino and sixteen-ounce cups and ice-brewed coffee, they don’t do public cuppings (“all kinds of shit shows”) and won’t serve you cold brew.

“Cold brew is a Second Wave wolf in Third Wave sheep’s clothing,” Cho said.

“It’s objectively a poor way to make coffee,” Rothgeb echoed. And nitro cold brew? Like French Roast, “it’s another thing we’re going to have to answer for in the future.”

Relying on Buffalo-based suppliers whenever possible and working closely with his West Side neighborhood is paying off so far. I notice as we walk around the neighborhood together that Crouse says hello to everyone he passes on the street—and like they’re old neighbors already, they greet him back. On this particular morning, the shop only four days old, a community has already begun to gather around the shop, meeting for work, crochet dates, or just a slice of avocado toast in the sun-flooded light of Tipico’s gargantuan windows. In the summer these same windows can accordion open, letting in the city’s ever-precious season of temperate air.

“So far it’s been amazing,” Crouse tells me. “People have ordered pour-overs by the gallons.” For a city like Buffalo, enjoying a cultural resurgence and attracting new businesses like Tipico, he’s already begun to achieve his primary goal. “I don’t want people to be confused about what coffee CAN be.”

It’s a cozy space, with big windows looking out at the glass-and-steel newness of the city, filled up with youngsters, expats, students, young professionals, specialty-coffee lovers, television stars, the local version of hipsters, and just flat-out curious people from the neighborhood, all dropping by to meet, learn, and experience a taste of coffee culture. “Coffee education with a new awareness is a priority for us,” owner and barista Erik Wahlen tells me. “We can see the growth and adaptation of global creativity in Mongolian culture—and we’re right in the middle of all of that.”