The La Marzocco Cafe—the Sprudgie Award winning Seattle coffee shop and showroom inside the KEXP Studios—has announced their Year Three Roasters in Residence, and there’s a pretty signficant international bent to this year’s lineup.
Like with previous years, each roaster gets to takeover the cafe for a month; this isn’t just a guest roaster spot, mind you, this is a wholesale change. Roasters decide the drink menu, bar design, flow, etc., in order to provide patrons a cafe experience that most resembles that of the roaster’s home shop.
For Year Three—though really it is Year Three and Four-ish, running from May 2018 through February 2020—the La Marzocco Cafe has tapped seven international roasters of the 20 total to inhabit the KEXP coffee shop. The international list includes: Allpress Espresso (Auckland, New Zealand), Seesaw Coffee (Shanghai, China), Bonanza Coffee Roasters (Berlin, Germany), Onibus Coffee (Tokyo, Japan), Ditta Artiginale (Florence, Italy), The Coffee Collective (Copenhagen, Denmark), and Five Elephant (Berlin, Germany).
For US-based roasters, La Marzocco has selected: Cuvée Coffee (Austin,TX), La Colombe Coffee Roasters (Philadelphia, PA), Kuma Coffee (Seattle, WA), Metric Coffee (Chicago, IL), Dapper and Wise (Portland, OR), Equator Coffees & Teas (San Rafael, CA), Port of Mokha (Oakland, CA), 4th Dimension Coffee (Durham, NC), Elixr Coffee (Philadelphia, PA), Onda Origins (Seattle, WA), Linea Caffe (San Francisco, CA), Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters (Lakewood, CO) and Verve Coffee Roasters (Santa Cruz, CA). That last two are my mom’s favorite coffee roasters, just in case you thought your parents’ coffee game was better than my mom’s. It isn’t. Hi Mom!
It all kicks off with next month with Cuvée Coffee. Will they bring with them their assembly-line style of drink ordering (featured here in Sprudge) or will Cuvée owner Mike McKim stand in front of the cafe slinging cans of nitro cold brew to passersby (a thing he has been known to do)? Who knows. Maybe both. That’s the fun of the La Marzocco Cafe. For more information about the Roaster in Residence program, view the announcement of the Year Three residents via the La Marzocco Cafe and Showroom official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
*top image via La Marzocco
