The Side Quest at Seattle’s new cafe Gloom is a beverage that defies categorization. The base is Kenyan coffee and blueberry rooibos tea, but there’s also grapefruit, strawberry, and lime juice in the mix, and cardamom-nutmeg coconut cold foam on top. It’s presented like a cocktail, in a tall glass that highlights the striking murky pink color, and garnished with dried fruit that you can snack on like sweet jerky. It’s fruity and light and fizzy with a dose of warming spice from that foam—but what do you call a drink like that? On Gloom’s menu, the Side Quest is simply part of the “Gloomy Cocktail Menu,” which includes several exciting combinations of the NA cocktail and coffee cocktail genres.
There’s a pronounced level of showmanship in these drinks. “Cafes forever have been doing a lot of interesting signature beverage–type things,” says co-owner Brandon Paul Weaver. “But a lot of times they present as like, a cup of brown.”
Gloom, which opened in May, is a partnership between four longtime coffee professionals—Alex Sciarrotta, Nate Reppert, Josh Modisette, and Weaver. Sciarrotta recently bought the Everett coffee shop Narrative and was looking to go into roasting with his longtime coworker Reppert. Weaver and Modisette joined the ownership team later, and the group got an opportunity to take over the former Elm Coffee space, in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. After that, Weaver says, the only question facing them was simple: “How weird are we going to get?”
Weaver is the one largely responsible for the coffee cocktails. His experience spans the bartending and coffee worlds—he’s competed as a mixologist and a barista, been a head judge at the Coffee in Good Spirits competition, and is a co-owner at nearby bar Liberty. He downplays the difficulty involved in creating these drinks (“If anyone wants to do it, they can”) but is happy to delve into the “nerdery” that goes into them.
The cold brew that forms the base of most of the coffee cocktails is run through a centrifuge and drained through filters in order to remove oil, which can make cold brew taste bitter when it goes rancid. To make the strawberry juice for the Side Quest, he throws the berries in a blender with Pectinex to break down the fruit, then runs that mixture through a centrifuge in order to get a strawberry juice that has the flavor without the seeds and pulp. The lime juice Gloom uses is actually “pseudo lime” extracted from lime peels, which stays fresh for longer than usual lime juice and allows Weaver to make use of all the parts of the lime. “It’s like nose-to-tail citrus out here,” he jokes.
The coffee cocktails are priced a bit more like cocktails than coffee—they range from $11 to $13, which is twice the price of a typical latte at a Seattle specialty cafe, but less than you’d pay for a craft cocktail in the city. Six months in, customers aren’t balking at the prices, maybe because of how they are presented. “Because they are so convincingly cocktails, more people register them as, ‘Oh these are really cheap cocktails,’ than they do as like, ‘Oh these are more expensive coffee drinks,’” says Weaver.
Gloom’s merger of NA cocktails and coffee is nothing new-new; in nearby Capitol Hill, Ghost Note has been playing around with cocktail-esque coffee drinks for years, and enterprising coffee bars around the country have played with cocktail forms (and especially cocktail glassware) for the last two decades. But Weaver’s combined barista-mixologist experience really makes the concept come to life in a compelling way here at Gloom. “Coffee drinks can be a little bit different than what I’ve always had,” Weaver says. “Just by accepting that idea, you might get to a more curious place about the rest of what coffee can offer.”
Harry Cheadle is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. This is Harry Cheadle’s first feature for Sprudge.
