Breaking here first on Sprudge.com, De La Paz Coffee Roasters will be opening a brand new cafe later this week at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in a partnership with Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen. The joint venture will have its soft opening this Friday from 11am-4pm, and will open for business the following Friday, August 2nd with operating hours projected to be 8am-4pm.
The cafe will feature a two-group Synesso espresso machine pulling shots of DLP’s Big City Blend, and will offer batch brewed filter coffee. Pour over coffees as well as custom blends for the space will come later. This will be the first De La Paz cafe since the Four Barrel acquisition and closing of their temporary roastworks coffee cart.
The Acquisition
Jeremy Tooker, Tal Mor, and Jodi Geren of Four Barrel acquired De La Paz Coffee Roasters early in 2013. When esteemed coffee writer and Sprudge contributor Hanna Neuschwander interviewed the former De La Paz owner Jason Benford in 2011 for her book, Left Coast Roast, DLP was in the midst of a cafe build-out in the SOMA neighborhood. According to Neuschwander, Benford was juggling two businesses at once and two years later, Benford approached Four Barrel.
Mssrs. Tooker and Mor have taken over green coffee purchasing for De La Paz, a roasting company with seven years of market presence in the Bay Area. In a phone interview with Sprudge for this article, Mr. Tooker spoke about some of the differences between the two brands – namely, De La Paz’s focus on blends.
Traceable Blending
Noticing the market for perennial coffees, Tooker has embraced the blend. De La Paz blends will always be comprised of two coffees, split evenly, and the coffees will be labeled on the back of the package. The coffees will change seasonally and stick to a specific profile. “Blends give us the opportunity to explore a broader spectrum of roast profile,” Jeremy told us over the phone, “We want to approach blends from a chef’s perspective.”
De La Paz currently offers three blends: the blue Big City blend geared toward a “simple, chocolatey, sweet” espresso; the red Graceland, a more “complex acidity driven espresso or a toned down drip”; and the yellow Peel Sessions, the lightest of the three.
Naturals
In another stark contrast between Four Barrel and De La Paz, DLP will offer natural Ethiopian coffees as well as coffees from Sumatra. Four Barrel does not offer such coffees. “I just found a beautiful natural for DLP,” Tooker tells us, “but I haven’t bought an Ethiopian natural in four years.”
New Look
Mr. Tooker on DLP’s packaging redesign: “The patterns were inspired by De La Paz’s original screen printed bags that Ape Do Good designed. Triangles and stripes, different rich colors and so on. Also inspired by the traditional decorative chocolatier papers; Dandelion, Mast Brothers, many European companies…”
“In the future, we’ll develop multiple blends that will fit into each category, making more sense of the colors and applying some sort of synesthesia to the bags.”
Wise Sons
Evan Bloom and Leo Beckerman started the Mission-area Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in 2010. The joint space will feature a paired down version of their unique brand of new American Jewish comfort food – think crispy fried noodle kugel smothered with maple syrup and a vegan smoked trumpet mushroom reuben. De La Paz will share the space.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum is located at 736 Mission Street (btwn. 3rd and 4th Streets), San Francisco, CA 94103.
