The feeling you get from Las Vegas is a city on fast forward. A city built from nothingโliterally an expanse of arid sand turned into a shining, glittering mass of consumer fantasy. A locale built on the backs of corporate interest, a city that leap-frogged the common themes of community planning, depending instead on a migratory tidal wave of tourism each year to fill its gleaming casinos and Olympic-sized pool parties. Itโs a sprawling city, a loose connection of suburbs and strip malls linked by dust-covered freeways, the skyline of The Strip always looming somewhere in the distance. On the surface, community in Las Vegas seems sparse, the long distances, scorching summer temperatures, and almost mandatory automobile usage, massive detractors from what most people see as normal aspects of a city. To see beyond the Midwestern tourists and drunken fratboys, to see the burgeoning off-strip food and coffee scene still working its way up and out of the cracks, you need to depart the bright lights and face-lifts. To see the beginnings of what could be a beautiful thing, you need to visit a place like Joshua Walterโs Mothership Coffee Roasters and see just what it takes to carve out a niche of specialty coffee in the desert.
Walters, a lifelong resident of Las Vegas, didnโt grow up hanging out in coffee shops or sipping light-roasted micro-lots from South America. โLas Vegas is different than other cities,โ Walters tells me one afternoon, both of us seated in Mothershipโs sparkling white cafe, a freshly roasted Rwanda Gishamwana Island filling our cups. โYou donโt have coffee shops on corners. Everybody drives everywhere. People donโt really go out.โ Walters grew up watching his dad drink Folgers, not even trying his first sip of coffee until he was 21. When he met his wife, Juanny Romero, a New York transplant with a yen for good food, all of that changed. โWeโd go out and eat food that totally blew my mind,โ Walters says, โand weโd travel to LA and San Francisco and I saw something really valuable.โ Which lead Walters to open his first shop, Sunrise Coffee in 2008. Sunrise isnโt a specialty coffee shop: it offers vegan food and 20-ounce beverages, and lives in the shell of a former Itโs A Grind, but it still stands as one of the cityโs most popular spots for a cup of joe, a haven for UNLV college students and people just wanting a place to gather and hang out. โPeople came there,โ Walters says, โjust to get coffee, but they saw people they knew.โ
Walters was, and is, happy with what Sunrise has become, but Mothership is the expansion of his vision. On a trip to California, Walters had a revelation that there was โanother tierโ to coffee that he could bring to the coffee-deprived Las Vegas community. Walters started teaching himself about the finer points of coffee flavor profiles in his garage on a two-group Brasilia. โI was using all these weird online forums and learning that I had to like, adjust the grind,โ he says, โI went from absolutely no experience to teaching myself how to modulate flavor profiles.โ In 2012, in the unused drive-in space of Sunrise, Walters started roasting the beans that would become Mothership. Three years later, he opened the brick-and-mortar just a few blocks down the road past sun-faded chain restaurants and Wayne Newtonโs house.
Mothership is very apparently a specialty coffee spot. Itโs starkly white with a five-item menu and hip mural crawling up one wall, and stacks of pastries and a chocolates tower behind a slab of glass. Thereโs a gleaming, polished three-group Synesso Hydra sitting on the counter, a Mahlkรถng K30 grinder, and a shiny new IR-12 Diedrich roaster just out of sight. Walking from the baking desert heat, it feels like youโve entered a different world, or maybe stepped through a portal into a new Blue Bottle. And Walters will be the first to admit that his trips to other coffee shops influenced his aesthetic, but this isnโt just an homage to other places, this is Walterโs coffee shop, and a new frontier for the local Las Vegas coffee scene. The pastries are baked in-house (try the scone with onion jam if you can), the chocolates (from Happy Ending Chocolate) are put together by one of Walterโs best friends, and the mural on the wall painted by Walterโs sister, well-known artist Amy Sol. Walterโs hung the shelves and designed the menu and even created a new form of cold brew made with hops. In San Francisco stocking your shelves with local companies and making things from scratch is the norm, in Vegas, a city that puts Starbucks on a pedestal, Mothership is almost revolutionary.
And Walters isnโt just trying to create a community amongst the nascent Las Vegas coffee scene, heโs trying to create a place where the typical Las Vegas resident can come and enjoy a drink and maybe, just maybe, push their own boundaries. โLearning to make a perfect shot of espresso off esoteric web forums has been good for me,โ he says, โbecause now [Mothership] can be the bridge between the lay person and specialty coffee. I can relate to these people very easily. And I can help walk them over that bridge.โ To Walters, coffee is a personal preference, one that isnโt going to be changed without a want to change it. โIf people donโt know about good coffee,โ Walter says, โyou canโt convince them. We have a responsibility not to punish people for not knowing. It is up to us to get them on board.โ Mothership works from the philosophy that each drink is a possible step towards the inner sanctum of specialty coffee. โYouโre not going to give, say, a former Folgers drinker a shot of espresso,โ he says, โbut you might make them a mocha made with locally sourced chocolate. And maybe down the road you might make them a cappuccino and then maybe a macchiato. We want to work people into it.โ
In its first year of business, Mothership has done well. You can find Walterโs beans in almost 20 accounts around the city and Walters and his staff have become resources for other burgeoning roasters. It isnโt easy though. Walters has found that a lot of people he knows who might be interested in increasing the presence of good coffee in the city, depart for greener pastures like San Francisco or Los Angeles. โPeople tell me theyโre going to SF to open a coffee shop,โ he says, โand Iโm like, โStay here, open a coffee shop here!’.โ
In Las Vegas, the fight to bring good coffee isnโt going to be an easy one. Shops like Mothership are fighting years of local preference as well as fickle tourists and a city that doesnโt have much use for small businesses. But it starts with building a community in a city thatโs never had one, and it starts with educating from the ground up. Quite frankly, it starts with a local like Joshua Walters, just a kid who taught himself how to make coffee in his garage, reaching out a hand.
Noah Sandersย (@sandersnoah) is a Sprudge.com staff writer based in San Francisco, and a contributor to SF Weekly, Side One Track One, andย The Bold Italic. Read moreย Noah Sanders on Sprudge.