If you’ve been following along on our Facebook and Instagram pages, you know we started sampling different coffees over the summer in search of the best one to serve at 443.
We are lucky to live in a town that boasts some incredible coffee roasters – Cafe Kubal, Recess, Kind Coffee, Freedom of Espresso, Salt City Coffee and lesser-known shops like the Ink Corner Cafe. Our coffee culture in Syracuse is thriving – and that is a very cool thing.
With easy access to so many excellent roasters, we didn’t feel like we would be adding anything to the local coffee scene by roasting our own beans. Plus, coffee is just not our main focus. Neither of us has a burning desire to buy a roaster and do our own thing, and we prefer to devote our energy to making our room an exceptional space for live music performances.
On the other hand…we still want to serve a killer cup of joe – and maybe offer something a little different.
Our original plan was to choose a single roaster located in New York state, but not from Syracuse. We started requesting samples from roasters we were interested in sometime around mid-July. I am amazed at how generous everyone was…before too long we had more coffee than we could handle.
We sampled so many great coffees that we had a hard time choosing just one, so eventually, we updated our game plan to include our new finds.
We decided to become what’s known as a “multi-roaster” cafe. Multi-roasters have been a trend in bigger cities for 4-5 years, but to our knowledge, we will be the first cafe in Syracuse with this business model. We will have a “house” brand that will be available every day, and monthly (possibly bi-monthly) we’ll rotate in a new roaster that we love. We like this concept because it gives us the freedom to experiment with coffee roasters we think are amazing and we’ll give Syracuse coffee aficionados some alternatives that aren’t readily available all over town.
So, the big question is – which roasters did we pick?
As I mentioned, we planned on using all New York state-based companies. But a funny thing happened along the way.
Jimmy was in charge of researching and buying coffee equipment. In the course of purchasing our Fetco dual station coffee brewer, he stumbled on Creation Coffee, which is a relatively new outfit based in Midland, Michigan. They were extraordinarily helpful and friendly and though we weren’t looking at them as a coffee vendor, they sent us a few samples. We were blown away by their coffee, especially their “Perfect Dark” – it was really outstanding, even amongst all the fabulous coffee we were trying out every day.
After a lot of discussion, we decided that Creation would be our house brand and available all the time, plus we’ll have a small portfolio of top-notch New York state roasters that will rotate in. In the interest of not making ourselves completely crazy (not to mention our super limited space) we will have one or two of our guest roaster coffees available brewed and ready to go plus a few other options available strictly as a pour over. We don’t want to switch our espresso around too much because every brand is slightly different as far as dialing it into the machine correctly. We would rather perfect a single espresso option instead of trying to master multiple brands and failing miserably.
Our guest roasters include our inaugural roaster, Java Love Roasting Company, which is based out of Bethel, NY. We LOVE this female owned company with a focus on doing good things in the communities they serve. Their first shop is located just a mile from the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, and the love and good vibes from that historic event definitely live on in every project these hardworking ladies tackle. Forty Weight Coffee and Copper Horse Coffee from Ithaca and Simple Roast Coffee out of Auburn round out our current list. If you want to know more, you can head over to our Bodacious Brews page to learn the stories behind the beans – we’ll be adding more roasters as we go.
We hope you like our roasters as much as we do…and we can’t wait to introduce you to your new favorite coffee.
