Barista Magazine

AUG-SEP 2017

Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005

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P A R T 1 : T H E S P A C E P A R T 1 : T H E S P A C E HAVE YOU EVER TRIED to date the same person as your roommate? In a way, there might be something fun or even cathartic about having someone ready at-hand to share giddy laughter about the fi rst fl irtations, commiserate with about ambiguous text messages, and lean on if "it's not you, it's me." However, it also gets awkward pretty quick, right? Does one of you leave the apartment when the other brings your shared date home? Is there a spoken rule about accidentally winding up at the same bar or restaurant when one of you is out with this per- son? What if they call one of you more often than the other? Isn't this kind of the same predicament we're up against as coffee companies with our potential customers? The cof- fee-drinking consumer has a kind of limited number of oppor- tunities to spend money in our cafés or on our bags of beans without putting their health at some risk (there are only so many espressos it's advisable to consume in a day, after all), and the roaster and the retailer alike are constantly vying for attention and dollars. "Specialty coffee competes basically with commodity coffee for customers, and I feel like that's how we gain customers, to carve out that commodity market more and more," says Joey Gleason, cofounder (with her sister Cassy) of the co-roasting space Buckman Coffee Factory in Portland, Ore. One of several companies worldwide that are following a shared-space model, making roasting and packaging equip- ment available for rent by the hour, half day, or a full day's use, Buckman opened in 2015, in part as a natural extension to supply Joey's café, Marigold, with its own roasted coffee. Following the co-roasting footsteps of similar setups like fellow PDXer Aspect Coffee Collective; Pulley Collective in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Oakland, Calif.; Brooklyn's City of Saints; California's Bay Area CoRoasters; and Australia's Bureaux Collective and Maillard Atelier, among others, Buckman serves small and mid- size roasting companies who have the time and energy to invest in their brands, but maybe not the outright capital to invest in a warehouse space or roasting and packing equipment. ARE COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION mutually exclusive? In the world of specialty coffee—a relatively small segment of the larger coffee-drinking market—brands and companies are by necessity looking for ways to stand out and stand apart to consumers, knowing that there are relatively few opportunities to capture a sale and turn it in to a regular occurrence. Coffee consumption, aside from those special, hyper-interested connoisseurs, is very much a hab- it-based industry: Folks are more likely to visit the same café every day for its convenient location, rather than regularly seek out new places that would require altering a course or commute; most people rely on one or a handful of trusted brands when they are making a purchase decision, instead of taking a gamble on a $20 bag of beans from a roaster with whom they're unfamiliar. Considering how naturally competitive the market is, then, it's especially interesting the many ways that specialty coffee today seems to buck against the typical business convention of keeping one's cards close to the chest, with the notion of "proprietary" information out and a culture of transparency in. From coffee buyers sharing container space and travel plans, to roasters divvying time on equipment, to brand collab- orations, to open-source education at the café level, all the way to farm-level knowledge sharing and cross-pollination— it seems as though we're witnessing a generation of specialty coffee that is "post-competition." Even the competitions seem post-competition these days: Producers cheering for each other at live auctions, baristas hugging and applauding each other onstage—surely this isn't what goes on in other industries. Then again, are we kidding ourselves? Does the rising tide that we claim fl oats all boats actually threaten to capsize us all if we're not careful? Are there ways we can work together without watering down the proverbial brew? In this three-part series, we will look at some of the collaborative energy that's swirling around various aspects of specialty coffee as we currently know it—from the tangible to the intangible, from the barista to the broker, from farm to cup—in search of the answer to the question: Can capitalism and "community" coexist? PART ONE IN A THREE-PART SERIES BY ERIN MEISTER • ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE FROMMLET PART 1: THE SPACE PART 1: THE SPACE 71 www.baristamagazine.com

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