Seattle Coffee Works

It’s snowing (again) and time to lay 2008 to rest.

After an incredibly busy holiday season, we are reflecting on all the many changes and events this year. It’s been a year of change, and maybe, maybe we’ve finally found our starting point for the journey to come.

Here are a few highlights from 2008:

• Customers Kristi Cromwell and Katie Shaw liked our café so much that they gave up their day jobs to tend the store! Their smiles and lattes delight all who enter. And now they have full-time access to great coffee.
• Polina Notik traveled from Samara, Russia to hone her barista skills at Seattle Coffee Works this summer. Shortly before returning for the fall semester, she competed and made the finals of the Seattle latte art competition, stunning the audience with her original, daring designs. (Trilobite, fish, pine tree reflected in water.) We are looking forward to seeing her again next summer!  

• We started our own roasting operation, with many fair trade, organic and even a few direct trade coffees.
• We relaunched seattlecoffeeworks.com as a shopping site; we now have customers in all 50 US states, and regularly ship to customers as far away as Brazil and Singapore, and as close as Capitol Hill.
• We have been blessed with so much love and appreciation from our customers; we often remark on just how lucky we are to be doing what we do and getting to meet so many wonderful people from near and far.

 Thank you for being part of the journey; thank you to everyone on the team and their supportive significant others (see the collage Polina sent from Russia); thank you to all of our regular and occasional customers; and many thanks to all of our vendors and friends. We couldn’t do it without you. You make our lives fun and rewarding!

Happy New Year!

Many Seattleites have been enraptured by the hope and change sparked by the recent elections. At Seattle Coffee Works, we’ve also dabbled in creating positive change. Last month we introduced our new Obama bend, which is so popular we can’t seem to keep on our shelves. We’ve also focused on environmentally and socially conscious coffee, as well as our place in the community.

So when we heard about families in Texas still struggling to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Ike ravaged the Gulf Coast, we sprung into action and launched a week-long fundraising event to generate support from our loving coffee drinkers for those needy families. In our downtown cafe we asked for donations to the Save the Children, Hurricane Ike: Children in Crisis Fund. As a token of our appreciation we offered a small coffee for every donation.

Right from the beginning everyone gave mighty generously. Slowly, through conversations in the cafe, we discovered that many Seattleites knew friends and relatives who were affected by Ike. Despite the rocky economy, people ambitiously donated to the fund, which helped provide cribs, diapers and other greatly needed supplies for a community far away from our own.

In the same spirit of giving, we’ve amped up the gift goodies in our store. We’ve introduced a new line of coffee samplers for the holidays–including some tasty treats from our friends at Theo Chocolate. We stocked the shelves with shiny new mugs–both ceramic and travel– and snazzy new T-shirts with our Drinking Man logo.

‘Tis the season for gift giving. We hope to keep the generosity flowing.