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.

A new friend of ours, John Reinke who incidentally was the highest bidder for a coffee card at the recent Earthcorps auction, wrote to us about the possibility of an Obama blend – a blend of Indonesian and Kenyan coffees based on Barack Obama’s truly multi-cultural background. While we are not particularly interested in gimmicks and we were hesitant about seeming too partial, we decided to put out a test balloon a couple of days after the election on November 4.

The first six bags of Obama Blend sold within 15 minutes. On our next roast date we made a very large batch of the blend; within two days we were sold out. There seems to be no end in sight.

Admittedly, our Obama Blend is quite spectacular: we have been using our beautiful Kenya Mchana Estate coffee, the most spectacular Kenyan we have come across in a long time, and our amazing Sumatra Mandheling (Fair-Trade Organic). The combination is divine.

Now we’re in the market for more Kenyan and Sumatra as our reserves are coming to an end. If we’re lucky enough to find the right coffees, we’ll even put out an Obama Deluxe Blend which will include some Hawaiian Kona. It’ll be pure bliss!

One month ago, Hurricane Ike slammed into the Gulf Coast with 110-mile per hour winds shredding homes in Houston, Galveston and along the Bolivar Peninsula. One month ago residents of the nation’s fourth largest city were displaced as a 20-foot wall of water inundated the coastal port. More then fifty people have died and hundreds are still missing. The stories from victims–of lost relatives, of desperate pleas and of spouses swept out to sea–tug at our nation’s heart.

This week, between 8 am and 10 am, we’re giving you a chance to help. We’re offering free small coffee drinks for every donation of $5 or more to the Hurricane Ike Children in Crisis Fund. All proceeds, either cash or credit, help provide diapers, cribs and other supplies to children and their families affected by Ike.

Please join us this week (Oct. 13-17) for coffee and a good cause.

Please vote for us for Best Coffeeshop in Western Washington — please click here.

We’re starting our third blog site here — and are simply going to abandon the contents of our previous blog sites. Those contents are sitting somewhere in cyberspace waiting to be unearthed by a fifth millennium historian from Mars looking for evidence that, yes, some people back several thousand years (million, trillion, gazillion, how long will the bits last?) were crazy about coffee.

There are so many little snippets to catch up on in this blog by a little coffee company in Seattle that only today, only this time, a short list seems in order:

• This year alone Seattle Coffee Works has won two-and-one half distinctions:
  • earlier in the year, we were named Seattle Magazine’s 2007 Best Place for a Coffee Tasting, quite a distinction considering that the magazine only chose two coffee shops out of the hundreds available in Seattle;
  • the good people voting on nwsource.com picked us as one of their finalists for their 2008 people’s picks;
  • we have started gaining some speed on yelp.com, and we’re now being reviewed as part of the top five Seattle coffee shops. (I am counting the yelp.com distinction only as a half distinction as yelpers, as much as we love them, tend to be fickle and sometimes punish businesses for things those businesses are not even trying to do).
• Earlier this month we soft-launched our shopping-enabled website — the orders have been pouring in, even though there is still a little construction to be done.
• For almost two months now we have held a daily coffee tasting — every day from 11am to 12pm you can join us for tasting the newest and freshest (and we’d like to think: best) coffees around.
• Vicki Schumann and her Seattle Coffee Crawl have begun their daily tour through downtown Seattle. Finally a tour that gets coffee and comes at a reasonable $15 per person.

More beginnings and surprises are coming — this, really, is just the beginning: of a blog, a business, a coffee company. Let’s drink some coffee!