Seattle Coffee Works

Time flies! We moved a month ago and have barely had a moment to breathe. It’s probably in keeping with our small-n-real business character that we moved before we had all i’s dotted and all t’s crossed.

A reviewer on yelp liked what we’re doing a lot, but knocked us down a star because our slow bar wasn’t quite there yet when she stopped in. Now it is.

We’ve continued to have to roast off-site at Velton’s as the permits for the roaster took a little while to snake themselves through the various agencies. Thanks to all of our inspectors and reviewers we may have managed to get a coffee roaster through the process from permit submittal to approval faster than anyone before us, at least here in Seattle. (And you’d think it would be easy to start a roastery in the Coffee Capital of the World!)

A couple of weeks ago, vinyl decals went up on our windows so folks knew what we sell.

And, finally we’re about to welcome the last member of the team: Drinking Man. We received a sneak preview from the shop. Stay tuned for the dude!

Oh, how we’ll miss that 111 Pike Street address that gave name to our first espresso blend: 111 Pike Street Blend! Earlier today we made the move out of the t-shirt shop into our own lil’ café.

Everyone here at Seattle Coffee Works is tired and very happy. Tomorrow morning we’ll be making coffee in our new 107 Pike Street location. The roaster is here and almost ready for action.

During the last few days, Katie took some pictures and I took a picture of Katie– check out:

Katie cut the ribbon as the new Diedrich IR-12 arrived

We wanted to see, once and for all, how many people could fit between counter and “grinder hutch” in the old 111 Pike location - almost the entire team fit. From left to right: Erik, Vicki, Elie, Amir, Pipo, moi, Ryan, Brooke, Daryl, Patrick, Katie, and Juan. Not pictured here: Max and Eric.

Katie took this shot of one of the many Home Depot shopping lists we created and filled during the last few days. 

Today there is only space and time for a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who helped us make our dream reality; you know who you are. Soon, we’ll have the real-deal VIP party followed by a very grand Grand Opening.

Construction in our new cafe is humming right along. It’s amazing how much a fresh coat of paint and a good scrubbing can change the face and feel of an interior space. Our construction crew has been working around the clock to clean the old restaurant space into our new cafe– from painting the walls in our warm and inviting colors to varnishing our new countertops with a rich brown coat to polishing our sleek new concrete floor.

Thank you to all Seattle Coffee Works friends who’ve helped in demolition, construction and soon, cleanup! We’ll open as soon as possible in June and can’t wait to show everyone our new digs!

Keep your ears to the ground and your palates whetted for tasty coffee… the new Seattle Coffee Works is coming soon!

Yup. You heard right. It’s now only $5 to ship coffee from the Seattle Coffee Works roastery to your home.

For ages we’ve been shipping coffee via United States Postal Service. So far they’ve treated us and our coffee customers well. Our packages arrive reliably within two to three days all across the U.S., each complete with a tracking number to monitor the coffee on its journey. But shipping prices have increased again and we’ve heard murmurings through the grapevine that it’s just getting too expensive to mail coffee.

So we switched to a model of flat rate shipping. Instead of dancing around price fluctuations based on weight of package to the various shipping zones, we’re now charging only $5 to ship our delicious coffee! One price. $5. So whether you’re sending one bag to your sister in Dillingham, Alaska or twelve bags your cousin in Toledo, Ohio, it’s the same price. That way you worry less about shipping costs and more about which tasty coffees you want to enjoy!

Just know that you’ve saved a little money each time you find that Happy Coffee package on your front doorstep!

Woohoo! Let’s drink some coffee!

We’ve seen some truly amazing people walk through the doors of the Seattle Coffee Works café. From architects to students, city planners to night-shifters, we’ve met them all. The quality of character never ceases to amaze us.

This year, one of our ambitious and loving customers is planning to amaze us again since she began training for her second half-marathon. Adrienne Anderson will be competing in the BMO Vancouver Marathon this May in honor of her mother who died of Hodgkins Lymphoma in 2006. Her goal is to raise $3,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Adrienne asked us to help her meet her goal this year. So to show our support we created the Northwest Runners Blend, pledging to donate 15% of each purchase to her cause.

We’re inspired by Adrienne’s perseverance and hope she can inspire you, too. So while she’s pounding pavement to find a cure for Leukemia and Lymphoma, you can support her efforts with us at Seattle Coffee Works.

You can also read more about Adrienne’s training adventures here.

Katie and I will be at the Burke Museum this Saturday 11-2 for a sampling of three of our favorite origins.

Come on by if you have time.

The wonderful folks at the Museum even made a flier to announce the occasion. 

A while back we repriced everything in our store so that *after* tax all prices ended in quarter increments: x.00/x.25/x.50/x.75. The new pricing structure has worked very well. We have been able to increase our speed of service without giving up one bit of quality. The bean-counter guy also noted that our daily cash reconciliation has become almost error-free because of this small change. 

We also got rid of another nuisance: we don’t EVER need any more rolled pennies, nickels, or dimes from the bank. We thought we’d found the solution to all change-bank issues. Alas, the ordeal wasn’t over.

While we weren’t returning any coins other than quarters to our customers, our customers gave us all their change — maybe a by-product of their general economic woes. Nowadays we seem to see at least one customer a day who pays for her entire coffee with coins. Because we have no outlet for the small change, time and again we find our till overflowing with … pennies. We’re talking hundreds of pennies. Counting pennies at the day’s closing went from being a small chore to a major time sink.

From my days in the field of industrial supplies I remembered that the folks in the warehouse never counted all those little screws, nails, grommets, and sprockets. It was much faster to weigh them. Yesterday, our own little weight-to-count-conversion spreadsheet went live. The counting of coins which used to take 300+ seconds every night has become a weighing of coins. Time used to weigh / count 1,500 coins: 54 seconds. Yahoo! 

Next we need to find a funnel to put all those loose pennies into little paper rolls; and off they go to the bank.

Photo Credit: Frog Museum

I hope no one is surprised to read that we think that our coffee is the finest there is. We’re constantly cupping new green coffees and trying out new blends; we’re also continuing to tweak our roast profiles to bring out the best in each of the coffees. If you disagree let’s at least state that we’re trying REALLY hard.

But does it matter?

We’ve long found that our ability to sell a coffee has a lot to do with what the label says. For instance, our variation of the Mocha Java, the Obama Blend, has been one of our best-sellers ever since we introduced it last November; when we renamed our Atlantic Blend into Seattle Sunrise, we immediately saw a significant up tick in sales of the very same coffee. 

The big packaged-good companies know the drill much better than we do: a can of cola consists mostly of very expensive aluminum packaging filled with water and sugar and trace amounts of flavor, color and caffeine. Most shelves in a regular supermarket are full of this kind of stuff: it’s all about the art of selling an inferior product with the help of expensive and good-looking packaging. Wall Street types, immune to immoralities such as endangering half the nation with obesity, have made great money with this deceptive practice. It also comes as no surprise that our corporate competition in the coffee business, the one with the green logo, has a number of consumer-good veterans on its board.

Even though we’ve smelled the success potential of good packaging, we’ve concentrated most of our efforts on the stuff that’s inside the bag. Turns out, there is a chance we might be working in vain. In an experiment at MIT, participants were asked to describe the smell of rose pedals concealed in two separate paper bags. One bag had a positive label on it, along the lines of “deliciously fragrant roses;” the other said something about lawn clippings. To everyone involved the first bag smelled much better than the second. What gives?

Is possibly Katie’s artful description the real reason why we have a hard time keeping our delicious Sulawesi Toraja in stock?

Photo Credit: Shabby Chic 

I know it’s lame to not have reported this earlier on this page – yet we ARE indeed moving. We have leased 107 Pike Street (former Johnny Rockets), and we’ll have both more space for our coffee experience project and, yes yes yes, a roastery!

The roaster is being made as we’re speaking, so far all is on track. Here is a first picture of the place which shows our friend Eduardo toiling away on the floor removal.

A BIG THANK YOU to Bill, Daryl, Bruce, Axel, Eduardo, Valli, Pipo, and everyone else who’s generously chipped in with the demolition; and also a very BIG THANK YOU to Kristi, Katie, Eric, and Brooke, who’ve kept the 111 Pike store running. Next week we’ll be starting with some beautiful new construction. Stay tuned!

Cupping events are one of the many highlights of working in our café. There’s so much suspense and anticipation in our search for new single origins. There’s a primal excitement as everyone gathers around the tall glasses, preparing their lips for some serious schlurping work. There’s the crumbly coffee crust and the first inhale of the aroma as you scoop sopping coarse grounds from the cup. There’s the auditory satisfaction of the brisk schlurp as cuppers suck the murky brew from the wide spoons. And of course there’s the orchestra of flavors—sweet citrus, floral and herbal, soft and smoky—revealing themselves after each spoonful.

This week we sampled through four Indonesian coffees and three Central and South American single origins. The organic Java estate offered rich smokiness, similar to our lushly bold Sumatra. The Fair Trade, organic Papua New Guinea estate brought a bit of light citrus notes to the sample. An organic Flores Bajawa offered floral and herbal notes amid a light body and the organic RFA certified Sulawesi revealed the biggest range of complexity, with deep, rich bass notes with smooth berry fruitiness.
The Central and South American coffees ranged from pungently sweet to richly smooth. The organic Costa Rica La Amistad danced with bright and sweetly citrus flavors, hinting at a splash of berries. The Fair Trade organic Bolivia Caranavi offered only a lightly sweet earthiness. And lastly the Fair Trade organic Peru Cepicafe delivered a smooth body balancing earthy notes with gentle lemony and berry sweetness.
Each of the coffees we sampled were beautiful in their own right, from heavy in body to citrusy sweet high notes. While we would love to offer the entire gamut, we chose a small handful to complement our growing menu of single origins. You’ll see these new coffees on our online store and in the café very soon. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with suspense and anticipation of the new coffees to come!