A Coffee in Brooklyn

You have never seen New York City look so quaint. Low buildings. Quiet wharves. Partly deserted warehouses. Colorful single-family homes, still mostly inhabited by single Hispanic or Polish families, on streets where you can see the Manhattan skyline poke between trees.

This is Greenpoint. This is the hip, just underdeveloped Brooklyn neighborhood kinda ruined by an oil spill, and kinda gentrifying.

They built the USS Monitor here. Back in 1861.

It was a revolution of a warship. No mast. No crewmen on an open deck. Just a single, revolving gun turret perched on an iris-shaped float. She drew just 10 feet of water and included over 40 original engineering innovations. She steamed at a leisurely 7 MPH. And she was the first American warship to be entirely covered in iron.

That’s because the USS Monitor was not built to weather attacks, she was designed to endure the very focus of them. In March 1862, She sailed into the heart of gun fight, took 6 hours of fire, and forced the retreat of a Confederate blockade runner called the Virginia.

On postcards and etchings, this battle is the stuff of naval legend. For both ships featured heavy armament and limited weaponry. They prefigured everything in naval design that was coming.

And within 9 months both ships were at the bottom of the sea.

There is no shortage of coffee in New York City. Reports find that New Yorkers spend 3x the National Average on coffee per household. Conservative reports count at least 1,000 coffee shops in New York- a number that leaves out street vendors, bodegas, and office coffee kiosks. In Manhattan, there are 9 Starbucks per square mile. That’s from over 277 Starbuck locations in the full city, with a stunning density of 91 between 59th and 42nd street.

The third wave of coffee took longer to swell on the Hudson estuary. And it has been largely done by colonization. West Coast brands like La Colombe, Blue Bottle, Four Barrel, and Stumptown cut deals to service hotels and creative agencies and form pop-up shops in the Lower East Side.

But New York never loses for long. She lets you entertain her, while listening closely, learning, before beating you at your own game. Think Pizza. Think Bagels. Think Ramen. Think Sushi. Think roadside diner hamburgers. New York is America itself: the hungry entrepreneur ready to learn you and improve on you and systemically out-do you.

So the third wave rose, wonderfully, and New York suddenly had Ninth Street, Irving Farm, Everyman, Gasoline, Grumpy, Abraço, Hi-Collar, Third Rail, Underline, and dozens of others.

Like Portland or San Francisco, the coffee making in these studios is slow and considered. The beans are storytold like rare wines. The cafes are minimalist ateliers designed for unblocking distracted imaginations. And the pour overs are always worth waiting for.

Greenpoint is quiet now. The G train is suspended for the summer. So you have to walk here from Williamsburg — a beautiful stroll — or take a ferry to land among the wharves that once built war machines.

Take the ferry.

Find Franklin Street, a quiet thoroughfare that feels like a film set from a forgotten Colonial Brooklyn no one would believe exists anymore.

Wander south to Manhattan Avenue. Take a left.

Find Búdin.

Among the high-aspirations of NYC’s third wave, Budín emerged as a symbol of excess. At open, they offered a $10 latte that outraged the New York Post and dozens of other city media outlets. The Village Voice urged calm. Do you know how much a Starbucks Latte is in Oslo, where Budín’s beans are roasted? $9.83.

Besides, the $10 Latte is a special option. Budín’s standard latte is $4.50 — just 20 cents more than the average Starbucks Latte sold across the city.

But the price debate ignores the point: this coffee is exceptional. For a city teeming with coffee and coffee drinkers, Budín is elysium.

Sit at the bar and order the $4.50 latte.

Watch them work.

Ask questions about any part of the process.

If most Third Wave baristas are grad students, Budín’s baristas are Kennedy School fellows. They’ll debate water temperature settings by single Farenheit gradations. They will tell you they learned this steaming trick at the WBC’s in Rimini last year. WBC? Oh, yeah, the World Barista Championship. They went to hang with Tim Wendelboe, the 2004 World Barista Champion who supplies most of the coffee to Budín via Oslo. And they’ve got a few of his books.

On the bare wood counter, light from Manhattan Avenue casts bright Brooklyn dreams onto Moleskines and newspapers. The summer air is warm and thick. Like the coffee.

Lattes are ideal for judging the quality of a coffee shop. They let you assess the quality of the espresso, the delicacy of the milk, and the barista’s acumen for balance all at once.

A great latte stands alone, needing no additions. It is a perfectly composed world of its own. Like an Old Fashioned. Get it wrong, and we’ll all know. But get it right, and we will tell the world:

Go to Budín.

According to the New York City economic research, small coffee is increasingly big business. Even combined, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts only represents 42.7% of New York cafes. The remaining 53% are individual shops or small chains with an average of fewer than 8 locations. And if we’re honest, those “small chains” only represent 90 of the 974 independent cafes the NYCEDC counted in 2013. So individual cafes, like Budín, really are the norm in New York.

What powers this indie coffee revolution? Work.

Over half of American workers buy coffee everyday, totaling about $1,092 per person annually. But by age, the story gets more stark. The 18 to 34 year old worker (hello, millennials) spend twice as much as those over 45 averaging $24.74 in coffee purchased every week.

That’s 5 lattes at Budín with $2.24 to tip.

So follow the young people, and you’ll find the coffee. Indie and otherwise.

And that’s exactly what the NYCEDC found. New York’s highest concentration of cafes is in the East Village (49 listed in zip code) where young professionals (20–39) outnumber other age brackets 4 to 1.

Rounding out the top 10 are Midtown, Soho, Chelsea, the LES, Williamsburg, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, and Park Slope. Overlap with the city’s highest densities of 25 to 34 year olds (via research from the University of Waterloo) is remarkable. Sure, one could claim that these same neighborhoods are New York’s trendiest, connecting coffee culture to simple commerce and popularity. But then one might retort: are they not trendy because it’s here that young people live, work, and play?

Greenpoint is still quiet. The espresso machine whirs.

Out on the street you can wander past small fashion boutiques, or artisan beer shops. The gentrification is coming, and partly, already here. In a February round-up of economic studies, The Guardian correlated the emergence of Starbucks & pricey coffee culture with unmistakable gentrification. But the question remains: does the neighborhood change first? Or does Starbucks change the neighborhood?

Between the building of the USS Monitor in 1861, there have been 154 years of history sweeping Greenpoint. And the neighborhood has been called “Little Poland” with nearly 21% of the population once hailing direct Polish ancestry.

But this city changes. The food changes. The demographics change.

The next Greenpoint is already under construction.

Grab a 2nd coffee to go. Wander around. Watch New York City do what it does better than anywhere: change.

SEE ALSO: If you enjoyed this, please read volume 1: “A Coffee in Istanbul”