Specialty coffee shops in Athens aiming to create community through customer education
By Janey Murray
For years, Mike Young spent one Saturday out of every month on the back porch at Two Story Coffeehouse in the Five Points neighborhood of Athens, drinking coffee.
The screened-in porch, which overlooks a gravel parking lot shaded by trees, is attached to an old red house, nestled in the heart of Five Points.
The coffee shop’s monthly tastings, which were called “cuppings,” were an opportunity for anyone to come and sample Two Story’s different coffees. Young, formerly the Director of Coffee and Outreach at Two Story and now a barista at 1000 Faces Coffee, educated attendees about the origins of the different coffees and compared the tastes of the blends.
“We had an extended amount of time where we could really talk about coffee quality, we could really talk about where these coffees come from, we could talk about whatever the customer was interested in asking about, and they had a full hour to do that,” Young said. “That was always really, really fun for me, and I think really rewarding for a lot of customers that Two Story was an important stop on their coffee journey.”
When Two Story was forced to vacate its building in Five Points, Young lost a big part of his life, and a place where he had developed a deep interest in coffee. Today, though, more people are interested in drinking specialty coffee, and more specialty coffee shops around Athens are instituting a similar goal of educating customers like Young did at Two Story.
Young, a graduate of the University of Georgia, started hanging around coffee shops when he needed a place to write in high school.
When he got to college, Young discovered Two Story, and it eventually became his new home to drink specialty coffee and write. He began to develop relationships with the baristas there, and ultimately decided to ask for a job.
“I became good friends with some of the baristas, and it was because of that over the counter education that they gave me that I got interested enough in it to ask for a job and get one,” Young said. “I didn’t expect to be there very long, but I ended up really falling in love with the coffee and with the customers and stuck around.”
After some time serving as a barista, Young took on the responsibility of director of coffee and outreach at Two Story. In that position, he took charge of customer education. A major part of the position was the monthly cuppings he led on Saturdays.
When Two Story closed last September, a void was left in the Athens specialty coffee market. Two Story provided a sense of community for many in its Five Points location.
According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, specialty coffee is defined by “the quality of the product, whether green bean, roasted bean or prepared beverage and by the quality of life that coffee can deliver to all of those involved in its cultivation, preparation and degustation.”
Essentially, specialty coffee producers pay close attention to the quality of their beans and production methods and try to ensure that each member of the supply chain is benefiting from the process. That effort is what has inspired 1000 Faces’ central mission of connecting coffee growers and producers to consumers, which could also be described as promoting fair trade. At a chain coffee shop like Starbucks, producers might not be able to pay as much attention to every step of the production process as at a specialty coffee shop.
After Two Story closed, Starbucks and Jittery Joe’s continued to reign supreme with locations all around Athens. But people in Five Points looking for a place that serves specialty coffee were left wondering where to go.
But 1000 Faces, where Young now works, is working to institute a similar goal of educating customers about its coffee.
Jan Kozak, CEO of 1000 Faces Coffee, said he noticed a lack of specialty coffee options in the Athens area after Two Story closed.
“When Two Story closed, it really kind of left a big gaping hole for the actual specialty coffee shop,” Kozak said. “With our move over here to Thomas Street, we’ve been really kind of carrying that forward as much as we can and just providing that community.”
But Young said he believes that the main void left by Two Story was in the community, and not necessarily in the coffee. While the coffee is replaceable, the community is not, Young said.
“I think the void that was really left by Two Story closing was Two Story itself,” Young said. “I think that there was a community and a network that was kind of built around that place, that grew up organically around that place. Some people were there for the coffee, but a lot of people were there for the people, and for the community that just kind of happened there.”
Educating young coffee drinkers
1000 Faces originally opened in 2005. But this fall, the coffee shop moved from its old Barber Street location to its new Thomas Street location, right near the heart of downtown and several student apartment complexes.
With the new location, the shop now has more space for roasting operations and gets more traffic. And with more young people drinking coffee right now, being close to students makes sense for a place like 1000 Faces.
According to the National Coffee Association’s 2017 National Coffee Drinking Trends (NCDT) report, 50 percent of 18–24 year olds and 63 percent of 25–39 year olds were drinking coffee in 2017. The percentage of 18–24 year olds is up two percent from 2016, while the percentage of 25–39 year olds is up three percent.
Young people are also drinking more “gourmet” coffee, which NCDT defines as “any sort of non-instant arabica or arabica blend coffee product,” and likely includes most specialty coffee. 39 percent of 18–24 year olds were drinking gourmet coffee in 2017, up three percent from 2016. 50 percent of 25–39 year olds were drinking gourmet coffee in 2017, up nine percent from 2016.
Thus, it’s clear that more young people are interested in the kind of coffee that 1000 Faces is serving. However, rent fees can be expensive, which often makes it difficult for coffee shops to remain open.
“I think rent plays a lot to do with it,” said Quintin Robison, owner of Sips Espresso in Normaltown. “If you’re talking about a specific market, outside of Athens — or, not downtown, I should say — is much more viable. You’ve got to sell so much downtown, and there’s a good market for our coffee, but it’s still just a coffee.”
1000 Faces is different from some of the other coffee shops in town in that it has a mission of connecting the producer to the consumer. This movement is often referred to as the third wave coffee movement.
“We take somewhere between four and six origin trips per year, where we go and meet the producers of the coffee and establish relationships and taste coffees together and decide what we’re going to buy for the year to come,” Kozak said. “We take a bunch of pictures and we write about it in order to be able to share that information as best we can.”
Third wave coffee producers like 1000 Faces try to ensure that everyone in the production chain gets paid a fair amount. This effort could also be described as a movement towards producing fair trade coffee.
Young said the baristas at 1000 Faces try to educate customers who are interested in learning more about where their coffee comes from, as he often did with his customers at Two Story. But they have to be careful not to bore a customer over something they might not be as interested in.
“It’s really easy sometimes to get so caught up in what we’re excited about, that you don’t notice that the customer stopped listening to you about ten minutes ago,” Young said.
That difficulty presents another challenge that specialty coffee shops like 1000 Faces encounter on a regular basis. They want to be willing to educate customers, but they also don’t want to appear pretentious, as that often turns customers away.
A new home for specialty coffee in Five Points
Peter Dale, owner of Condor Chocolates, a chocolate and coffee shop in Five Points, said he thinks educating customers about coffee is important, but that his company is ultimately in the hospitality business, so making customers comfortable is the main priority.
“We just try to make ourselves available and approachable, and our staff can answer any questions and provide any information, but it’s up to the guest to decide if that’s the right time and place to learn about it.”
Being in the same neighborhood where Two Story once was, Dale said he has seen an increase in business since Two Story closed and people were in the market for a new specialty coffee shop.
While Dale and his brother Nick originally planned to source both chocolate and coffee from Ecuador, where their mother is from, it became difficult to get a large enough supply of coffee from Ecuador for the store. They ultimately turned to other roasters to help them source it.
“There’s just not as much available to us as there is from other countries, and it kind of became a bit of a challenge to source Ecuadorian coffee of the quality that we needed,” Dale said. “So we decided to open it up and serve coffee from anywhere, as long as it was of great quality and sourced well.”
Now, Condor Chocolates serves 1000 Faces Coffee and Jittery Joe’s, the two primary roasters in the Athens area. Both of these roasters have found their way into the majority of coffee shops around Athens, including Sips, the main specialty coffee shop serving the Normaltown area.
Dale said that, like 1000 Faces, he considers Condor’s operation to be a part of the third wave movement in that they source their coffee carefully and prepare it professionally on a high-quality espresso machine.
Murals on the walls of Condor Chocolates tell the story of the shop’s sourcing process, so that customers can learn a little something while still getting to interact with friends and enjoy coffee and chocolate as they wish.
While Robison said that education is not always his main priority, he is invested in providing good customer service to customers of Sips in order to combat the stereotype that baristas and coffee shops can be pretentious about their coffee.
“I think that’s a stigma that you really have to fight,” Robison said. “We get a lot of people that come in, they want caffeine. That’s all they want…They don’t care what region it’s from, they don’t care about anything like that, they just want a good cup of coffee.”
Oftentimes, though, it is that education that gives customers community. It is what gave Young community at Two Story when he first came to college, and what convinced him to stick around and stay interested and involved in coffee.
That community is the main thing that Young said he lost when Two Story closed. And while some of the customers he had developed relationships with at Two Story now come to 1000 Faces, some, he no longer sees.
“There’s a lot of customers that I don’t see anymore, because either this is too far out of the way, or, you know, they don’t care for the coffee or the experience or what have you,” Young said.
That type of community is the community that 1000 Faces is trying to build in its new location through education, Young said.
“That’s the cool thing about coffee shops, is that even though we’re serving the same thing…each shop kind of has its own personality,” Young said. “We definitely have fans and we have a community that we build up around it. 1000 Faces has a very long standing, very close knit group of friends, and a similar kind of community that’s built up around it.”
