New Wave Coffee

Owning a small business is hard. Like, really, really hard. The last two years have made it almost impossible. Even before COVID upended the independent cafe model and turned all our coffee shops into sidewalk cafes and mini bodegas, coffee businesses have had to get creative to continue thriving in a crowded field, and survive in a world of high costs and low margins.

Almost all of the carbon footprint in your morning cup of coffee is created after it leaves the farm, and yet farmers are the ones experiencing outsized, immediate impacts of carbon related climate change. Sustainability experts, coffee farmers and climate researchers weigh in on where carbon lives in the coffee lifecycle (and where it doesn’t), the surprising ways cafes can mitigate their impact immediately (hint: it’s not compostable straws), and what the future looks like for coffee farms if we don’t act today.

In the coffee industry, we associate quality with craft, and craft almost always means manual, handmade, and low tech. But in an increasingly competitive landscape, can technology provide new ways of working that benefit businesses while maintaining their craft? We think so.

Perhaps the most controversial topic in all of modern coffee, we dive deep into the question of flavor and ask the questions we’ve all been wondering - Who gets to decide what tastes good? Why does it seem that so many cafes are suddenly serving coffee that only appeals to a certain palate? And how, exactly, did flavor become a matter of taste. Part coffee history, part food anthropology, and part data science, we explain the evolution of coffee flavor over time and learn what really makes a coffee menu that appeals to everyone.