Kansas City Coffee Culture

over the past few months, some friends and i made a mini documentary about Kansas City’c coffee culture. it started as just a day of planned coffee shop hopping around the city to shops i hadn’t been to, wanted to visit, and some favorites ive come be be fond of over the past visits to the city. i invited my friends Cooper and Kaycee to follow me around and document the day. they were in search of a “passion project”, and i thought this would provide an opportunity for a video project that they would enjoy doing.

after our 3rd stop, we knew we werent going to make it to all the cafes on our list. this we a bit of a bummer, but we made the most of it and still had a good time, got some great shots, and were able to interview some really cool people. it was also about this time that we started discussing the idea of pivoting the project from a day of coffee shop hopping, to a more in-depth look at what KC’s coffee scene really had to offer. after some discussion and a bit of a game plan, we decided to move in that direction and start making plans and setting up interviews with coffee people in the Kansas City area.

all together, we made 4 total trips to KC to shoot interviews. it was an absolute blast to get to make this video. as a coffee guy, i got to chat with some people that i really look up to and got to learn things about KC’s coffee culture that i had no idea existed. for example, we talked with several people that work out of a place called About The Coffee. this place is host to 6 different entities. there is Marty Roe who runs About The Coffee, a baristas pro shop, Service Call, a coffee equipment technician service, and Workbench Coffee Labs, which is place where several people teach SCAA classes and pathways. Pete Licata, 2013 WBC Champion, also has his office here where he and his partner Holly Bastin operate Licata Coffee Consultants and their website, Roast Ratings, and website that rates coffees through a couple different methods. Current SCAA president Tracy Allen has his office here where he handles his SCAA business, and operates his coffee consultation business, Brewed Behavior. thats a lot of stuff going on under one roof. this place is huge and every time we turned a corner or opened a door, i was floored by all of the stuff they were doing out of this space. the pro shop of About The Coffee would have been enough for me to play in all day, but there is the garage where Service Call does all of their repairs and custom work, the cupping lab, the TWO competition set-ups, the roaster training room, and seriously so much more. i want to live in that place. i could spend weeks in there just playing with stuff.

one of the things that is both awesome and a bummer about KC is just how dense the coffee scene is. its awesome because great coffee is in just about every corner of the city, and finding good coffee is really easy. its a bummer because we only scratched the surface with all the people we interviewed. we had to leave out so many people doing awesome things in coffee just because of the amount of people there are that deserve to be included. it was a harsh realization for us making this that we were going to have to leave people out. luckily, we were able to talk with several people who have worked in coffee in KC for 20+ years, and they were able to give us a great overview of what is going in Kansas City. and because the coffee scene is so tightly knit, we were able to hear about all of the great things the people that we left out are doing.

anyway, that was a bit of backstory. here is the video. we so hope you enjoy it.

why bother with latte art?

in this bit of writing, i am going to explore for myself why i think latte art is important. im sure these are ideas that have already been thought and shared by coffee professionals more seasoned and accomplished than myself, but the purpose of this is to force myself to really wade through my mess of thoughts and experiences in order to bring myself to my own conclusion, for the time being at least.

to start, i absolutely believe that latte art is worth learning and doing at almost all coffee houses/shops, but only if that team is going to do it well. what i mean by “well” is pursuing latte art with the mindset to always by trying to improve. this does not mean that every person on staff needs to be able to pour a double swan breathing fire in a 2.5 oz cup. it does mean that you teach your staff how to steam milk well and how to manipulate the foam created during the process in conjunction with the coffee you are pouring it into. learn the basics and give your staff the encouragement and freedom to experiment and play with latte art.

latte art has had a larger impact on my coffee journey that most get to hear about. i was fist served latte art by a barista at a cafe in Kansas City called Broadway Cafe. this was in April of 2012, and it absolutely blew my mind. i come from a town that has only ever had chain coffee shops and mom & pop shops that tried to mimic the Starbucks model of service, so going from that to a vanilla latte with a freaking flower on it was an amazing experience for me. not only did it look amazing, but having milk that wasnt burt to shit and had that buttery micro-foam all mixed with great espresso was incredible. its worth noting that this was before i was interested at all in specialty coffee. i just really remember lighting up and having what i will remember as one of the most delicious things i have every tasted, and doing something as simple as either not putting a little design on that coffee or covering it with a lid would have made that experience less exciting for me. visual presentation in incredibly important in food and drink service, and while taste is the bottom line in our ideas of what we call good or bad, presentation will have a much larger effect on that bottom line than we often give credit, especially for those who arent as “into” coffee as coffee people are.

thank you Julia for this awesome photo

i dont say all this to suggest that we should “do” latte art to try and wow people into working in coffee. i say this because there are customers everyday and almost every coffee house that have never had latte art served to them, and we have the opportunity to set them up for a really great customer experience by serving milk drinks that look great. we are visual creatures and we almost always eat with our eyes first, so it should be natural that we who serve food and drink should want to make them look like they are worth drinking.

so to simplify this a bit, i want to list out some reasons why i think latte art is worth it, in no particular order.

1. it is incredibly fun to do
2. it is enjoyable for customers, new and returning, to receive a drink with a design, simple or complex
3. it builds the hype in that moment for how the drink will taste
4. it is a way for staff to bond and have healthy competition between themselves
5. its opens doors of opportunity for the greater coffee community to connect, bond, and also have some healthy competition
6. it is an avenue for baristas to be creative in their mundane tasks of “just making lattes”
7. it is a way for baristas to put their “signature” on drinks they make, often finding their own style of pouring
8. it is exciting for customers who are new to “specialty” coffee
9. the added effort and time it takes to learn latte art will often add perceived value to a customers drink, often leading to more tips for the barista
10. it encourages great milk preparation

this list is not exhaustive, nor are the thoughts perfect, but they have come through my short time of working in coffee. i am sure the list will fluctuate and change as i become more seasoned in my coffee journey. but this is where i sit in this moment.

latte art hits really close to home, and my first experience with it was recent enough that i can still remember how it made me feel. i think that at Breathe we have a real opportunity to share that experience with whole heaps of people, because Hays has never had a coffee house like ours, or a coffee house that did latte art well. it it both incredibly fun and fulfilling to watch and hear people react to latte art for the first time. one of my favorite things about working in coffee in a place like Hays is seeing people have those interactions with coffee that i did when i first started pursuing good coffee. latte art really gripped my attention for a while, and learning to do it has been so much fun.