Coffee Clubs for all! Give 3, 6 or 12 months of coffee joy.

Meet our newest employee...Henry!

Henry Brown is here! He told me that in his spare time he babysits people's poison dart frogs. Did you know that they're not poisonous unless they eat a certain kind of fungus? Crazy.

I started drinking coffee around age thirteen, pretty much strictly so I could feel cool. Hollywood taught me that all people who are really cool drink black coffee all day because they're U.S. Marshals or astronauts and don't get a lot of sleep. I decided that was the path for me. Suffering through cup after cup for the sake of someday becoming a starship pilot or maybe an FBI agent, the bitter, acrid beverage slowly started turning into a rich and invigorating one. My deli cup soon became an experience more than a wake-up button, and I started spending time with my friends at cafes drinking far far too much coffee, discarding sleep in favor of a newly discovered social and flavorful aspect of the brew.

It wasn't until after college that I came to understand that I hadn't scratched the surface. I moved to Chicago and answered a help wanted ad for a small roaster in town, figuring free coffee is good and and a nine to five is a nine to five. The day I walked into the warehouse and was hit with the smell of roasting coffee I was sold. The amount I learned at that job was astounding. There turned out to be so much more to coffee than I had imagined, and felt I could ever understand. Now, I continue to seek knowledge and explore the mighty depths of the complex and wonderful beverage, ever alert for new experiences and uncharted territories.

Cupping 7/22

From NBA Fancam

From Eric:

"Since there will likely be no NBA season New Harvest has created a program for under and unemployed professional basketball players."

Eric Loves Coffee

Eric Lepine is the Head Roaster at New Harvest. He is awesome. And he is one of the funniest people ever and one of the best writers about coffee. Read this.

(Also, he is best buds with Princess Kate.)

Like most people, I have very humble beginnings in coffee. My very earliest coffee memories are from mornings at my grandparent's house. I really loved spending the night at my grandparents because they would let me sleep in the RV parked in the backyard so it was like having my own fully furnished clubhouse. My grandfather was always a morning person and whenever I stayed there I would wake up early also. My grandfather had an autodrip coffee maker and he would set it up to brew the night before. He used Chock Full O'Nuts canned coffee. I remember being fascinated with this coffee from a very early age because it smelled good and grown-ups drank it so drinking coffee must actually make you a grown-up somehow. I tried it several times, black, with sugar, milk, cream, every sort of condiment combination you can imagine, but the flavor never appealed to me as a child. I distinctly remember the last time that I tasted it as a child and concluding, this just really is not for me.

As I got older, the appeal of coffee arose in my life is two related ways. The first was that I was beginning to be out and about until 3am every night. My nightly activities began to either require coffee to drive home safely or ended at a diner. The second appeal was that because I was out so late, I required coffee in order to be able to function at work the next day. I look back at my late-teen to early-adult life and I'm really not quite sure how I functioned on 4 hours or less of sleep every night. I also began playing music at this point in my life and so coffee became essential for those practice sessions that inevitably went on until the wee hours of the night. Those practice sessions somehow produced some music that allowed me to tour the world for most of my adult life. When I started traveling a lot coffee became absolutely vital to my day to day survival. People in bands who cram themselves in vans, sleep on floors or in the van because you have an 18 hour overnight drive and do not drink coffee are not human.

All of this time I had no real concept of quality coffee. Coffee was coffee. At the time I was working in the produce section of Whole Foods and traveling a lot and often when I got home from a tour I would have to scramble a bit to secure hours or a steady position while I was home. As fortune would have it, I came home from tour one day and could not get any hours for the job that I had and so I applied for a position at another store. That position was Coffee Buyer. I thought, well, I love drinking coffee, this sounds great. I got the job and I was pretty much immediately immersed over my head in all this "new" coffee. I read whatever I could find and just drank everything that was available to me. For someone who was accustomed to drinking "just" coffee, being suddenly privy to all these new flavors and aromas was really fun and exciting. I literally could not believe that there was so much variety and that it was all right under my nose this whole time.

I took to my new job very well. My newly developing passion for specialty coffee was paying off huge in the form of sales. By the third month I had somehow won an annual trip to origin that Allegro Coffee does. I was going to get to visit a Co-op in Costa Rica. This was really incredible but at the time I was still a bit too new to the industry to really understand how huge this was. It was not until I actually saw the Co-op in action that it really sunk in with me. So basically, a lot of my foundation for knowledge and interest in specialty coffee was born at origin. That's wild!

Seeing coffee being picked and processed and talking to producers was one of the most life changing events of my life. It was almost overwhelming to have that sort of experience so early in my coffee career. What I took home most from the trip was that there are people working very hard to produce these coffees that I loved. It was no accident. I felt like I had a commitment to make sure that their hard work was carried through on my end of the supply chain and to try to translate that to consumers.

About a year after my origin trip Whole Foods sent me to Allegro's roasting facility. This was my first time seeing a roastery and it left a huge impression on me. I didn't want to come back home. I wanted to just start working there immediately. Shortly after this i was invited to take a tour of George Howell's roasting facility and the presentation that he gave left me absolutely floored. His passion for great coffee is something you can literally feel in the air surrounding him and it comes without any of the egotistical trappings of an expert. What really struck me about that visit was the idea that coffee is beautiful, but the potential has not been tapped. I think about that idea a lot to this day.

Eventually I stopped traveling so much and I thought, I would really like to have a coffee specific job and not a coffee related job in a grocery store. I actually emailed Gerra about a job out of the blue. I had no idea New Harvest was actually hiring. At the time my friend and also future Harvista, Rory was living with Devlin. I was at their house one day and I was tired and Rory jokingly told me to ask Devlin to make me some coffee and I jokingly replied "ask Devlin to get me a job at his work". I had not actually seen Devlin that night but I thought about how that sentiment was not really a joke. I really did want a coffee gig. I emailed Gerra the next day and the rest is history.

Mogey's Coffee History

You might know MorganEve Swain as one half of the amazing band Brown Bird, but she also works here as Assistant Production Manager. She is my favorite smiling face to see in the morning.

A man at a bowling alley named her Mogey, and it stuck forever.

I try to always use the best picture I can find. (Sorry, Mogey.)

"My first experience with coffee was drinking it with dessert out of delicate cup-and-saucers at Nanny's house (my mother's mother). It didn't matter that I was 5 years old; if was proper to drink coffee with dessert! For years afterward I always began my day with a cup of coffee a la Nanny: extremely light and extremely sweet.

During college, I got a job at a cafe (which shall remain nameless). I was one of the original employees at this cafe, which had just started up. We had Intellegentsia coffee, and where shipped several different roast levels and varieties each week. On slow days we'd brew up a whole bunch of half batches of different coffees and have our own "cuppings". That was my first introduction to the world of real coffee. Each coffee came with a description, which we'd read and try to identify the flavor notes. We'd also try to memorize which coffee was which, based on their flavor notes.

Once I was trained on the espresso machine, I was really in love. I liked nothing more than to have a line of drink tickets and be literally stuck on bar, cranking out lattes.

After a while the quality of the shop started suffering, and the stress level didn't match the sort of work we were doing. And I left. In favor of New Harvest, where I hoped to expand my knowledge of coffee and enter into coffee-world from the other side of the counter. And that's exactly what I did. Man, I love this place."

Cupping Tomorrow!

Sorry for the late notice. We are cupping two new coffees tomorrow at 3 pm!