COFFEE GROUNDS

ATX Coffee Fest

Day one of the Austin Coffee festival just wrapped and I am filled with thoughts.

First, on vendors. The showing this year featured an excellent mix of big Austin players and smaller shops, with a few from out of town as a bonus.

Coffee Grounds

I don’t work in coffee. But I’ve spent the majority of my waking hours this past week in a coffee shop—and I don’t think I’m alone. Neither, apparently, does the Austin City Council, which unanimously agreed last week on a proposal aimed at making it easier than ever to open a coffee shop or truck in Austin [1].

The measure aims to introduce more cafés into Austin’s residential areas to encourage the creation of community spaces as part of the larger Imagine Austin initiative [2]. According to the proposal’s sponsor, Ryan Alter, the updates are intentionally focused on cafés and coffee trucks. The document even calls out Austin shops First Light, Littlefields, and Desnudo by name, highlighting them as examples of the kinds of spaces the city needs more of.

The larger goal—to foster community spaces—and the specific choice of coffee as the vehicle, says a lot about Austinites’ attitude toward our cafés: they are the grounds from which we, as a city, grow.

Case in point: check the wall of your local café. Proudly displayed in many shops are community boards covered in posters for local events, companies, artists, and more. These boards serve as free, much-needed advertising for independent businesses, helping to cross-pollinate one another while also providing a convenient directory for patrons.

Coffee shops also serve as accessible third places [3] for communities across the financial spectrum, offering not only a delicious pick-me-up, but also critical amenities like AC, internet, water, seating, and restrooms that both enable and encourage customers to stay awhile. But more than that, they provide a place for people to meet and socialize with friends and strangers—something that’s becoming increasingly important as new generations drink less alcohol [4] and, consequently, spend less time in spaces that used to be social hubs like bars and nightclubs.

As the informal host of this space, the modern barista wears many hats. Often they are not only creating your drink, but also working as a guide through the world of coffee (“actually, a macchiato is…”), a sommelier discussing origin and tasting notes, a latte artist, and a friendly face, all while maintaining conversation—so please, consider a tip!

Finally, coffee connects Austin to the globe. Shops like Lau Lau’s (Chinese-American), Sa-Tén (Japanese), and CaPhe.inCoffee (Vietnamese) blend Asian and American cultures into their drinks. And many cafés serving single-origin coffees connect us closely with our neighbors to the south—Talisman (Nicaragua), Mercado Sin Nombre (Mexico), and Desnudo (Colombia), to name a few.

These businesses unite Austinites in vital ways, and it’s refreshing to see city representatives give such a clear endorsement of that fact. I spoke with a few shops that opened this year, and many mentioned a lack of café-specific zoning, steep re-zoning costs, and restaurant codes being enforced on coffee shops (even if they didn’t serve food) as major hurdles to opening. I was thrilled to see the proposal mention all of these issues, but I remain cautiously optimistic on the outcomes: this is, afterall, a proposal to discuss solutions to the problems, not a proposal to actually fix them.

For the third year in a row, Austin has ranked in the top ten on WalletHub’s Best Coffee Cities in America [5], and there’s still so much room for the culture here to grow. With the 2022 opening of Proud Mary on South Lamar, Austin was introduced to the powerful force of Australian coffee culture. Australia is well-known for taking coffee seriously: shops are highly community-focused, in large part because around 95% of Australian cafés are independently owned [6].

Through their public cuppings, Proud Mary has continued this community-forward approach in Austin, while shops have found different paths. We’ve seen a massive influx of catering carts and pop-ups from Mercado Sin Nombre, Luna Espresso, and Creature coffee that are making great coffee even more accessible. Spots like Epoch, Mozart’s, and Radio have closely tied themselves to the local music scene, hosting regular events and concerts. Desnudo and Flora even have run clubs! And many more across the city continue to provide essential spaces and identities for the neighborhoods that they call home.

One of the most important elements of good coffee are the grounds—and the same can be said (if you’ll allow me the dramatics) of culture, too. Where we meet can significantly influence who and how we meet. And, at least for now, it seems where Austinites increasingly meet is over a cup of coffee.

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