As I’ve posted recently, I’ve been very lucky this spring to travel to Arizona for baseball spring training, and to Portugal with my family. Last week I enjoyed one more very special trip, driving in the US south, and of course visited some coffee places. I neglected to do my usual rounds of picture taking, but we may be better off without them.
I’ve been a big fan of Red Rooster Coffee for a while now, enjoying their coffee at some of the best DC-area cafés. Their coffee’s flavor profiles are often bold, but offer layers of complexity that make them more interesting that just smacking you in the face. I’ve wanted to visit their café and roastery, but Floyd, VA is a bit far from where I live, I’m not a bluegrass fan so a visit to Floydfest isn’t in the cards, and Floyd hasn’t been on the way to places I’ve gone before. This trip gave me the opportunity to route myself in their direction, so I built a stop into the itinerary.
I booked a tour and tasting, and it was a real treat. I learned about the company’s history, saw the entire operation from roasting through to the café, talked about their approach and all the little decisions that go into developing the product, and tasted some of their delicious coffee as well as their teas and syrups.
The staff could not have been friendlier, especially my guide Tiffany Virtue, the Head of Customer Experience, and Grace McCutchan, who manages their education and training programs in the coffee lab and also does some roasting and prepared the tasting. They were very patient with my coffee geek questions and made me feel very welcome. The products we tasted were absolutely delicious, including a couple single origin coffees that were perfect examples of fruit-forward light roast flavors with more complexity behind them. This layering of flavors was also true in their teas and syrups.
The café itself is airy and welcoming, and the baristas were very attentive to make sure my order was exactly what I wanted it to be. Another enjoyable thing about Red Rooster is their attention to design, which is reflected in everything from their merch to the cool art on their bags to the café itself.
Red Rooster was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal (the article is behind a subscriber paywall) for their on-site subsidized day care facility for staff. You can also learn a bit more about the company’s origins from the segment on Grace in this article about competitors in the 2019 US Coffee Championships.
I also passed through Charlotte, NC, and was pleasantly surprised that my five minutes of research showed a lot of specialty coffee options. I tried 2, and both were great.
Undercurrent Coffee is in the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood, which has a lot of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, new apartment buildings, and cool outdoor murals (Undercurrent also has a stall in the Optimist Hall food hall). It’s part of a local coffee group with sister companies Night Swim Coffee and Not Just Coffee, both of which have multiple outlets around Charlotte; Night Swim is also the group’s roaster. The building is a converted home on a relatively quite street. Loved the design (as always, I’m a sucker for colorful ceramic tiles), and the gorgeous Kees Van Der Westen Spirit Duette espresso machine. It’s the kind of comfortable café we all wish was in walking distance, and the coffee was top notch.
My other Charlotte coffee stop was at HEX Coffee, Kitchen & Natural Wines, the café outlet for HEX Coffee Roasters, which is located in Camp North End, a large complex of shops, food, art galleries, and offices in former industrial buildings. Different vibe than Undercurrent, a bit more modern and industrial (no surprise given the setting), but still warm. The coffee was very good and the food menu was very interesting; I had the Spam musubi, a delicious rendition of a Hawaiian classic.
I had family in the Columbia, SC area for many years and visited often, but that was long before I caught the coffee bug. Like Charlotte, a bit of digging showed several specialty coffee options.
Very near to my hotel was Irmo, SC’s Loveland Coffee. They operate a drive-up kiosk nearby, but I went to the café and roastery. Much like other places on the trip, it was beautifully designed, comfortable, and managed to balance modern and welcoming, bringing the production facility and retail into the same space. I love their logo suite, and was really tempted to stock up on merch. No time for that, but the coffee was terrific. Sorry I wasn’t able to visit a few other cafés.
The final destination on the trip, and the reason it came together in the first place, was to spend time in Augusta, GA with a friend. I didn’t get to try any coffee shops there, as we were actually staying up in Irmo and going back and forth. We were in Augusta as spectators patrons at a certain professional golf tournament which you may have heard about.
My friend Harry was lucky enough to get badges for the first two rounds of this year’s Masters, and he was incredibly generous in inviting me along. I could go on and on (and on) about what an amazing experience it was, the incredible hospitality and efficiency like no other event you will ever attend, all the thoughtful little traditions and practices that make it so special.
As this is Matty Macchiato, not Gary Golf, I won’t go into the details here other than to say that their drip coffee was completely drinkable, a part of the iconic concessions menu – the $1.50 pimento cheese sandwich is as wonderful as it’s made out to be. If you’re at all interested in anything about the Masters, be sure to hit me up and I’ll be glad to let you know all about it.
My final coffee stop on the ride home was Lovelady, VA’s Common Grounds Coffee. This was a perfect rescue from the onset of drowsiness while working my way up I-95. A mile and a half off the highway and located in a quiet area between Richmond and Fredericksburg, Common Grounds has a cute setup, including a huge sitting area in the back of the store with high ceilings and support beams. The coffee wasn’t quite on the same level as some of the shops I visited earlier on the trip. It was, however, certainly good enough to make the directory, if not earn the Coveted Asterisk of QualityTM, and a welcome improvement from the usual fast food and convenience store coffee options blanketing major interstates.
