Good Magazine
The country’s top 10 small-batch coffee companies are brewing blends that do more than wake you up.
You might feel like you’re living in a Starbucks-dominated world, but there are countless boutique roasters across the country that are devoted to being much more than just modes of caffeine delivery. These are the 10 best, and they’re giving the black-gold industry a much-needed makeover.
- Barefoot Coffee Roasters Founded: 2003 Home base: San Jose, California Most coffee businesses aren’t started by people who despise the drink. But Andy Newbom—who set up shop in a strip mall in what he calls “the middle of cultural nowhere”—didn’t have his epiphany until he had the perfect sip of espresso years after the 1980s coffee-shop boom. That one specimen paved his pursuit of brewed goodness. “There’s no magic—it’s the hard work,” Newbom notes. For the employees of Barefoot, that means everything from pulling the perfect shot in their hippie-minded cafe to becoming gurus of their growing regions—a goal they’re working to achieve by focusing on beans from three countries: El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Guatemala.