Acoustic Java Café Visit

On Friday, March 11, 2022 I visited Acoustic Java Cafe and Roastery located at 6 Brussels St. in Worcester MA. This cafe is located in a more secluded area of Worcester, down an older cobblestone path and in an old mill building. I visited from 9:45 to 11 AM, but the coffee shop is open from 8 to 4 every day.

 

The cafe environment of Acoustic Java was very welcoming and warm. Calm music was playing on the speakers and books lined the walls of the entire store. There was outdoor seating being set up while I was there and plenty of tables filled the store. There was a busy flow of people coming through the store and most customers sat in and enjoyed their coffee while only a few did takeout. Tables were filled with mostly college students doing homework in groups or individually, due to the location being near Holy Cross, Clark, Assumption, WPI, and Worcester State.  There also seemed to be a large amount of regulars not only chatting with the staff but also with other customers.

There was a wide variety of coffee available at Acoustic Java. While I only ordered a caramel macchiato made with skim milk and a plain bagel with cream cheese, there were so many options. Hot coffee, iced coffee, cold brew, espresso drinks, and basically any kind of coffee you can think of was available. They were offering coffee blends from different places such as South America, Africa, and Asia. Acoustic Java looks for coffees that are specifically fair trade, organic, bird-friendly, rainforest alliance, carbon free, women produced and high-scoring. One of their missions is to help with global climate change, underdeveloped infrastructure, and widespread poverty. The coffee that I ordered was very good and I could tell that it was made with attention to detail and care.

Acoustic Java is also very active within their community. At the shop, they offer food and pastries made with bread from Birch Tree Bread Company located in Worcester and in return Birch Tree Bread Company uses beans from Acoustic Java. Bags of Acoustic Java coffee beans are also sold at different locations throughout Massachusetts including NU kitchen in Worcester. Coffee beans from Acoustic Java are even used in the Blizzard of 78 Brown Ale by Wormtown Brewery. They also sell a variety of their own Julie's Teas and host hot tea tastings on the third Saturday of the month.

Acoustic Java is considered a "Premiere Coffee Campus" and hosts a few different coffee classes for the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). They teach you a variety of barista skills within these courses. Acoustic Java also hosts cupping events throughout the year.

Dough Company

 Dough Company - New Bedford, MA

   If you are ever in the New Bedford, MA area you should definitely stop by Dough Company for a delicious latte and homemade bread. They are located in the Kilburn Mill which gives the cafe a very industrial vibe. They have many different coffee options, including a honey lavender latte which I highly recommend!

It is a great place to grab breakfast or lunch and catch up with a friend or get some work done.

They keep the atmosphere light with a good playlist and the staff are all very nice.

They first opened in 2019 and they have made it a point to include different people from the community and support other small businesses. 

They also sell their coffee, which they buy from Downeast Reserve, most of it is certified organic and fair trade. 

All in all if you are in the area or are looking for a cool place to check out I definitely recommend checking out Dough Company.

Written by: Hannah Thornton

Città del Caffè

A Café Travelogue Link 

When I searched "Coffee Town" on Google to create a catchy title for this post, Trieste appeared -- rather than the phrase città del caffè. This suggests that the only error in Susan Van Allen's article on Trieste for BBC Travel is the use of the word "surprising" in the title.

Photo: Michael Brooks via BBC

I try to learn something new about coffee every day, and it is often thanks to students past and present that I do so. On this, the first day of my spring-semester coffee seminar, a former sent me a link to Van Allen's article Trieste: Italy's surprising capital of coffee.

Italy is the only European country to have grown coffee, long ago on the island of Sicily. Trieste is a center for the aspects of coffee for which Italy is better known -- importing, roasting, brewing, and most relevant to this blog: sipping at outdoor cafés. The BBC article provides a lot of insight to all of this, and to the relevance of coffee culture to the broader cultural geography of the city.

The article mentions the importance of the city's location but does not provide a map. To my discredit, I had never looked for Trieste on a map, even though it figures prominently in Black Gold, a coffee movie I have seen dozens of times.

This screenshot from the GeoCafes map highlights a specific café that Van Allen highlights in her article: the Cafè San Marco. It also shows the position of Trieste in the extreme northeast of Italy; the article explains the significance of this location.

Favorite Coffee Question

 A Coffee Maven Dental Encounter

In our relatively small college town, I know that I might get asked a coffee question at any time. I always welcome it!

The coffee mentioned in this video is Byron's Maracaturra from Thanksgiving Coffee. Since our first meeting in 2007, I have brought almost 100 people to Byron's farm Los Pinos, named for the pine trees he planted as part of a holistic approach to cultivating an entire ecosystem around the coffee fruit. Byron is, for us, the Poet of Coffee.

In the video, I also mention my Nighthawks post elsewhere in this blog, where I use the Edward Hopper painting to introduce a discussion of the placeness of cafés.

Demise of a Coffee Shop

A January 2021 Remote Review

It is unclear who said it first, but geographers and others know that the value of a property -- and the potential of a business -- depends on three factors: location, location location.

Detail from GeoCafes Map

This would suggest great things for The Kitchen Café, which opened in 2017 in a cozy thicket of streets just a few steps from South Station in Boston. And for several years, great things were happening for this family business as it grew to employ 20 people. Sadly, however, I learned of the Café only because of its closure because of the Covid19-related changes in dining, especially downtown dining. 

Photo: Robin Lubbock WBUR

I include the radio story Time to Cut Losses here in part because it is representative of the difficulties many independent businesses -- which all of the cafés featured on this blog are -- in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic. A general contraction of the economy combined with restrictions on indoor dining have forced several thousand small restaurants to close just in Massachusetts. 

Some have managed to remain open by reconfiguring on-site dining in various ways and by shifting to a focus on carry-out, delivery, or catering. This is where the location of The Kitchen Café may have limited its options: a very large proportion of its patrons could walk to the café from their offices until they shifted to working from home, in many cases at the far end of one of the train lines that brought them to the neighborhood. This raises the question of how businesses that serve office workers in such locations will fare post-pandemic. Polling of employers and employees alike suggests that after work-at-home is not longer required, some people will move back to their offices as before, some will never come back, and the average might be a reduction of about 1/3 in office usage. If this prediction holds true, maintaining and launching cafés in such locations will be even more challenging in the future.

The trajectory of launching a café is another reason I include this story. Jayme Valdez and his wife represent the thousands of people who start new cafés and restaurants each year. The story gives listeners a bit more insight into the kinds of stories behind most of the small shops that are described elsewhere on this blog. None of them succeed by accident, and despite the opening paragraph above, location only favors those who have the rest of what it takes to grow and sustain a business with notoriously small profit margins. My students and I have found scores of independent shops whose owners could probably tell similar stories. 

As we continue the blog project with a new group of students in the 2021 spring semester, we will be learning -- mostly at a distance -- about how they have fared in this most difficult time for small business. 

Cool Beans Coffee House - Toms River, NJ

A May 2020 Remote Review

While researching through the hundreds of coffee shops that reside in the great state of New Jersey, I came across a pretty "cool" place called the Cool Beans Coffee House. This cute cafe is located in Toms River New Jersey. Due to Covid-19 I was unable to visit this coffee shop in person so instead I will be giving an online review.

https://www.coolbeanstr.com/

Through extensive online research I have gathered some solid information about Cool Beans. According to their website Cool Beans is "More than just coffee". They serve breakfast lunch and dinner and even have their own catering business. Cool Beans is said to "put wraps on the map" with over 30 custom wraps. 

https://www.coolbeanstr.com/about

Although cool beans serves delicious food, it is mostly known for its delicious coffee. They serve many types of coffees, from a hot cup of joe to those really scrumptious specialty coffees. It is said to be that their candy bar specialty coffees are a big hit. I would not doubt if they are specialty coffees are right up my alley, I am just salivating thinking about a Milky Way iced coffee!

A Milky Way Latte

Cool Beans is known for being your cozy neighborhood restaurant where friendly people come to share and enjoy their love for coffee. It is known for being a "family atmosphere".  After researching Cool Beans Coffee House it is apparent why people love this coffee shop! They are more than a coffee shop bringing more to the table and going above and beyond. From staff down to the espresso beans it is an over all hit. I will add this to my bucket list in hopes of visiting one day. With my love of coffee I will be sure to try out the signature “milky way” latte.

- Zak Labonte

Anastasia and Katie’s Coffee Shop & Cafe - Livonia, MI

A May 2020 Remote Review

My online café visit was to a coffee shop in Livonia, Michigan called “Anastasia and Katie’s Coffee Shop and Café” with the slogan “We Are Good and Strong”. The reason I have chosen this coffee shop is for the entire reason why they are open, and that is to help those with developmental disabilities find jobs and grow skills so that they may find better jobs in the future. The shop works with the employment program Mi Works Matters to assist in the hiring individuals with developmental disabilities and the first thing that you see on their website is pictures of those who they have helped though this program.

The main focus of this coffee shop is not being a coffee shop, and that is apparent in the fact that they have limited options of drinks and meals, their focus is on making a statement and helping those who are left on the wayside in many other jobs or occupations. The prices for all their drinks and food are reasonably priced and there is nothing that catches the eye because all of the options are your typical drinks and foods. Their hours are not competitive in the coffee shop market like with Dunkin or Starbucks but again they are not a coffee shop who is aspiring to be competitive or to give the most options to blow away the competition. No, they aspire to touch the hearts of anyone that comes in contact with the store because seeing those who are typically in the background in the front, talking with you, learning new things through your patronage, now that is what they do, and it is by far the most underappreciated work that can be done. They have received many reviews by news articles and televised news and rightfully so.

I wish that I could visit this store, not only to experience the rare style customer service but also to pledge my support for the work these wonderful people are doing. Few things compare to the work of lifting others for the betterment of the whole, this shop does exactly that.

- Nathan Irwin