William & Sons -- Concord NH

A Coffee Maven Review

Some people cannot tell a story without hand moving their hands; for me, the key storytelling aid is often a map. That is certainly the case for my spring-break visit to this lovely new café in Concord, New Hampshire. 

I learned of William & Sons in Concord a couple of months ago, when a friend shared a news article about the café, which is a second location of one that was already established in (relatively) nearby Manchester. 

This friend used to live around the corner from me in Bridgewater, but is now as far north of this café as I am south. We were both sufficiently intrigued by its back story that we agreed we should meet there "some time." 

The ...

ground work @ the corner

  A Coffee Maven Review

A few years ago, my brother and his family moved to Kent Island, Maryland -- just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from our former home in Annapolis. Specifically, they are in Stevensville, a quaint village that is largely unnoticed from the 70k-120k vehicles that pass through it daily. More on that at the end of this post -- for now, a bit about a lovely café that recently opened there. 

For the third year in a row, we have walked in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Run, a 10k event for which one span of the bridge is closed to vehicles on the Sunday morning of the Veterans Day weekend. So far, the weather has been perfect for a long walk high above the water in November -- this is not something I would have believed when I lived in the area 40 years ago.

Some of the 15,000 people who crossed the bridge more quickly than I did!

On the night before the November 2024 walk, we had a lovely dinner at Amalfi Coast, an Italian restaurant and wine bar nestled in the village. 

As we left, my spouse and fellow coffee enthusiast noticed this quite cute sign. It reads "Groundwork @ The Corner -- Share what makes you thankful -- Save 10%"

That is, this coffee shop gives a discount to those who contribute to its positive vibe. 

We went back the next morning and can confirm that this is a very cheery place with excellent coffee and a lot of positivity squeezed into a small space. 

It has room for an eclectic array of gifts, a couple of tables, and a sitting area for those who wish to play a bit of music. 

This little nook at the entrance has a couple of comfy chairs and guitars that are there for the playing. 

It also has a turntable that is always turning -- even when the store's digital audio system is playing. It is good to know that vinyl is always an option! 

Family errands have me back in Stevensville with some regularity now. Even though my nephew now keeps good coffee at my brother's house, I love stopping by this spot in the mornings while I am in the area.

The café has a couple of names -- the full version is Ground Work Coffee & Juice (at the corner). The corner in question, it seems, refers to this tiny area that includes a baker, this cafe, the aforementioned Italian restaurant, and some art-related spots. I clearly need to do some more exploring here! 

In my visits so far, the baristas have exuded the positivity and welcome implied by that sign we first noticed. Of course, having a really cool cashier station helps. 

Yes, it is the front end of some kind of trolley, with the side windows still intact. Here is the detail of the destination sign:

It bears yet another name for this place -- "Historic K.I.'s Coffee Corner" -- Stevensville is the main town of Kent Island, where the Bay Bridge lands for those eastbound from Annapolis. 

And now for some of the local geography that I ask my students to address on this blog. We always look at the proximity of independent cafés to the coffee provided by national and global chains. In this case, coffee of some kind can be found in many places that are close to this shop. 

I am including maps at a two different scales.  On both of these, the blue placeholder marks the geographic center of Stevensville and covers the icon for the shop itself. On the first, larger-scale map, we see that The Corner includes something called Creative Corner -- and that ice cream is nearby. 

We can also see that Starbucks has two outlets just across the highway, within a few feet of each other! Both of these benefit from ongoing global marketing, of course, and from ample parking. Groundworks is different -- it is very nearby, but with a very different geography.

Zooming out just a bit, we see that a search on "coffee" reveals many opportunities along this very busy highway. The bridge that connects Annapolis to Kent Island also connects the entire Baltimore-Washington area to Ocean City. The backup at the bridge is often five miles long in the summer. The way is lines with opportunities for fast-food and fast-coffee relief.

A careful look at this map, however, shows that there are a few other independent cafes for the Coffee Maven to explore. Stay tuned!

Qahwah House - Dearborn

A Coffee Maven Advance Review

Although the Coffee Maven is writing this post, it is truly in the spirit of student-led coffee discoveries that are the main purpose for this blog. A student who took both the coffee seminar and the coffee travel course over a decade ago has remained a good friend and recently forwarded me an article about Yemeni coffee shops in general, and Qahwah Coffee in particular. 

Cozy image: Qahwah Coffee

As we now know, coffee originated in Ethiopia around 200 C.E., but it became known to the rest of the world through its cultivation in Yemen, which began around the year 600. More than a millennium later, Carolus Linnaeus was convinced that Yemen was the origin point of the species he named Coffea arabica -- a Latinized way of saying Yemeni Qahwah.

As important as it was historically, coffee from Yemen had become rather rare, and I had encountered it only once in my first decade of studying coffee. It was in 2022 that I met anybody from the Yemeni coffee industry -- shown below at the Specialty Coffee Association meeting in Boston that spring. 

Those gentlemen were working at the wholesale level. I am very delighted to know that coffee from Yemeni farmers is now available by way of Yemeni American roasters and baristas. I am especially delighted to have found all of this out in time for a trip I am taking to Detroit with students and colleagues in March. These shops are now opening in many parts of the United States, but they originated in Dearborn, which is adjacent to Detroit. I have added the East Dearborn Qahwah shop not only to the GeoCafes map, but also to the planning map for our AAG-Detroit travels.

Café Milano Challenge

A Coffee Media Find

I was interested. recently to notice in my feed a fun video about a coffee shop that promotes dancing. When I got around to clicking it, I realized that it is a place I have visited a few times. And because it is local, it has been reviewed by students on this blog a few times, mostly when it was still fairly new.

The word "challenge" in the title refers to the extra-credit points I will award to the first student who shares a video from one of the dance days in this café AND for the student who can alert me to one of the dance days in time for me to get there myself!

Prairie DD

 A Strong Towns Preview

While I was in the kitchen preparing some very special coffee this morning, my favorite librarian sent me the following video from the living room, where she was awaiting her cuppa. It is from Strong Towns, a sustainability organization that is focused on ways to improve the walkability of urban places. 

Chuck Marrone's discussion of a new coffee shop near his office pertains to the geography of coffee shops, more specifically that poster child of mediocre commodity coffee: Dunkin' Donuts. 

I include this ambulatory screed in this blog, because it is addresses some of the important spatial implications of local coffee shops, and the difference between those that are independent and those that are run by distant corporations, which are in turn increasingly in the thrall of the same sort of "investors" that are eviscerating many sectors of the economy. 

This short video points to something I find fascinating -- when asked about what kinds of businesses people would like to have in their towns, a severe lack of imagination takes over, and people start naming fast-food franchises. People in small places feel their town has "arrived" when a Chipotle or Panera shows up -- even more, it seems, when Dunks arrives. 

I have not been able to update my Coffee Hell page for about a decade (thanks, IT managers!), but it remains a valid introduction to some of the other issues I have had with the company, as does a Dunkin word search on my main blog. Not its workers, of course -- many of my students have been DD employees, even a few from the nearby headquarters. I have not had DD coffee since 2008 -- which takes a bit of effort, living where I do. 

But I include the video for something more useful than my rants -- the speaker describes some specific benefits of local shops for employment, tax base, and sustainability of infrastructure. The original post includes some opposing views, which are worthy of discussion but not convincing. I hope that Strong Towns returns to the site with more specific analysis, as the speaker suggests near the end.

The short video raises two "where" questions this geographer. The first is a "what kind of place" question of situation, to which the answer is, just about any place outside the center of a US city. I was in such a pocket of otherwise gorges Ithaca just last week -- a place I had not been, but that I could navigate almost blindfolded, because it is like every similar place.

The second "where" question is the more precise question of site, to which the answer is Route 210 in Brainerd, Minnesota. I have included a map here that flips the usual map assignment for students posting on this blog. We can see that commodity coffee is easy to find in every direction from the new Dunks, but I wondered about the nearest real café. 

Loco Espress is across the main street, as it turns out, but this part of town has already been ceded to the automobile so that the two businesses are very much isolated. Google suggests that they are 2 minutes apart by car but 30 minutes walking, because a person cannot cross Route 210 in that area. If I ever find myself in Brainerd, however, I know where I am headed -- the boutique café with the clever name that honors its rail yard location. 

Since I have gone this far, I should end with a meta map -- showing the distance from our university (where we talk about good coffee but don't serve it) to Ground Zero of commodity coffee, located 32 minutes by car to our NNW.

Lagniappe: The debate continues

Anybody still reading this will have noticed that I have spent more time writing about the Strong Towns video than it took to produce or watch. So I was about to wrap this up when I noticed this related post in my scrolling.

And as before, not everyone agrees. They say "never read the comments" but sometimes the comments provide an education, in this case revealing some of the attitudes that shape our shared townscapes. Individual decisions have community effects, and the shape of our community constrains our individual decisions. 

Coffeelands, Rutland MA

A Coffee Maven Review
(August 2024, updated March 2025)

This visit has a bit of a backstory -- I'll do my best to keep it brief. It starts with another café -- Coffeelands in Clinton. The fact that Coffeelands is not on this blog already is a huge oversight! Not only have I been there many times, but it is also my favorite café. Yes, the Coffee Maven has a favorite, and Coffeelands in Clinton is it!

I post about it frequently on Facebook, but I just realized that the only post on Geocafes is a very brief 2017 post about its precursor -- Coffeelands World Gifts Espresso Café. If it sounds like it was named by a committee, that is because it essentially was. The original café was founded circa 2011 by my friends at the Polus Center for Social & Economic Development (another long story).

When the global non-profit organization decided to sell the café, they found the perfect buyer, who simplified its name and business plan, but has kept its focus on celebrating the farming communities that grow its coffee, tea, and chocolates. 

March 2025 Update

I returned to the café during our 2025 spring break, in part to drop off a coffee artifact. As we downsize our home, there was no good place for this lamp, and I knew it would have a good home at Coffeelands. 

So I stopped by on my way to a new (unrelated) café in New Hampshire. Both Coffeelands locations always have great window art. This one (which I flipped because I took it from the inside) is wonderful on at least two levels.

First, it reminds us of the people and lands behind the coffee we enjoy. Amid the beautiful leaves and coffee cherries, it reads, "Proudly supporting a CULT...ivation movement for sustainable coffee."

Second, it allows me to frame one of the shop's neighbors, part of a chain I discuss in some detail on an old web page entitled Coffee Hell. The proximity of many independent cafés to their better-funded rival chains is, of course, part of the origin story of this blog, which was inspired by a visit to Country Kitchen in Walpole nearly 20 years ago.

Lagniappe

During my first conversation with the owner, Rhonda, she had so many excellent questions about coffee that I told her she should join my next travel course. She did so -- three times! Each time, we learned a lot from each other and of course from the farmers and others in the industry. Here are just a few action shots:

Traveling "to origin" is something everyone involved in specialty coffee hopes to do. Here Rhonda (right) is learning from two of the greats: worldwide Cup of Excellence winner Byron Corales and his daughter Sara, the first to market specialty coffee to domestic markets in Nicaragua. 

Transparency is an even more important benefit of fair trade than its financial and contractual advantages. Here Rhonda is tasting coffee in a tasting lab owned by the farmers themselves. 

And even something as serious as coffee needs a bit of fun. Rhonda insisted on this goofy selfie at the mouth of an active volcano -- Volcán Masaya. 

Coffee Break Cafe - Quincy MA

 

     Situated on Franklin Street in Quincy Center, the Coffee Break Cafe boasts five locations in total: three in Quincy (Franklin St/Quincy Center, Washington St, and Wollaston/Old Colony Ave), one in Hyde Park, and another in Milton. The hours of operation are from 5 AM to 5 PM on weekdays, with doors opening at 6 AM on Saturdays and 7 AM on Sundays. 

I visited the Quincy Center location. The Cafe occupied a quaint wedged-shaped building, reminiscent of a corner store. The Cafe was cramped, with only a handful of small tables. The Cafe offers a variety of flavored iced or hot lattes, as well as specialty black coffee and pastries from local bakers.

At 9 AM on a Wednesday, there was only one other customer in the Cafe, an older man who ordered an iced coffee and a sandwich. I ordered the house blend, which was a light roast consisting of arabica beans grown in Indonesia, Columbia, and South America. The coffee was quite good, tasting similar in quality to the coffee served in class.

 

     The Cafe is decorated with paintings from local artists and hosts shows for local musicians, as well as free story hours for children and as a free venue for community meetings. The Cafe strives to serve "old-fashioned drinks made by hand, eye contact, and smiles". The coffee cup sleeves all come with different phrases such as 'Gratitude' and 'Kindness'.

    The Nearest chain, Dunkin, is located 0.5 miles away, and can be reached with an 11-minute or a 4-minute drive. There are ten Dunkin locations in Quincy, and six Starbucks and three Marylou's Coffee locations.