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.