Amalgam Comics & Coffee - Philadelphia

A Coffee Maven Preview
(Not to worry: this blog is still primarily for postings by my GEOG 298 coffee students. The spring course is underway, and the next round of student finds will be here in March and April. Until then, it is all Coffee Maven.)

Source: Amalgam's Facebook Cover

At the beginning of this year, I began hearing about a new coffee shop in Philadelphia that is creating a lot of positive attention. I will turn this preview into a review as soon as my next drive to Maryland, since Philly is just a small side trip if I'm zooming down 95 to see friends and family in the Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis area.

I believe the first mention I heard was during an interview with founder Ariell Johnson on All Things Considered and soon after that, Amy Poehler's Smart Girls blog reported that Johnson is Taking the Comic Shop World by Storm.

What is all the excitement about? Apparently, a great coffee shop with a mission. In this case, the mission is to highlight not only the fact that comic-book audiences are more diverse than is often assumed while also highlighting work that brings some of that diversity to the comics themselves. Plus yoga, delicious baked goods (according to the reviews I have read) and, of course, coffee.

The main online presence of Amalgam is the Amalgam Philly Facebook page, which is filled with special events, links to the media items, including Johnson's own brief and powerful essay on Black History for Philly.com.

I look forward to my next drive south, so that I can learn more about this shop and of course its coffee!



The coffee at Amalgam comes from Philly Fair Trade Roasters, whose suppliers include PRODECOOP, a farmer cooperative I have visited in northern Nicaragua. In fact, I'm drinking PRODECOOP coffee (roasted myself) at home as I write this!

A good indication of PFT Roaster's commitment to coffee farmers is that its home page currently features an article on roya coffee rust, which threatens coffee and livelihoods throughout Central America. (I speak about this plague in my Coffee Bellwethers TED Talk.) When I visit Amalgam in real life, I'm going to have to set aside some time to visit Philly Fair Trade as well!

World's Best Coffee

Just in time for Christmas, a holiday coffee-shop recommendation.


Observant followers of this blog will know that it takes a lot more than a neon sign to be the best coffee.

Coffees of Boulder

During the summer of 2015 the entire family (except the dog) made a journey to the Great Plains, visiting friends in Nebraska and all along the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado. It was great to see some friends we had not seen in many years, and of course to explore some coffee shops.

Two of the shops we visited are a mere 13-minute walk from each other, and share an interesting connection. Our friend -- and my former coffee student -- Sullivan Cohen has been a barista at both. More precisely, he gained experience as an expert barista at Boxcar in Boulder and was later hired to direct the coffee program at Wonder, a high-end juice bar at the other end of a very trendy retail corridor in this rapidly-evolving city.

Since visiting these two shops, we learned of a third station stop on the Sullivan Cohen Colorado Coffee Train.

He is now -- according to Coffee Daily News -- directing coffee at the Moxie Bread Company. Clearly, we need to return to Colorado, if for no other reason than to keep track of this BSU Coffee Achiever. (Of course there are other reasons, from the snow-capped mountains to the incredible art galleries and coffee-cherry beer and of course our friends throughout the Front Range. We'll be back!)

Shops to Look For

 A Coffee Maven Referral

The great thing about being Coffee Maven is that friends always share new information about coffee and cafes with me. This is the only reason that I am fairly successful in my efforts to learn something new about coffee every day.

Yesterday, that was a nice new list of cafes to explore throughout the United States, courtesy of Food & Wine. The list includes several I have heard of, and one that I visited earlier this year. I was at the Boulder outlet of Boxcar, which my friend and coffee-class alum Sullivan had recommended. He had worked there when he arrived in Boulder, and was working down the street, directing the coffee program at a high-end juice bar. The coffee scene in Boulder is so intense that he has now been hired away to improve the coffee program at a bakery in the same area -- he was recently profiled on Coffee Daily News.

El Taller -- Lawrence, MA

 A Coffee Maven Review

One of the great things about Project EarthView is that it gets our team into many of the nooks and crannies of the many communities we visit as we take our giant globe to 10,000 participants each year. Most recently, we were at a favorite, familiar school -- with several familiar coffee shops -- near the home of one of our team members. This allowed us to get out of our North Andover routine (not that there is anything wrong with that!) and explore neighboring Lawrence.

One of our EarthView Wranglers (as our student workers are rightly known) suggested a shop where she had been employed -- El Taller (tah-YAIR) -- The Workshop. In operation for just three years so far, it has clearly established itself as an intellectual and artistic hub of this city that is clearly awakening and figuring out how to reinvent itself after many decades of industrialization and many more of deindustrialization.

It is a family business in which some family members are focused on the arts and others on the food. It is a winning combination. The selection of books for sale is carefully curated to include such works as  Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach. and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- the latter in a tall stack suggesting frequent sales and discussion. The cafe's Facebook page regularly features new books and events related to the books they carry. It is truly a learning community.

Clearly, the EarthView team was pleased with the experience. We were fortunate to have time for a leisurely lunch -- the food was exquisitely prepared, pleasingly plated, and in perfect proportions for lunch. Oddly enough, I did not learn much about the coffee itself -- the focus seems to be on espresso, and brewed coffee was not fresh enough to discern much about it.

Still, this shop is a winner, and I will be returning.

Customer Guide

A Coffee Maven Advisory

Stock DD photo makes rare appearance on this blog. Read below to find out why.

We interrupt this blog about what cafes can do for customers for an excellent article about what customers can do for cafes. More specifically, for cafe workers.

Blogger extraordinaire Odyssey tries to help out customers and her fellow Dunkin employees by sharing 20 "rules" for customer success. I use the quotes because of course these are not mandatory. But they offer insights into what employees are trained -- formally and informally -- to expect. 

Some of the tips here are about sugar, cream, flavorings, and other things that no longer apply to my coffee experiences. But the majority of these tips are applicable to ANY coffee shop, and boil down to one word: RESPECT.

A big lesson from my work in the geography of coffee generally is that all work is worthy of respect. From the invisible work of the millions of people who grow and process coffee to the worker across the counter, everyone's job is just a bit more complicated and demanding than it seems to others.

These lessons are, of course, applicable outside of coffee as well.

Coffee on the Rocks -- Estes Park

A Coffee Maven Review 

This cafe adventure followed a morning of exploring Rocky Mountain National Park with friends who live in nearby Fort Collins. Near the continental divide we enjoyed the tundra, elk, marmots, many glacial features, July snow patches, and gorgeous long views.

Clearly, I was enjoying this moment at the roof of North America, with one foot each in the basins of the Atlantic and the Pacific. More photos from our adventures in the Rockies and the High Plains are on my Continental Divide album on Flickr.

As we descended from the thin air into the beautiful enclave of Estes Park, we also regained internet connectivity, and our first use of it was, of course, to search for a cafe. We were delighted  to find Coffee on the Rocks tucked along the banks of a mountain stream, a short distance from the park gate.



Zoom in to get details on navigation, but the map is presented at this scale to convey some sense of the wondrous surroundings. A more idyllic location for a cafe can scarcely be imagined, and the cafe itself merits the location. Each of us was able to find a coffee, chai, smoothie, snack or meal to suit our appetite, and we were able to enjoy them at one of several outdoor tables near a small pond. Had the weather been less inviting, we noticed ample space inside the cafe, which could easily seat a few couple dozen guests.

A beautiful location makes a good cafe a great cafe!

I did not take the time to delve into the details of the coffee itself, but I did enjoy a cappuccino and my daughter's latte was also quite good. If ever we are fortunate enough to be back in Estes Park, we know exactly where to go.