The Reign of the Fire-King

If you've had a cup of coffee at Taproom, you've taken sips out of a vintage Fire-King coffee mug. So what's the whole deal with those things?

I have to give sole credit of the idea to David Lamont, previously with Counter Culture Coffee and now with La Marzocco. (Fun fact: we also have David to thank for coining the term "Beerspresso".) Maybe ten years ago, David introduced me to this fun line of serveware that many people can recognize from their grandparents' kitchens. He said off-handedly at some point that it would be cool to have a coffee bar that served regular coffee out of them.

Anchor Hocking (the glassware company) produced a line of serveware called Fire-King, from the '40s through the '70s. They had mugs, bowls, plates and other dishware in the collection, and are often distinctive for the white "milk glass" that they're made out of (think Pyrex). We've used and sold all styles of Fire-King mugs, but have settled mostly on the stackable ones, with a preference for the Kimberly Diamond design. 

I doubt that these mugs were ever intended for high-volume coffee shop use. They chip and crack as easy as any other glassware. They're not super easy to find, even in antique stores, and I've only ever found one at a Goodwill. We get all ours from eBay, and it's only affordable because we bid on the huge 30-piece lots that no one else wants. 

So why do we use them if they're a lot of trouble to find and we constantly have to replace them? Well... they're fun to drink out of. We're proud of the coffee we serve, and it makes sense to have the quality and uniqueness of the beverage matched by that of the vessel it gets served in. If you go to Grandma's house and she hands you one of these mugs, you get a smile on your face and you just feel... special. That's the kind of experience we're going for at Taproom. 

On your next visit, ask for a regular ol' drip coffee or a manual pourover brewed to order - by default, either one is always served in a Fire-King mug. We don't publicly advertise it much, but at any time you could also purchase any of our mugs if you want to take one home for good. We've actually unknowingly sold some rare pieces that are worth $50-$100 each!

And if you're clearing out Grandma's storage and happen upon a jackpot collection of these mugs and need someone to take them off your hands, let us know!

Puqpress and Our Bruising Barista Bodies

I've been a barista for a little over ten years now. That's ten years of the same motions, day after day: pulling, pushing, twisting, standing, squatting, lifting, shaking. In addition to building up a virtual immunity to liquid burns, I know that I've probably submitted myself to an elevated risk of repetitive motion injury.

Lots of baristas can probably empathize with me when I confess: My wrist hurts. I'm behind the espresso machine a lot less nowadays (thanks to my incredible crew), but whenever I pull 8 hours behind the bar, I feel the pain, numbness, or throbbing in my right wrist almost immediately, and usually some time after that for at least the next few days. 

I've toyed around with ergonomics. I've changed body positioning with tamping, locking in portafilters, etc. I've read articles and watched videos, paid attention to my movements and done stretches. But through it all I haven't been able to shake the recurring pain. 

There have been articles about this issue for baristas, reported by Sprudge, Fresh Cup, even the New York Post. Most people who investigate barista injury point out that the act of tamping is probably one of the key culprits, so some companies have tried to be innovative in tamper design to try to reduce the likelihood of tamping-related strain and injury. Last year we purchased a first-edition PUSH tamper, which quickly became my go-to tamping device. But even though my motions and wrist felt better overall, I'd still have nagging pain every now and then. 

After a recent conversation with some of my staff, I realized almost every one of us experienced wrist pain, but we just didn't talk about it a lot. So when the Puqpress started being distributed in the United States, I contemplated investing in one for the sake of barista health.

A post shared by Taproom Coffee (@taproomcoffee) on Aug 22, 2017 at 10:50am PDT

We got our Puqpress yesterday. It's only been less than 24 hours, but I have to admit I'm super pleased with it so far. The machine tamps the coffee grounds quickly, evenly, and without any significant wrist/arm movement needed. The true test will come over the next few months to see if wrist pain gets better or stays the same. Either way, one added benefit to the Puqpress is that our overall espresso consistency is improved - tamping variance is less of a factor in producing great-tasting shots of espresso. 

New Hours: Now Open Earlier!

We've adjusted our hours slightly to accommodate earlier morning coffee runs!

Monday - Thursday: 6:30AM - 10:00PM
Friday: 6:30AM - 9:00PM
Saturday: 7:30AM - 9:00PM
Sunday: 7:30AM - 8:00PM

Crowler/Taproom Draft FAQ

We recently rolled out can-on-demand options for our non-alcoholic Taproom draft products. The 32-ounce "crowlers" (can growlers) are available any time, and are filled and sealed when you come in and order them. Here are some FAQ's about the products:

• What products are available in crowlers? 
  • Only Flash, Beerspresso, and Hopsintea are available in take-away cans. Flash is our flash-brewed nitro iced coffee, Beerspresso is iced coffee brewed with malt and hops, and Hopsintea is an herbal iced tea infused with hops. All three nitro products are non-alcoholic and are Taproom creations. We are not legally permitted to use our canner for any alcoholic products. 
• Are the products carbonated? 
  • No. We use a 100% nitrogen gas infusion in our Taproom draft products, to give a velvety mouthfeel and thick foamy head, without the metallic bite that comes with CO2. 
• How long does a crowler last?
  • The cans should be treated like growlers, which are not intended to be shelf-stable more than a day or so. The draft liquid has been exposed to oxygen and is not canned like typical nitro beers, so the nitro gas infusion will dissipate over time, even in the can. Beerspresso (because it's basically the IPA of cold coffee beverages) will not be an ideal experience after 24 hours, but Flash and Hopsintea can still be tasty and refreshing after a few days, just with less nitro mouthfeel.  
• Why don't you offer smaller cans?
  • The large-format cans are meant to be shared. If you would like a single serving, you can simply order a drink as usual from our bar and enjoy it in our cafe or take it away in a plastic cup. The 32-ounce crowlers give you an excuse to spread the love! (...or it gives you 3 or so servings if you'll be stuck at the office all day)
• What's the deal with the 3-pack carrier?
  • You can mix and match any 3 cans for a discounted price, and they'll come with the snap-top carrier. The 3-pack is great for bringing to a party or gathering in lieu of (or in addition to) bringing a bottle of wine or a pack of beer. 
• Can I buy Taproom cans anywhere else?
  • At this time, our canned products are available for purchase only at Taproom. 
• Can I bring in my own container to fill?
  • Definitely! We can fill any size container with our non-alcoholic draft products. In a few weeks we will have our own branded, refillable MiiR growlers for purchase.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

As of today - Monday, March 20th - Taproom is officially transitioning our coffee roaster partnership.

For nine years I’ve served Counter Culture Coffee in shops that I’ve operated. They have always been an incredible partner and they continue to lead the specialty coffee industry in many ways, not least of which are quality and transparency. The local team has consistently delivered on support and a commitment to help Taproom grow throughout its first three years.

I am forever grateful to long-term relationships I’ve had with David LaMont (now with La Marzocco), Ben Helfen (who moved away from ATL last year) and Emily Davis (our connections span experiences with four different coffee companies), as well other professional/personal crossover relationships with the rest of the CCC team (Park, Dustin, Anthony, Sara). We’ve all shared laughs and tears, many conversations over cups of coffee and glasses of beer, and we even won a bowling championship together. My memorable association with Counter Culture has been a joyful picture of what the greater coffee community has to offer in providing positive space for lives to rub off on each other. Thanks, friends.

With that solid partnership as part of our unchangeable history, I am excited to announce that Taproom will enter into a new chapter of this journey, now partnering with East Pole Coffee Co.

East Pole has been roasting coffee in Atlanta since 2015. One of the founders is Jared Karr, who previously worked as a barista at Taproom. He was here painting ceilings prior to opening day and worked until he left in 2015 to grow East Pole full-time.

East Pole will soon be opening a full-scale coffee bar in the Armour Yards area of North Midtown where they will be showcasing their San Franciscan 25lb. roaster and offering a unique set-up for the Atlanta community. The public roastery and coffee bar will double as a training facility/workshop for wholesale customers like us. 

In celebration of this new partnership, we’re hosting a kickoff party on Thursday, March 30th, from 7-9 PM. We’ll have food, drinks, giveaways, and an overall good ol' time with Taproom and East Pole owners, friends and family.

In addition to a core offering of East Pole Coffee Co., we will be featuring a rotating selection of guest roasters whose coffees will be available on our manual pourover menu and retail coffee shelves. For the next couple weeks we’ll still have some awesome Counter Culture Coffee in the lineup, and then our next guest roaster to be featured will be Panther Coffee out of Miami.

So come on in and try out a cup of something you haven’t had before, or take a bag of coffee beans home. As always, one of my favorite parts about owning Taproom is the constant opportunity to pause and sit down to talk with customers and friends. So if you see me around and want to chat, just pull up a chair and tell me what’s on your mind!

Jonathan

#baristoss Barista Trick Shot Video

Just for kicks, I thought I'd get the Taproom crew to film a series of coffee-related behind-the-back trick shots and string them together in a fun video. My original inspiration was this guy.

Yes, all the shots are real, and most of them took just a few times to pull off. We originally posted the video to Instagram and Facebook on August 14th and thought it'd be great to issue a #baristoss challenge to our barista friends across the nation and around the world.

If you only found out about Taproom from this video, we're a coffee and beer bar in Atlanta, GA. Poke around our website and you can get a good sense of who we are!

In the course of three weeks we had over 48,000 views of the video! Only two videos were posted by others as responses, and those are re-posted below. We'll keep updating this page with other #baristoss videos if any of you feel like putting together a fun clip for us!

---

First #baristoss response video got posted from Ten Drops Coffee in Plainfield, IL:

And another post from Decatur's Dancing Goats:

#baristoss #dancinggoatsdecatur #dancinggoats @taproomcoffee it actually did go in the trash can in the counter!!!!!

A video posted by Dancing Goats Coffee Bar (@dancinggoatsdecatur) on Aug 29, 2016 at 12:47pm PDT

I'm 2. Let's Party!

My son Ransom. He's basically the unofficial mascot for Taproom.

Taproom is turning 2!!!

It's sometimes hard for me to believe, but this Taproom train keeps chugging along... day after day, month after month, and now - year after year. We hit the 2 year mark officially on April 29th, and we've scheduled a huge party for this Friday, May 6th!

This past year has been so much fun! Some highlights for me include:

1. Inventing Beerspresso. It was a team effort of months of random ideas, messing around, and then some solid experimentation. What started as a fun barista conversation about beer brewing ended up as a new beverage that tasted delicious, and people went crazy over it. Even Imbibe Magazine gave us a shoutout for the innovative drink. 
2. Becoming financially stable. I'll be openly honest: Taproom was just like any other business in that the first couple years were really tough financially. Every startup has to build a foundation of customers and sales, and it just takes time (and a whole lot of effort) to do that. I'm proud to say that in the last few months I've breathed a sigh of relief, because we've finally reached a sustainable pace! 
3. Showing off to the world. The SCAA Expo was in Atlanta last month, and it was an insane week of coffee events, industry parties, and TONS of visitors to Taproom. We were honored to be included in some prominent lists of must-see coffee spots, which brought us droves of coffee professionals and enthusiasts from across the nation and around the world. We welcomed everyone to our humble space in Kirkwood, proudly serving our coffee, beer, and a (hopfeully) memorable experience. And during the U.S. Aeropress Championship that weekend, Taproom barista Tyler Mowry represented us well and placed 5th overall!

Two years in and I'm still having a blast! My favorite part of every day is hanging out with our regulars and meeting new friends, knowing that Taproom is serving as that community hub we all hoped it would be. We wouldn't have gotten this far without a rockstar staff, a supportive neighborhood, and so many friends and family cheering us on along the way. 

See you at our anniversary bash this Friday!!!

A Craft Beer Journey

Photo by Allison Mah Photography

Fresh out of college, my first beer was a Corona. At that time I didn't know the first thing about what beer should even taste like. My friend handed me a lime wedge and said the thing to do was put it in the beer. He demonstrated by dropping the wedge in the bottle, sticking his thumb in the opening, and then turning the bottle upside down so that the beer mixed with the lime. I tried the same thing, forgot that beer was carbonated, and gave it a shake. Beer exploded all over me. 

That was my first beer experience, and honestly not much changed for several years after that (aside from avoiding beer explosions). I only drank the occasional beer, and stuck with whatever my friends were drinking at the moment. Right before I got married, I took my groomsmen on a tour of the Coors brewery in Colorado - it was really interesting, but still didn't do much to affect my personal consumption of beer. 

As Taproom launched in 2014, my awareness and knowledge of craft beer took off. Along with my staff, I went through some Beer 101 classes and became a Certified Beer Server with the Cicerone Program. I sampled new beers on a daily basis. I began to get a grasp on various styles, the basics of beer brewing, and the general vocabulary surrounding beer. Taproom hosted monthly beer classes. We partnered with local breweries for beer releases and tasting experiences. I tried my hand at homebrewing beer with some friends. I even got to be a guest on the Beer Pop! Podcast, telling hosts Dan and Aaron about my beer journey. 

Now, almost 2 years later, I feel a lot more comfortable in the beer world. I can actually carry on a conversation about beer styles, brewing basics, or what my personal preferences have come to be. 

And my overall conclusion: Beer is a means to an end. For me, beer holds the same function as coffee does - to bring people together. Yeah, I can geek out on all the brew science, history of styles, or nuances to the flavor palate, but really what I want to do is enjoy a great glass of beer with some friends... and I want others to do the same.

So at Taproom, when day transitions to night, when coffee cups give way to pint glasses, know that the goal is still community.

You might seek out and enjoy that seasonal one-off limited-release from a local brewery, but the real focus is connection with others - shared experiences. We'll always strive to offer up a killer lineup of draft beers from all over. We'll grow in nerdy beer knowledge and tasting. We'll teach and learn, pour and sip. But let's take the journey together. 

Keep It Simple

When we opened Taproom in the spring of 2014, the menu board was a $10 piece of plywood that we put some chalkboard paint on and threw together in half an hour so that we could have something on the wall when we opened. It was the stereotypical coffee shop chalk menu - filled with drink names, descriptions and prices all laid out in a grid.

Coffee customers usually know exactly what they want and the general ballpark of how much their drink costs, even if it's their first visit to a shop. We found out over time that it actually doesn't matter too much what's specifically written on that coffee menu board - people end up ordering what's on their mind anyway, or they end up asking the same questions regardless of whether or not the board already provided that information. A huge, detailed menu board, then, only serves to confuse or bog down the barista/customer interaction rather than make it more efficient. 

So we got rid of our clunky menu board. We narrowed down a list of the top items that we do best and that most people order, and we chose to highlight those items with individual menu tags. The local artists of Maplanta helped us produce the clean and simple laser-cut wood boards.

Now, when you walk in for the first time or the 50th time, the new slimmed-down menu will either quickly direct you to a delicious drink that we do well, or will nudge you towards a Taproom barista for more info - and they'll gladly walk you through what we have to offer and can answer any question you may have. 

And the pricing? We made that more simple too: We made slight price adjustments to the most frequently-ordered items, and now the final amount after taxes ends in a nice number rounded to the nearest quarter. That means we don't have to spend time dealing with dimes, nickels, or pennies in cash transactions. It also means that we no longer say, "That'll be $4.02," and then you either go digging around your wallet for a couple pennies or we load you down with eight more coins in change.

These little changes hopefully brighten the shop and help to improve every experience at Taproom. We always strive to consistently deliver quality drinks with quality customer service. If you ever have a suggestion, comment, or concern, please don't hesitate to contact us. I'll likely personally respond to your messages!

-Jonathan

Introducing Nitro Beerspresso

Since the time we opened shop in the spring of 2014, we’ve been searching for the perfect signature drink… a single beverage embodying the marriage of coffee and beer that’s at the heart of the identity of Taproom. We have a great coffee program. We have fun with our rotating craft beer selection. We even have a La Marzocco Linea “Beerspresso Machine” for our draft beer tower. But what drink could possibly be the best of both worlds? Well, I’m proud to announce that, after months of exciting research and experimentation, we’ve finally found it. 

Hi there World, I’d like to introduce you to....

Nitro Beerspresso™.

Japanese-style iced coffee. Dry-hopped. Kegged and pulled through a nitro tap. 

Japanese Iced Coffee. For our regular iced coffee service and as the base for Beerspresso, we use the Japanese-style iced coffee method, which was made popular (to us and to a lot of the specialty coffee world) by Peter Giuliano. This method results in a brighter, more aromatic iced coffee that retains a lot of the delicate flavor notes that tend to be subdued when using the more-popular “cold brew” method. 

In the cold brew/Japanese-style iced coffee discussion, I like to make the analogy of lagers vs. ales: In beer, lagers are fermented at lower temperatures and result in a smoother, milder and crisper flavor profile - much like the flavor profile you get from cold-brewed iced coffee. Ales, by comparison, are fermented at higher temperatures and result in a more complex, robust, possibly floral/fruity flavor profile - much like the flavor profile you can get from hot-brewed Japanese-style iced coffee. Both types of beer and both types of iced coffee have their strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately come down to personal preference. For us at Taproom, our iced coffee preference falls to the [ale-like] Japanese-style brewing method. So we just had to see what it tastes like when... 

Dry-Hopped. Hops are added to beer for bittering, flavor, and aroma. When added uncooked (or “dry”), hops can impart flavor and aroma but no bitterness - even in a beverage that isn’t beer. We experimented with adding different hop varieties to our iced coffee, and found some that really complemented or accentuated the floral/citrus notes already present in the brew. (This process doesn't add any alcohol to the coffee, by the way.) And in terms of overall flavor, the hops transformed our iced coffee to an almost-unrecognizable, extremely-delicious, new beverage - one that has a crisp citrusy brightness, hop highlights, coffee undertones, and a slightly heavier body than a normal iced coffee, all working together to present layers of flavor and complexity, further enhanced with... 

Nitro. We used 100% nitrogen gas (as opposed to the typical CO₂/N₂ gas blend) so that we could serve Beerspresso on draft without carbonating the beverage. In our experiments, even a little carbonation caused the iced coffee to taste too acidic and bright because of carbonic acid (think of the slightly tart flavor you get from plain sparkling water). Nitro beers, when also served with the appropriate faucet, get a thick, creamy head (like Guiness or Left Hand Milk Stout). Nitro iced coffees have the same thick, creamy mouthfeel that ends up being reminiscent of cappuccinos or even the crema of a fresh espresso shot.  

So what’s in Beerspresso, exactly? For coffee, we started with Counter Culture’s year-round offering Apollo (currently 100% Idido from Ethiopia), with bright floral and citrus notes that shone through the Japanese iced coffee method. We tried out several different kinds of hop varieties, settling on citrus-forward aroma hops for the first batches - distinct orange notes give the brew a noticeable punch that isn't too acidic, and rounds out nicely in the finish. 

The great thing about Beerspresso is that it’s not a final, set formula. We’re planning on rolling out later versions with different single-origin coffees and blends, and changing up the specific hop variety to best complement the coffee. Just like our 11 other constantly-rotating beer taps, our Beerspresso tap will be a permanent fixture on our Beerspresso Machine, but we’ll keep it fresh with a new recipe every so often. We’re already planning fun experiments with seasonal spices and syrups!  

I think Nitro Beerspresso is delicious. But don’t just take my word for it - come in and have a glass. As of today, you can sit down and enjoy Beerspresso at our bar, or you can take a cup to go. 

And on Friday, July 24th we’re having a Beerspresso release party! Mark your calendars for a fun bash. Let's see... we can do giveaways, drink Beerspresso, and what else related to nitro... racecars... Mario Kart!!! Yup, we'll do a Nitro Beerspresso/Mario Kart video game night. 

Cheers!

Jonathan