Return to my cafe roots

I am thrilled to announce the return to my café roots. On Monday, Laurie and I purchased Taste Coffee House in Newtonville, MA, a suburb of Boston. Taste was owned and operated by Nik Krankl, a superstar in the local coffee scene! Nik built Taste into a first-rate cafe with a strong reputation for good food and extraordinary espresso drinks in the local coffee scene. We intend to maintain the food, espresso and service traditions Nik so solidly established in just two years.

We teamed up early with Nik – foreseeing what a star he would become in the local coffee scene. Taste has served our drip coffee exclusively since 2008 and frequently offered our espressos in his rotating espresso program. We worked closely with him to develop the signature espresso blend, Cerise, that he competed with in the 2010 United States Barista Competition, in which he took twelfth place! To learn more about Taste Coffee House check out the website - www.tastecoffeehouse.com. We look forward to continuing our creative relationship with Nik as he moves back to his California roots and opens a second café in the near future!

We will take over from where Nik has left off. We will keep with Nik’s rotating espresso program and convert the drip coffee program to the same level of excellence and diversity. In the near future we will start a rotating drip coffee program – serving the full range of George Howell Coffees, similar to The Coffee Connection’s style of small batch brewing. Freshness of brew will be key!  A bit further down the road we will bring in single cup brewing as well.

As a buyer and roaster of the finest coffees on the planet our goal with Taste is to have more face to face interaction with coffee consumers, to learn from their feedback, and to have a venue to educate them about our coffees and the many brew methods available for home use.

Getting our feet wet with Taste is the first of many exciting plans we have in store as we move towards opening a Boston flagship store in 2011. More updates to come on our progress at Taste but in the mean time please stop by and say hello!