Counter Culture Coffee

I had an opportunity to attend a Bay Area Tasting at Ten and would highly recommend it!Every Friday at 10am, Counter Culture Coffee opens its doors to the public to taste delicious coffee and discuss sustainability in the coffee industry. What an eye opener (in more ways than one)! Each week showcases different offerings, giving me an excuse to come back again sometime. The tasting is fun, FREE, and super informative. They even offer a low-key tour of the roasting room afterward. Don't miss this unique Emeryville experience!

I attended the Friday 10:00am cupping recently and left smitten. If you are a coffee nerd and want to be the coffee version of those annoying people in wineries that wax poetic about "nose" and "body" you'll love it. We smelled and slurped 2 different Colombian coffees (my inner coffee nerd was disappointed there weren't more). So be like me and belly your soccer-mom-self up to the bar with all the hipsters and try it. We were also treated to a tour of the roasting facility. They have a small San Franciscan and a giant Loring. There are pallets of coffee on Costco sized industrial shelving. There is also a crazy little (not little) room where (Amy?) the lady with my dream job tastes and roasts samples of coffee. *sigh* Long story short, they were probably thinking they were going to need to escort me out because I just couldn't seem to leave. But eventually I scraped myself out of there with a bonus bag of freshly roasted coffee that they gave me. I think I was a blithering idiot by that point. Everyone was very nice. Unfortunately I'm terrible with names and I only remember Jesse because he gave me his card. Can't wait to revisit.

Counter Culture coffee is now available at the Monterey Market in Berkeley! The price is $12.95 for a 12-ounce bag. (If you're keeping score at home, that works out to slightly over a dollar an ounce.) I started with the Big Trouble and moved on to the Forty Six. You can find descriptions of the coffees at https://counterculturecoffee.com/store/coffee . The roasts are a little darker ("deeper") than those of most third wave coffee roasters. The Forty Six, in particular, reminds me somewhat of the great old days of Peets and Starbucks, when they were just starting out and hadn't become yuge chains. Alfred Peet was a big fan of the full city roast; Counter Culture doesn't go all the way there, but it certainly veers a bit in that direction.These are elegant and interesting coffees. It's a pleasure to see them on the same Monterey Market shelf that offers coffees from Verve, Intelligentsia, Ritual, and so on. All of these coffees are offered at essentially the same price, so there is no reason not to move around and try different things. My main principle has been to look for the most recent roasting dates. Even though the coffees tend to be vacuum sealed, freshness definitely counts!

Somehow in my 20 odd years of caring about coffee I've never made it to a cupping. Thank you, Counter Culture, for changing that and for teaching me how to sniff, break, and slurp. I arrived a bit late and was warmly welcomed into a group that included a lot of folks from Blue Bottle and Peets. Everyone seemed impressed with the facility. Very knowledgable and friendly staff. Excited for the roaster to be up and running and to take a class. These light roasts are sure starting to grow on me. Public cuppings every Friday at 10 am. Go!!

I was excited to see photos (here on Yelp) of donuts lined up on the counter and was looking forward to walking in for a coffee and pastry. However, the Emeryville location doesn't serve coffee, except on Fridays at 10 am, when they are open to the public for free tasting (cuppings, to you!). It looks like some of their specialized classes are open to the public too, such as one that covers "brewing basics." I plan to drop in some Friday, but In the meantime I'm reviewing a bag of coffee I picked up at Whole Foods - an organic blend called Forty-Six. Normally it costs $13, but Whole Foods had it on sale for $11 - pretty good for a 12 oz bag compared to some of the other Bay Area "third wave" coffee roasters. It was a strange concoction: a dark roast of blended Colombian and Ethiopian coffees (my bag was 50% Colombia (Los Vascos), 38% Ethiopia yirgacheffe (Idido), and 12% Ethiopia natural sundried (Aramo), but apparently the composition of blend Forty-Six varies over time). I love Ethiopian coffee and I'm pretty sure it's not common to combine it with Colombian and then give it a dark roast. But it worked! I love natural sundried beans, where the full cherry is dried in the sun where the bean can take up some of the fruity sweetness from the cherry pulp, and perhaps this was evident from the small percentage in the blend - there was definitely something good in there and I wish there was more of it. It smelled wonderful (It was roasted on 02/09 - just the day before I bought it!) and did live up to the notes on the package - chocolate, full-bodied. Overall, I think it deserved 5/5 stars for quality and price and I look forward to trying their single origin coffees. For social and environmental impact I'm giving Counter Culture 5/5 "green" stars. That's right - green stars. You can't see them yet, but we'll have them someday - please join in. This rating comes down to the social and environmental responsibility of Counter Culture as a company and the coffee I bought in particular. Starting with the bag that it comes in - it's compostable! Most bags, even those with paper on the outside, have a non-compostable plastic lining. This one can be composted after you remove the plastic valve and closure tie. The coffee itself is organic and Counter Culture has a third-party-certified direct trade system for fair pricing. They do a great job with transparency, publishing their coffee prices in their sustainability reports - you can even select by country of origin and see prices paid for each farm. Their average (FOB) price paid in 2014 for a single-origin coffee, weighted by poundage, was $3.37. They paid between $4 and $7 per pound Colombian organic coffees. They are essentially carbon neutral for their own operations: they calculate their entire carbon footprint, including travel and shipping, and purchase wind power or finance tree planting to offset it. They also say they are working on reducing energy use - the Emeryville roastery was established partly to reduce shipping from Durham (their only roastery until now). There is clearly still room for improvement - to take one example, they could increase donations to their Seeds program ("supporting projects in coffee-growing communities that improve the natural environment and promote education") from their current level of one penny per pound of coffee bought. But the nice thing is that they are making an effort to be fully transparent in their reporting (both as hard numbers and also in blog form) and I think they serve as a good example to other companies.

Found their coffee at a small coffee/pastry shop in L. A. And asked the barista if I could get a pound bag of this great tasting beverage to go. A little while later I was brewing my own expresso at home. Highly recommend

Love Counter Culture coffee! It has a really nice depth of flavor and is the perfect start to my morning. The people there are friendly. I got to tour their facility and the precision that goes into each roast is impressive. Definitely one of the best independent roasters in the bay if not the west coast.

I am reviewing the roasted coffee bean offerings available at SF Bay Area retail outlets eg. Whole Foods and by mail from the website. I have sampled many of the local award winning coffee products producted by local roasters, but wish to acknowledge the outstanding flavor profiles of the wide variety of single origin and blends offered by Counter Culture. Counter Culture coffees are found on the opposite end of the roasting spectrum (light) when compared to Peets (dark). All of the roasts that I have sampled - from Fast Forward to Hologram have offered a consistent and flavorful cup. Often, I have a "favorite" single origin/blend for most of the different roasters. However, all of the coffees that I have sampled - Idido, 46, Hologram - are distinct in their cupping qualities but are equally enjoyable.Counter Culture is currently my preferred coffee roaster brand with a broad offering of single origin/blends. I still have specific competitor "favorites" but these are typically from micro roasters who do not have the wide range of roasted products as offered by Counter Culture.