ROASTER OF THE YEAR AWARD

COUNTER CULTURE COFFEE

Driving the Passion for Coffee

by Shanna Germain

WALK INTO Counter Culture’s cupping room on any given Friday morning, and you’re sure to find a collection of employees, customers, coffee aficionados and friends lined up in front of the counter, silver spoons in hand. If you’re lucky, you might get to hear Counter Culture’s roasters chat about their favorite coffees or crack a few of their canned jokes, just for effect. If you’re really lucky, you’ll have time to stay a while, cup some organic Sumatra or shade-grown Harrar, and get a firsthand feel for the culture of Counter Culture.
    “Our Friday cuppings are like Sundays at church,” says Peter Giuliano, master roaster and coffee buyer for Counter Culture. “It’s a moment where the whole extended family comes together. We try to make it as welcoming and comfortable as possible, without dumbing it down.”
    As part of the company’s goal of making coffee accessible and understandable to anyone who’s interested, the cuppings are open to everybody, even those who don’t know the first thing about coffee. “Almost always, there is somebody in the room who has never cupped before,” Giuliano says. “Sometimes it’s customers, sometimes it’s family—my mother-in-law came last week—guys who work here bring their girlfriends…”
    In fact, Giuliano admits, the company likes to have “newbies” at the cuppings. It’s a chance for Counter Culture employees to do what they love to do: spread the word about their passion for good coffee. “I think we need to be evangelists of coffee,” Giuliano says. “Whatever it takes, we need to get more people involved.”
    While Counter Culture’s weekly cuppings may not be unique to the industry, they are just one example of how the company pursues its ultimate goals: quality coffee, quality of life and quality people. This three-pronged approach makes Counter Culture stand out among its peers.
    The company’s vision statement is built on these three priorities:
    • The relentless pursuit of coffee perfection
    • A dedication to real environment, social and fiscal sustainability, and
    • A commitment to creating cutting-edge coffee people.
    Of course, all three priorities go hand in hand. You can’t have coffee perfection without having amazing coffee people. And you can’t have amazing coffee people—including producers, employees and customers—without supporting the communities in which those people live and work. That interconnecting chain—from coffee to community to people, and back again—has been the backbone of Counter Culture since its inception, and it continues to be the driving force behind the company today.

From the Grounds Up

Established in 1995, Counter Culture was the brainchild of Brett Smith and Fred Houk. Smith, whose background was in business and not coffee, credits Houk with establishing much of Counter Culture’s culture.     “Fred had been in the coffee industry for a while, and he really laid the foundation for what we’ve evolved into today,” Smiths says. “He is very passionate about coffee and service, and he introduced and brought the desire for sustainability to our company, all the way up the chain to the farmers.”
    Houk, an avid birder, also brought the idea of shade-grown coffees to the company with Sanctuary Coffees, one of the first bird-friendly lines. Even the Counter Culture name was created with those priorities in mind. “We spent a lot of time trying to come up with a name, and let me tell you, we had some bad ones,” Smith says with a laugh. “Fred was part of the counter culture movement in the ’60s, and we used that name, which turned out great. There’s a double entendre there that I think says a lot about who we are.”
    A wholesale-only roaster, Counter Culture produces about 450,000 pounds of coffee each year, selling the majority to restaurants, coffee shops and specialty stores. In 2000, Counter Culture was listed in Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest-growing privately owned companies.
    In 2001, Smith bought out Houk’s portion of the company. “It was an amicable departure,” Smith says. “I wanted to continue growing the company and had some ideas that I was passionate about pursuing.”
    Since then, the company has continued to build on that foundation of pursing great coffee, while supporting the people, plants and places that are part of the coffee world.

Pursuing Coffee Perfection

First and foremost among Counter Culture’s priorities is the pursuit of coffee perfection. Ask Giuliano what that means—the perfect coffee experience—and he’ll admit he doesn’t know. Instead, he’ll start waxing philosophical. “It’s kind of an Aristotelian idea, the idea that there is perfection out there somewhere and we may not know what it is and we may not see it ever, but we have to believe it’s out there,” he says. “It gives you a reason to constantly be trying to improve. I’m very afraid of the trap of, ‘Well, we’re the best, why do we need to get any better?’ You don’t want to get satisfied with good enough.”
    In the ongoing attempt to create coffee perfection, the company chooses its coffee carefully, regularly buys Cup of Excellence lots and roasts only single-origin batches, believing it is difficult to roast blends with precision. In addition, they work directly with producers to improve coffee quality, often paying extra for outstanding production and protocols.
    To ensure that the coffee is at its best from start to finish, employees and customers receive training on coffee practices and techniques, visit origin countries to see coffee farms and meet with producers, and are encouraged to take and teach classes. In addition to the Friday-morning cuppings, the company conducts monthly espresso and brewing labs and has played a large role in organizing barista competitions. “The thing we realized was when you make everybody in an organization into a coffee person, by definition, you’ll always have great coffee,” Giuliano says. “We choose to think of ourselves as a teaching organization, and it’s made all the difference.”

Sustainable Ways

Hand in hand with Counter Culture’s pursuit of great coffees is the company’s drive to be sustainable. That’s because Counter Culture believes that in order to grow the best coffee, you have to have rich organic soil, shade trees, beneficial birds and insects, and, of course, people who are passionate about picking and processing coffee.
    In 1996, Counter Culture introduced Sanctuary Coffees, one of the first shade-grown coffee lines. The company was also the first certified-organic roaster in North Carolina, and today more than 70 percent of its coffee is certified-organic, certified-fair-trade or both.
    The company also instituted a program called the Partnership for Great Coffee. It began a few years ago when a Peace Corps family from Durham bought a coffee farm in Nicaragua. The family’s goal was to convert it to an organic farm and to set up a sister-city relationship. Counter Culture agreed to roast the coffee for free, so the family could sell it in Durham and use the money to convert the farm. “We did this for three or four years, and then they invited us to visit this community as a thank you gesture,” Giuliano says. “I went down and realized this was a coffee town that had such great potential, but they weren’t realizing it.”
    Together, they worked to reach out to the community. “The idea was to become really connected with independent producers in this little town and do whatever we could to get them to the place where they were producing [true] specialty coffees,” Giuliano says.
    Last year, Counter Culture took a group of customers down to the community, where they stayed on the farm and met the producers. During one meeting, the producers and retailers talked about their struggles and goals. “Farmers were saying, ‘First of all, we want to make enough money to survive and prosper. And second of all, we are willing to work hard, but we hate to toil in obscurity,’” Giuliano says. “And our customers said, ‘We want to be happy and prosperous, but we also want to experience this kind of connection every day.”
    To help the producers and their customers, Counter Culture created Partnership for Great Coffee. Each year, the top 10 coffee producers from the community receive $100 in prize money and are matched up with one of Counter Culture’s customers. The producer receives information about the customer, while the customer receives photos and information about the farmers that they are able to put up in their store.
    The program offers a chance for an engaged community, creates a mechanism for rewarding quality and is completely transparent. “The cool thing is that some of these guys become pen pals, and our customers have sent stuff to their producers,” Giuliano says. “To me, that’s the sort of creative thinking that’s going to lead to phenomenal coffees in the coming years.”

Power to the People

Creating cutting-edge coffee people is perhaps the most difficult—and the most unusual—part of the mission statement. “The moment we articulated the vision statement, we converted from thinking of ourselves as a roaster of great coffees to thinking of ourselves as a promoter of coffee people,” says Giuliano.
    By turning everyone into a coffee person, the company changes from what Giuliano and Smith call a “culture of control” into a place of empowerment. “What I think has helped our company the most and what has really energized people has been giving them the ability to make decisions and to act,” Smith says. “There are no real stars of the company. We focus on pushing the company as a whole. It really brings people together and galvanizes us as a group and helps us be successful.”
    Along those lines, the company provides benefits for all its employees. “I’ve always felt like for any number of reasons, it makes sense to provide great benefits for everybody that works with us, so as soon as we could, we put a health benefits and 401K plan in place,” Smith says.
    Last year, the company began a profit-sharing program for employees as well. Every year, 10 percent of the profit goes into the profit-sharing pool. The portion each person gets is based on a number of factors, including position within the company, tenure and his or her status as what the company calls “a coffee person.” Defined as “really sharing the passion that we have for coffee,” an employee’s “coffee person” status is based on a number of factors. “We want to reward people for being coffee people,” Giuliano says. “Coffee is a thing that is totally worth getting excited about in whatever capacity that you are—whether you’re a coffee grower, importer, roaster, barista or consumer.”
    Still, Giuliano admits it’s hard to put a tangible face on something that’s so value-driven. To explain, he tells the story of someone interviewing for a job with the company. “He said he was ‘fascinated by the potential for coffee to be a medium of exchange,’” Giuliano recalls. “We hired him just for saying that.”
    In the process of pursuing the company’s goals, Giuliano admits that everybody has a lot to learn, and they don’t always get things perfect. But that’s part of the joy of trying. “Taking responsibility for the whole chain is hard, and it’s intimidating,” he says. “But I think the answer is not being afraid to try and be wrong. You just work at it, and that provides an inspiration for us.”
    Of course, a daily cup of awe never hurts either. “I am humbled by the beauty that I’ve seen in coffee, and I think I can extend that to everyone who works here,” Giuliano says. “And I am similarly humbled by other people in the industry that are doing phenomenal things every single day.”

ROASTER OF THE YEAR RUNNER-UP

TAYLOR MAID FARMS

All of the coffee that Taylor Maid Farms roasts and sells is certified-organic. Seventy-five percent of it is certified-fair-trade.
    This makes sense when you look at the company’s mission: to be environmentally and socially progressive, to be responsible to the communities it interacts with and to be committed to sustainable quality—all while remaining profitable. “I set out to prove early on a sustainable business can be just as profitable as a non-organic company,” says Mark Inman, Taylor Maid Farms president and green coffee buyer. “When we started, people thought we were a joke.”
    Since then, Taylor Maid has turned the passion of being sustainable into two kinds of green benefits: saving the environment and turning a profit.
    The company’s list of sustainable practices is long and unique: deliveries are made in biodiesel-powered vehicles; biodegradable waste is recycled using vermiculture; coffee is packaged in recyclable steel packaging; and each Taylor Maid employee is given a raised bed on site, in which he or she can grow organic vegetables. Taylor Maid was also the first roaster to use the Kestrel S35 Roaster by Loring Smart Roaster, a roaster that reduces fuel use and emissions by 80 percent. In addition, the company buys only certified-organic products that come from farms that use bio-intensive/whole system farming practices.
    Taylor Maid achieves profitability in the same way that it achieves a sustainable business: by being accountable to all the communities with which it interacts, from producers and employees to customers and other roasters. Daily cuppings are used to train employees and to help them understand the product. In addition, everyone at the company is currently being cross-trained in all aspects of coffee preparation. The company is also heavily involved in education, whether employees are speaking at coffee events, writing articles, being members of the Roasters Guild Executive Council board or helping found the Barista Guild of America.
    From creating local and global sustainability to offering quality coffee while turning a profit, Taylor Maid is a coffee company that’s truly taking care of business.