“Tradition and Nostalgia, keep the great flavors, loose the bad”
Coffee, it’s our escape, our revival, and our reward. My wife and I own and operate Tar Beach Coffee because we love to make coffee just like we first tasted as our younger selves , and that coffee lacked some finesse, lacked some balance. How do we define what we loved about that coffee, rectify it’s shortfalls, and convey that in our own efforts? How do we bag that style for the public at large? It took some immersion into the Central and South American markets where coffee is a religion. We just started with some standards, free trade, pay the farmers, our choice of varietals, countries of origin and our roast levels. Once upon a time, Kim and I were little kids growing up in America in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s begging our parents for coffee all the time, I mean they drank it every day, all day, in the morning, at lunch, after dinner, all the time really and damn it..... we wanted coffee too.
For me, my first coffee scrounging success was with my grandmother.... she caved in first. I was 7 or 8 and she got me half a cup, really, it was a cup cut in half and it said “I’ll just have a half a cup”. It was cute but I was like “Whatever, give me the coffee and I mean right now!” I remember being on the verge of anxiety in anticipation of my first sip and I was like “Wow! It tastes like hot cereal milk loaded with sugar”,. I said “mmmmm,” OK, so I mistakenly thought it’s a vehicle for mainlining refined sugar, and at 7 or 8 I cared about little else than mainlining refined sugar. The seal had been broken and I was officially a daily coffee drinker now. Not long after that, I tried black coffee and it was dreadful, you know exactly what I mean, bitter, harsh, nothing like sugar..... it was bordering on false advertising. I was really out of context because in grandma’s kitchen, where all things culinary were deep fried, sweet, magical and perfect, black coffee was sugarless and therefore out of place. I resigned myself to light and sweet coffee for years.
Growing up in Atlanta with my mom, who loved her coffee light and sweet, I drank my coffee like she drank hers. In those early years ,mom was ahead of the curve , and got her Gevalia specialty coffee by mailorder. It was all very fancy and nobody knew what to make of that. Still, it took me a long time to pay attention to where the coffee I was drinking came from. All I knew was the nightly ritual my mom had of filling the coffee machine with water and setting the timer so we could wake up to freshly brewed coffee. The joy of that repetition became established lifelong tradition.
Sometime later, but still very young, I spent the night shark fishing on Sand Island in Biscayne Bay with my Dad and Uncle Lenny. They caught nurse sharks all night long and I caught a barracuda and fed all of Miami’s mosquitoes with my body. Dad made cowboy coffee at about 4am in a pot over the fire. After the all-nighterfishing and having fun outing the open world, that coffee tasted bitter and harsh but damn it was perfect. I was cold in the morning dew, exhausted, just done, and this magical nasty cowboy coffee just completely revived me. It clicked and I understood. I was desperate for anything pleasant and I appreciated that coffee so much. I had a new tool in the box, and my perspective changed. I felt the caffeine work it’s magic in my body and in my soul, the overnight was a haul and I was now so revived. I got it...coffee rocks, coffee is life, coffee good.
Our coffee is such an ongoing, important and enjoyable part of our lives, paying a little more attention to where it’s from, who cultivated it, how it’s processed and the way that flavors develop once green beans are roasted make a really significant difference in our happiness. It won’t take you long to learn a little bit, experiment, and get great results. You’ll be sitting there with a big smile on your face, because
you just realized that now you’ll always be able to create a new blend, discover new varietals from new origins . . . basically you’ll be experimenting with coffee from here on out, and you’ll love every cup.
We began our company with two coffee styles we couldn’t live without; a great medium roasted blend from the Americas, all Arabica beans reminiscent of our first sweeter cups, and a stronger toastier French dark roast from all over the world to pick you up by your bootstraps when you need that coffee embrace to get it going. We love, love, love these coffee styles, what is different now is that we got the great memory of grandma’s., mom, and dad’s coffee flavors without the not so great burnt, bitter flaws. We didn’t reinvent the wheel; we made it taste better. Life’s too short to drink mass-produced coffee. It’s really not treated with the respect and care that the living product deserves and we all know what that tastes like. Conversely, life is too long to drink mass produced coffee. There are endless better options; We have chosen to begin our Tar Beach Coffee journey in the deep, well travelled groove of tradition and nostalgia.
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