Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/158781
NINE BARS by Matt Milletto There's more than one way to start a shop SHARED SPACE: Portland's Water Avenue Coffee chose to open its second location inside a winery. O ne of my favorite industry developments in recent years has been the transition of more and more baristas to café owners. As a barista since the 1990s who is now a café owner, I've been thrilled to see others on a similarly upward trajectory—it's a far cry from the old sentiment that working as a barista can't lead to a career. This has been on my mind recently as Water Avenue Coffee, the retail-roasting business I co-own with Bruce Milletto and Brandon Smyth, has embarked on a new project. Though we have a flagship retail location where we also do our roasting and showcase our coffees, we opened a second venture this summer in which we are cohabitating with a local urban winery. There are two elements of this endeavor—the small footprint and the shared space—that have allowed us to lower our costs and overhead dramatically. We've launched a second location in an inexpensive way, and I view our model as one that could be useful for entrepreneurial baristas and other aspiring café owners and micro-roasters. 48 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com SHARING A SPACE The new branch of Water Avenue Coffee is inside Enso Winery, located in Southeast Portland about a mile from our roastery. The two businesses launched around the same time—ours in 2010, Enso in 2011—and we quickly developed a friendship with Enso's winemaker, Ryan Sharp, through the camaraderie of being fellow business owners with new ventures. Though both of our companies had our hands full in the first years of running our business, we eventually got our feet under us and began to consider expansion opportunities. It turns out that Sharp felt he had more space than he could use—not in terms of actual size, but as far as the hours in a day. Enso opens at 4 p.m. during the week and at 2 p.m. on weekends, meaning that it's shuttered in the mornings and early afternoons. For him, it made financial sense to charge rent to another business—such as a coffee shop—that did the bulk of its sales during those hours. Due to our pre-existing relationship, Water Avenue