Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
RALEIGH- DURHAM- CHAPEL HILL, N.C.
CAFÉ HELIOS
TASTE THE TRIANGLE The area around the three small Central North Carolina
cities Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill has long been hailed as a hotbed of software development and biomedical research. Such recognition makes sense: The "Triangle" towns boast three colleges that draw internationally—Duke, North Carolina State and University of North Carolina—and facilities for IBM, Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline and many other multinationals are all nearby. Since the early-to-mid-1990s, however, this pocket of the
South has also quietly grown into one of the most forward- thinking specialty coffee communities on the East Coast. "We used to have to tell people what a cappuccino was," says Robbie Roberts, who opened one of the first specialty cafés in Raleigh in 1991 and soon after started roasting company Joe Van Gogh. "Everything's changed." True, the Raleigh-Durham area has for years had a presence on
the quality-coffee radar. Counter Culture Coffee, a name most everyone in the industry recognizes and respects, started in Durham in 1995. But as Counter Culture has increased its list of wholesale accounts and training centers nationwide and become a national brand, a number of smaller players have kept central North Carolina's café scene unique and locally focused. Roberts' Joe Van Gogh, for instance, recently opened its fourth
retail location to complement the company's roasting facility, which since 2004 has been located just outside of Chapel Hill in the town of Hillsborough. The roasting side of the business offers dozens of single-origins the company works to source itself. The same can be said of the coffee marketed by Carrboro Coffee,
the roastery owned by Scott Conary, who's well known in the spe- cialty coffee world for his work judging and organizing barista competition events (he's chair of the SCAA's USBC Committee). In addition to top-scoring coffees he finds on sourcing trips, Conary began five years ago importing and roasting beans that had won
JOE VAN GOGH
Cup of Excellence honors. Such products tend to carry a hefty price tag, but Conary—who also owns Open Eye Café and Caffe Driade, both in the Chapel Hill area—feels the Triangle market is one where consumers are open to innovative culinary ideas. "We're changing minds here," he says. "Maybe a bit slower than in other places, but it's happening." And it's not just the roasters that are building up Carolina cof-
fee: A number of quality-focused shops also have found success. Aside from the cafés run by Conary and Roberts, there's Raleigh's Café Helios, which serves Counter Culture and has been a go-to independent shop in the state capital for a decade. Chapel Hill's 3 Cups, meanwhile, prides itself on providing customers with stel- lar education and product when it comes to wine and tea as well as coffee. And new to the market is Jubala Village Coffee, a shop that opened last year and features seasonal coffees available as espresso and pour-over. As is often the case when a coffee community grows, the influx
of players has helped push individual businesses. "Five years ago this was just a generic coffee shop," says Ian Dunn, who manages Café Helios. "But we've evolved into a shop that sources local ingredients and has locally roasted coffee and very talented baris- tas. We've just gotten better." And how has a section of the country with a relatively low
population density and mild winters been able to support the pursuit of world-class coffee? The answer lies partly in the fact that so many of the area's residents are drawn from other areas of the country and world to work in the Triangle's labs and study at its schools. "We're in a bit of an isolated oasis, for lack of a bet- ter word," says Conary, who himself is a Maine transplant who initially moved south to take a research job. "It tends to be much more international in thinking and action than other parts of North Carolina." But the years of work that local companies have put into trans-
forming individual consumers into appreciators of great brews continued on page 42
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