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/66983
W hen he's talking about coffee, John Justice's energy spills over like a pasta pot nearing its boiling point. It's easy to see and hear the fire behind the energy. As operations manager for a surging specialty coffee roaster and retail café in Columbus, Ohio, Justice doesn't try to contain his passion for his work. If anything, he approaches it with a pre- cision and structure he absorbed during military service before beginning a career in the specialty coffee industry. Those dynamics are in keeping with the word brioso, an Italian music term conveying vigor and lively spirit. They also suggest an attitude guests can find in ready supply at Café Brioso, a 2,000-square-foot café and roasting center in the city's downtown district. The space is home to an evolving coffee culture centered around a roasting station—where customers typically find owner and chief roaster Jeff Davis—as well as a full espresso bar and a kitchen that cranks out traffic-building breakfasts and lunches. Café Brioso may be located in a metropolitan area known widely for its sprawling Ohio State University campus and corporate retail and restaurant outposts, but the shop brings a dose of hand-crafted intimacy to Ohio's capital. Davis and 68 COFFEE ALMANAC 2012 Justice are focused on small-batch roasting, highlighting great taste at the bar and educating customers in the nuances of fine coffee. "When we first opened, the demand for food was really high," Davis says. "The demand for coffee was not. Now we're at a point after 10 years where we have that reputation locally for finer hand-crafted coffees of all kinds. It's about being excited about coffee every day." Evolving with specialty coffee sits at the core of Brioso. The roasting area sits beside a custom pour-over station that Davis recently built to take the café a step further in its coffee prepara- tion. It became an immediate showcase for the café's newest lots from wholesale importers such as Royal Coffee and Café Imports. Among the coffee superstars are an Ethiopia Tchembe and the La Granja Esperanza Geisha La Margarita from Colombia. Davis founded the business in 2001 and hired Justice a few years ago to elevate service at the bar. Before Brioso, both had worked at Stauf's Coffee Roasters, a longtime fixture in the Columbus area. Today the two leaders and their expanding team have worked hard to build a culture that stands out among area competi-