Falling In Love Again: It’s Never Just About the Coffee
by Milena Meneghetti, MCA Vice-President
Walking into this particular café downtown the first few times was a bit intimidating. From the outside, the building appeared dark and ominous: brick and black paint suggested one would want to stay away, rather than wander in to enjoy a Demitasse of tea, or a mug of Caffe Latte. The only redeeming feature from the exterior were the canines of various varieties, some rather large, but most obviously loved and leashed outside the café as their humans enjoyed themselves inside. Of course, as with most visits to café’s, it was more about the experiences, the conversations and the company you keep while inside that mattered.
On these cloudy, rainy, and sunny days downtown near our major river, my sense of curiosity gladly got the best of me and drew me in despite outward appearances. Eventually, back then, I had my fiancé (a handsome but intense sort of man) with me on occasion. A mysteriously beautiful demure French speaking woman as barista also coloured the experience for me just about every time. One couldn’t help but feel that you had entered a sort of time machine which brought you back to a much earlier day when coffee had a sort of underground feeling to it. It was a love at first visit, which grew for all those reasons.
At the beginning, over the course of several months, I came to know and feel an affinity with the many kind people who worked at this particular café. Still, I was concerned that many seemed somewhat ashen, even unwell. Others were simply reserved and introverted. A few were angry. This was pre-COVID-19 time, a time that changed all of our lives. Somehow this group all seemed a tad bit out of their element. However, they obviously worked together well, and there was a certain something that bonded the people working there which was palpable. They slowly established a sort of camaraderie with their customers, and it was a breath of fresh air at that time in my life. Later, I would come to learn that part of the magic of what they had built together, and with us, was based on our shared values of collaboration, mutual respect and sustainability — and one another magic ingredient: respect and admiration of adversity.
One of my favourite parts of being at this particular café was meeting people who were from various parts of the country, and I often heard other languages spoken, which was music to my small ears. You would often see scholars and young adults working – an office away from home as it were – and so we became a group of loosely multilingual Calgary citizens who found a warm place to feel at ease. I was in my own version of heaven, steps away from where I worked at the time. Each day there were new people, and I rarely crossed paths with the same customer more than a few times, giving it a sort of global, Olympic feeling.
One of the most striking and noticeable aspects of this café was the showcased Roaster which one could view very easily behind glass, but not directly access as a customer. I stood to watch on many occasions, a huge rotating cast iron drum flanked by all manner of equipment I could not identify. My curiosity was piqued, and all of it created a feeling of their deep investment in the world of coffee – something I greatly admired and respected. I would watch as the staff would dump very large sacks of raw coffee beans into the bin and as the months wore on, the smell of freshly roasted coffee won over the more industrial construction-related smells in the air as the essence of the warmed oils seeped from the beans to greet our noses.
The guided tour my fiancé organized as a gift ended with a visit to the upstairs, where the true coffee purveyors worked to blend and taste the coffee before it was packed to be used in the store and sold as whole-bean coffee for customers to bring home. Sam Flynn described for us a new process which was about developing relationships with the owners of coffee farms in coffee producing countries and towns. Together, they were working to enjoy the benefits of a process which would be mutually beneficial, not only for the producers, but also for the communities that had been slowly resurrected as a result of this project.
Sam described their newest approach as “Third Wave Coffee”; a proprietary system for roasting where “custom roast profiles” are being created based on the region from which the coffee originates. Their motto is “one country, one region, one farm.” Jesting, the system was described as a their “good obsession”: The coffee came from “ethical COOPs” and this café had the goal to treat farmers more fairly. At the time they had nine different coffees being grown and harvested.
The love and care that was evident in this proprietary system was most evident to me when I heard that it was likely this café’s profit margins were far lower because of the fact that they were doing their very best to be as ethical as possible in all their dealings.
Their first attempts in this Third Wave were to source coffee from Central America, other parts of Panama, and Costa Rica. These produced coffees that were “washed” and tasting more like honey. This variety of coffee was easier to grow but, due to the growing conditions at the time, did not taste as good. Hence the need for in-house processes to improve the flavour by working with water chemistry. In the upstairs “lab” the owners of this café tasted all of the drip coffee roasts and they were working hard day and night to ensure the coffees they offered in their café would please their customers and remain some of the best coffee in the world.
Phil & Sebastian’s will forever hold a special place in my heart. Call me too sentimental and romantic, but I, fell in love all over again that summer — partly with the handsome man on my arm, and partly with the experiences in my new favourite coffee shop, smack dab in the middle of the prairies. It’s still there. But that handsome man? Well, — who knows how he is, where he is and what he’s doing now. Although we were married, the marriage, and any shred of respect I had left for him, ended in divorce when he left after only eight months of marriage without explanation or (apparently) remorse, for the repercussions.
“Why this story?” What does it have to do with MCA? It is my way of saying let’s work together to make our community all it can be — diversity and all. If I need to pass the torch to the next Vice-President, whomever our community chooses that to be — let’s still work together with that in our minds and in our hearts. Because it’s never just about the coffee. It’s about living, and making our community a safe, welcoming and a place we all want to be.
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