Is Asheville at forefront of new farm-to-cup coffee culture?

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Story from Time magazine:

Coffee aficionados have been asking the question over and over again: is Portland’s Stumptown coffee, the most conspicuous exponent of Coffee’s “Third Wave,” the new Starbucks?

Wait, you haven’t heard of the third wave? Get with the program! In cities across America, a new fervid generation of caffeine evangelists are changing the way we drink coffee. They tend to be male, heavily bearded, zealous and very meticulous in what they do. And the coffee they produce is as much an improvement over Starbucks and its rivals as Starbucks was over Taster’s Choice. Stumptown didn’t make a movement by itself. There’s Intelligentsia in Chicago, Counter Culture in North Carolina, and as far back as the ’80s some roasters, like David Dallis of Dallis Coffee, were seeking to import beans from single farms, roasting them less rather than more, and generally doing the things that separate this movement from its Seattle-based progenitors in the ’70s.

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Counter Culture has stores, and even training centers, in Asheville and Durham, N.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, New York City and Washington, D.C. But there’s just no way any farm-to-cup roaster can open up 60 stores, let alone 16,000+ like Starbucks. But every town can have a little café that, if it doesn’t buy its coffee beans from a small farm in Burundi or Costa Rica, at least can buy them from someone who does.