Taos’ take on the ‘specialty coffee’ shop

Coffeehouses are historically and culturally recognized as places where people can socialize while enjoying a stimulating beverage, each community and cafe cultivating within itself a culture of its own. With so many different local coffee shops in Taos, business owners and coffee enthusiasts have a lot to say about coffeehouses and their relationship with the greater community.

Pablo Flores and Lydia McHaley, co-owners of Coffee Apothecary, have operated their cafe for over six years, a journey which Flores undertook to pursue his love for the bean. While the shop isn’t old, he’s been involved with the beverage for two decades, starting as a barista while attending Taos High School. However, his passion only grew, especially when he began visiting specialty coffee shops in Albuquerque years ago.

Shortly after, he realized this would be his vocation. Emptying his bank account to purchase the right equipment, he began the meticulous task of becoming a self-taught coffee bean roaster. Watching videos and reading books taught him the science behind it, but none of these mediums considered the change that high altitude brings to the roasting process. However, he was determined.

“When you kinda stick within that realm of specialty coffee,” Flores said, “you really have this consistent exploration, the process of discovering something new, and I think that’s what’s cool about the shop, and I think the customers — the locals and steady regulars — I think that’s what they figured out. We try really hard to keep our mainstay espresso blend as consistent as possible. Because, you know, let’s not mess with people’s coffee.”

But messing with people’s coffee is exactly what he did. With customers that offered honest and constructive feedback, he was able to maneuver and understand the roasting process, even being nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Today, he has a loyal customer base and a broad palette of coffee beans. He sells more beans than he does beverages, he noted.

Flores now sees himself as a chef, experimenting with coffee flavors and concocting recipes, which are then handed off to the baristas — the line cooks of the coffee world — to prepare for customers. However, he believes this

relationship — the one between roaster and barista — is oftentimes taken for granted.

“When I went into some of these specialty coffee shops,” Flores said. “They’re showing you how coffee itself is so nuanced when it comes to how it will taste, and without having to go as far as a dark roast, if you stick somewhere beneath that parameter, you get a huge, varying amount of flavor profiles that you would just never come across. Not all of them are great, but what it is is how you, as the roaster and the barista, come together and create that friendship.”

A former barista himself, Flores had a lot to say about the profession. The baristas that many are used to can pull levers and push buttons, but at Coffee Apothecary, they’re “professionals,” McHaley said, and they combine the craft and science behind coffee.

Recipe in mind, the Coffee Apothecary barista must also understand the science behind the coffee-making process. As humidity and precipitation change — even as the sun disappears and reappears from behind the clouds — the content in the grinder and espresso machine changes in flavor, which leads to the baristas having to monitor these pieces of equipment and recognize changes that might come about as a result of the weather and changes in barometric pressure.

“I think the baristas have a huge responsibility, and people don’t give them enough credit,” Flores said. “You have to have, not only the attention span in the middle of a full-blown rush to keep up with the demands that go behind making coffee, but then you’re hosting people.”

Other coffee shops around Taos have their own take on community engagement. World Cup, one of Taos’ legacy coffeehouses, opened 31 years ago after its founder — the late Patrick Larkin — returned from a voyage to Italy, where he observed coffeehouses that cultivated vibrant social atmospheres. According to owner Andrea Meyer, World Cup is a place where people are often present, phone in pocket, and attentively mingling with someone new.

To Meyer, curating that atmosphere is the basis of the small cafe, and their baristas assist in that process especially.

“A lot of it is just about really being present with the people that walk through the door — and engaging,” Meyer said, “not going through the motions, but really doing everything with intention.”

She also believes that offering customers a consistent cup of coffee is of the utmost importance, something Flores would agree with. However, according to Flores, consistency is not so hard to find. To him, one of the most consistent brands are those that have gone corporate, and this aspect of their product has become a pinpoint of their business model.

According to Flores, this consistency dates back to a company called Illy, and while exporting beans from Italy to the U.S. in the mid-20th century, they found the beans did not taste the same by the time they reached the other shore. They then found that by roasting the beans until they’re burnt — or a dark roast — they would last exponentially longer. This became a method to ensure consistency, and it was adopted by larger chains such as Starbucks.

However, Starbucks wasn’t always corporate; it began in 1971 as a standalone specialty coffee shop — one of the first of its kind — in Seattle, Wash.

“So, a lot of us specialty coffee shops now actually have to say ‘thank you’ to Starbucks, because they’re the ones that made that platform,” Flores said. “But they just went to the corporate side of it, and now they are what they are today, but Starbucks wasn’t always like that. I actually like to look into the history of Starbucks because it’s a story of how America functions as a country, and it tells you about what, culturally, Americans gravitate toward. I mean, Starbucks will always out-compete any specialty coffee shop.”

However, whether it’s a specialty beverage or just a cup of joe, the beverage has had a deep impact on Taos.

Not only does the town have its own social climate surrounding the beverage, but it’s led to a plethora of small businesses to crop up, so that atmosphere might find itself with a roof over its head.

“It’s a labor of love,” Flores said. “We’re not doing this because we’re making a bunch of money, we’re not doing this because it’s easy. I think, when you sit down some days and you drink this product that you’ve brought in, and you’re like, ‘Woah, that’s really good!’ That’s where you’re like, ‘Oh, OK. I know why I’m doing this.’”