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Coffee Shop to Train Java Connoisseurs

By Mary Johnson | July 26, 2011 7:10am
Stephen Leven and his partner, Dan Elwell, started their coffee business with a small cafe at 52 Irving Place about 15 years ago. Behind him stands a coffee tree from Colombia, which actually produces a few beans every year.
Stephen Leven and his partner, Dan Elwell, started their coffee business with a small cafe at 52 Irving Place about 15 years ago. Behind him stands a coffee tree from Colombia, which actually produces a few beans every year.
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DNAinfo/Mary Johnson

GRAMERCY — Inside the “training lab” at the Irving Farm Coffee Company on a recent morning, Dan Streetman and Mike “Wiggles” Peters hosted a coffee cupping session.

Think of coffee cupping as the “holy communion” for coffee drinkers. It's basically a formalized tasting process through which connoisseurs can check for defects and identify unique flavors, explained Streetman as he arranged rows of small white bowls on a table at the West 23rd Street company's HQ, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

The bowls were filled with beans from five different Irving Farm varieties. Those beans were ground and brewed. Streetman and Peters then slurped spoonfuls of coffee from each individual bowl and ultimately spat their samplings into a stainless steel carafe.

As part of the coffee cupping process, coffee is ground and then brewed before it is tasted.
As part of the coffee cupping process, coffee is ground and then brewed before it is tasted.
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DNAinfo/Mary Johnson

The spitting part was optional, but when you work with coffee, the risk of becoming over-caffeinated is ever present.

Streetman and Peters are bona fide coffee nerds. They both began their careers as baristas — Streetman at Texas A&M University and Peters in Cleveland, Ohio. Now Streetman is Irving Farm’s director of coffee, traveling the world to visit farmers and find uniquely flavored beans.

Peters is the company’s director of education, conducting training for wholesale partners and for baristas at its two Manhattan coffee shops.

Both Streetman and Peters were brought on board as the 15-year-old company has gone increasingly geeky over coffee.

Stephen Leven and Dan Elwell started the business back in 1996 with a tiny shop at 52 Irving Place in Gramercy. At the time, Starbucks was unheard of in the city. The two college buddies had found a niche.

They soon outgrew the space and moved a few doors down to 71 Irving Place, where their hugely popular cafe still stands.

“It wasn’t a neighborhood that had a center,” said Leven, who lived in the Gramercy area for years. “There wasn’t a heart to the community.”

Now, people have met their spouses there, written their first novels there, Peters said. The store has even lasted long enough to employ the daughter of two longtime customers.

“If we closed for one day, people would be calling us freaking out,” Peters said.

The company has also been roasting its own beans since 1999 out of a carriage house on a farm in Millerton, N.Y., and it's planning to build a new green roasting facility soon.

On Monday, the plans were sprawled across a box in Leven’s office. He said they were just waiting on approval from the community board in Millerton before they could break ground.

The company also has a café in the West Village, and Leven said he is about to close a deal on a new Upper West Side location, although he declined to give specifics.

With all these changes, the company has shifted its focus to center mostly on the quality of the coffee, Leven said.

“We’re bringing in awesome coffees now,” Leven said.

Leven attributes much of that to the addition of Dan Streetman,  who this year alone has visited growers in El Salvador, Colombia and Honduras. In January, he's heading to Guatemala and Costa Rica.

“People haven’t been as sophisticated with coffee drinking,” Streetman said.

But that, he said, is changing. And Irving Farm is embracing the shift.

Leven said the company is working to increase outreach to the community. He said he wants to move the company’s headquarters from its current 11th floor location to a ground-floor site to make it more accessible to the public.

The company’s “training lab” is another part of its development. And Leven said he hopes to host seminars about coffee and invite farmers to come in and speak about certain varieties.

Leven said he is even hoping to host the occasional latte art throwdown, a competition in which baristas battle to see who can create the most stunning piece of art on top of a latte—using only foam.

“It is our focus to bring to light all these efforts,” Leven said. “We all want to really talk about what we’re doing.”