The Big Move (from Emeryville to West Oakland)
Hello, my name is Tom and I like coffee. Let me be your guide on a brief tour of our new place in lovely (or hopefully-soon-to-be lovely) West Oakland, California
 A view of our old location in Emeryville, emptied. What a pain moving is, even when it is just 20 blocks to the South. But the rents in Emeryville were steep, and the building a little too small. |
 The final picture of Judy, Maria, Francy and Tom in Emeryville. The hardest part was not the initial move, or getting up and running in West Oakland. The hardest part was getting the tail ends of all our stuff out. That’s when you have to deal with everything that has been squirrelled away in the corner for X number of years… |
 The new place, 1115 21st Street, West Oakland. It is bigger by a few thousand feet, and since we had time to move it, it is better organized. |
 Setting up shelving in the packing area |
 Moddie and Keli putting up some racks. |
 Here’s the packing tables where YOUR orders are flawlessly assembled (at least I really hope so) and all the boxes are the green coffees. We bag about 1 week or less in advance on the green coffeeGreen coffee refers to the processed seed of the coffee tree fruit. Coffee is a flowering shrub that produces fruit. The seeds of the fruit are processed, roasted,... ...more. When I started, with a scoop and a postal scale, I filled every order as it came in, but that wouldn’t work anymore. |
 Here’s the pallet racks I set up before we really moved in. All those pallets are custom printed boxes which we have to order in big quantities to get a decent price. Storing them is a pain. |
 Here is more what you see when you would walk in now. We keep the green coffee down low so we can get at it, and keep it cooler than up toward the roofline. We don’t store all our coffee here at 21 street. We have some stored for us so we can preserve room to move the forklift etc. |
 Here’s my little lab table in the current cuppingCupping is a method of tasting coffee by steeping grounds in separate cups for discrete amounts of ground coffee, to reveal good flavors and defects to their fullest.... ...more room – it is not the ultimate place for the cupping room which will be upstairs in the offices. So it is still a little crammed. |
 Here is my actual granite slab cupping table, once again, not in its final restingEither the resting of parchment coffee after drying, or for the home roaster, post-roast resting.: Resting might refer to "reposo", the time after drying the parchment coffee, when... ...more place. |
 Here is the aforementioned 2 story offices … at the time of this picture we were still moving in. |
 We also have this neat little block building inside the building – a great shop room to build/modify stuff, do welding, store all the tools. |
And here is our brand new gate, making us a bit easier to identify than in the days of yore. |
We have a link with a map of our new place on our Order Page (look under “Pick Up Orders”)
| The Coffee Library
|
Sweet Maria’s Coffee RoastingThe application of heat to green coffee seeds (beans) to create palatable material for brewing a great cup!: Coffee roasting is a chemical process induced by heat, by... ...more Tip Sheets |
|
| Sweet Maria’s Coffee BrewingThe process of making an infusion of water and roasted, ground coffee. In the most basic sense, hot water is added to coffee ground to produce a drink.... ...more Tip Sheets |
||
| Further Reading | The Complete Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library Page – Coffee Travel Pictorials, New Product Reviews, Roasting Pictorials, Etc! |
|
| Interesting Coffee and Coffee Roasting Web Sites – Links to Home Roasting Web Sites, Coffee Industry Sites, Great Coffee Books, Etc! |
||
| Coffee Book Recommendations | ||
|
Sweet Maria’s
Coffee Cupping Reviews |
Central America: Costa Rica | Guatemala | Honduras | Mexico | Nicaragua | Panama | El Salvador
Africa/Arabia: Burundi | Congo | Ethiopia | Kenya | Rwanda | Tanzania | Uganda | Zambia | Zimbabwe | Yemen
IndonesiaUSDA is (obviously) the United States Department of Agriculture. USDA also had coffee plant breeding programs in the past and one variety they distributed to Indonesia and was... ...more/Asia: Bali | India | Java | Papua New Guinea | Sumatra | Sulawesi | Timor
Islands/Blends/Others: Hawaii | Puerto Rico | Jamaica | Dominican | Chicory | Saint Helena | Sweet Maria’s Blends
|
|
This page is authored by Tom Owen and Sweet Maria’s Coffee, Inc. and is not to be copied or reproduced without permission.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
