Coffee and wine share the essence of terroir. Coffee and beer share a
crafty, localized entrepreneurial spirit. And as anyone that’s worked
at a coffee bar can attest, coffee and music share personnel.
A creative industry that welcomes big personalities, coffee is a
fitting daylight mirror to any town’s music scene, given the robust
percentage of baristas that also play in bands. “If you’re in a band,
you’re either a barista or a bartender. You know how that goes,”
Tampa-based roaster and guitarist Tim McTague told Daily Coffee News.
Yet what happens when the young people involved grow up
without sacrificing either of these passions?
The answer is currently evolving within the Tampa, Fla., specialty
coffee landscape. Nate Young and Tim McTague cofounded the
retail/wholesale micro-roastery
King State Coffee
in 2014, centered on a Proaster 1.5 located in a built-out room
alongside McTague’s home garage in the Lutz neighborhood. Greens have
come from a variety of importers and couple direct relationships, while
sales have spread to a few wholesale accounts including multi-roasters
around the country, and one whole-bean retail partner in the Seminole
Heights neighborhood, the
Jug and Bottle beer, wine and spirits store.
Nate Young and Tim McTague of King State
“We’re trying to dive in deep with a few key partners,” said McTague.
“Instead of taking a blanket approach and casting a wide net, we’d
rather cast a much more refined net of quality places that we believe
in, and drive as much business to them as possible to make it worth
their time as well.”
Prior to his life in coffee, Young joined the successful Tampa-based
Christian alt-rock band Anberlin on the drums in 2002, and rocked around
the world until the band broke up in 2014. Meanwhile, his high school
buddy McTague was in another Tampa band, the Christian hardcore punk
outfit Underøath. McTague joined Underøath on lead guitar in 2001 and
stayed through a wildly successful run until the group disbanded in
2013. That band’s fifth album, “Define the Great Line,” debuted on the
Billboard 200 chart at number 2. Their album packaging and other
production elements were nominated for Grammies.
“Locally we’re known more for the coffee scene than we are for our
music,” said McTague, noting that online orders have shipped all over
the US and beyond. “We look at our business as more of a national brand
than a local brand.”
Neither Young nor McTague would ever ham-handedly co-opt the legacies
of their bands to sell coffee, although they’re not so naïve as to
ignore the potential, either. “It’s something that we tread lightly on,”
said McTague. “We take leveraging our past very seriously. Obviously
that is an audience we have, and we’re not stupid to think that we
shouldn’t utilize that, but we want to make sure it’s done respectfully
and classily, and we want people to judge our product based on the
product.”
McTague working the Proaster
And yet it’s not just music and coffee that bind these partners
together. Not only were Young and McTague old friends, scene-mates, and
label-mates on the Seattle-based independent
Tooth and Nail Records. The women
they eventually married also happened to be sisters, making them
literally family. “We’ve been friends for almost 15 years, labelmates
for 10 or 11, and sworn-in brother-in-laws for almost eight years,” said
McTague. “To say King State runs deep is an understatement.”
Meanwhile, on the same Tampa Bay music scene in 2008, musician and
fellow coffee lover Joel Davis started the Christian indie rock band
that would become Ascend the Hill. In 2011 Davis also started a folkier
and more secular solo project called Fistful, to express the side of his
creativity not as well suited to performance in churches or Christian
music festivals. “Joel was in the scene with me and Nate,” McTague said.
I’ve known Joel for 15 years, too. We’re all old friends.”
In 2013, Davis added another number to his professional repertoire in the form of
Commune + Co.,
which serves proprietary, patent-pending pressure-brewed cold coffee on
nitro tap via cargo-tricycle on the streets of Tampa. “It was really
developed in response to our disdain for cold brew,” owner and brewer
Joel Davis told Daily Coffee News.
Commune + Co founder Joel Davis
“We get all the benefits of brewing in a cold environment, but our
brewing method allows us to more properly extract what makes these
coffees exciting,” Davis said. The pressure-brew process borrows some
“wisdom and technology” from the beer- and wine-making worlds, and is
both scalable and effective at preserving the nuance, sweetness, balance
and acidity of hot brews, according to Davis.
When Commune + Co incorporated, Davis and his cohorts intended to
take a hiatus from Ascend the Hill to focus fully on establishing the
coffee business, although that hiatus became permanent when they fell in
love with being home. “After a year of everyone being home and loving
it and not traveling or touring, we realized that we wanted to keep
doing that,” said Davis.
So while Ascend the Hill is still a band, Davis doubts they’ll ever
tour again, or at least not extensively. Davis is ready to anchor his
life into the Tampa Bay community, with a grounded and stable business
that speaks to his passions. At the same time, McTague believes that the
experiences with different coffees and coffee shops as touring
musicians are what set businesses like KS and C+Co apart.
“Nate and I have toured around the world. We’ve had coffee on six
continents, in probably 40 different countries,” said McTague. “We’ve
been able to taste the good and bad, and pull from what we want.”
McTague sees this wide perspective as valuable, although often not
applicable to local consumer tastes.
KS debuted last year with an “everyman” Colombian coffee, then
followed that up with a slightly boundary-pushing Yirgacheffe. Currently
they’re tinkering with a Kenyan micro-lot coffee that McTague thinks
may challenge local palates as well as wallets. “That’s going to be the
riskiest thing we’ve done,” said McTague. He’s confident that once local
coffee drinkers experience the difference in the cup, they’ll
understand what makes it worth more, which will constitute an important
step locally. “We want to push this thing forward.”
For its part, Commune + Co. has brewed and served King State coffee as well as offerings from the Michigan-based
MadCap Coffee Company and Wisconsin-based
Ruby Coffee Roasters.
The two Tampa businesses have appeared together at events and cupped
coffees together, sharing perspectives and collaborating but without
strings attached. “They’re also pushing the boundaries and they’re
picking up the roasters that have those robust and complex Kenyas and
the really deep, high-quality roasts,” said McTague. “If Joel wants to
use Ruby and Madcap, by all means, do it, man. Those dudes crush and
they’re fantastic roasters.”
The Commune + Co bike
McTague clearly relishes the power of excellent coffee to inspire,
and to open people’s eyes to parts of life and the world they may not
have considered before — a power also often found in music. Davis,
meanwhile, seems drawn just as much to coffee’s music-like power to draw
people together and foster community. The interactive nature of
creating a quality product and entering a community of businesses is
also not unlike starting a band, writing songs and entering a music
scene.
“As much as I’m a coffee nerd and as much as I love coffee, Commune +
Co is about community,” said Davis. “Allowing other people into that
process is the most natural way to do what we do best, which is create
space and opportunity for people to hang and do life together.”
Davis is more interested in teaming up with passionate roasters than
becoming one himself. “Roasting is a pretty solitary lifestyle and a
completely different skillset,” said Davis. “Obviously our success
depends on people being able to do that really well. Instead of
recreating the wheel for Commune + Co., I would rather depend on people
who have made that their life’s passion.”
As for the future of Tampa’s rockin’ coffee scene pioneers, McTague
recently picked up the keys to a prospective brick-and-mortar location,
with an eye towards a first-quarter 2016 opening if all goes well.
They’ve picked out their gear and have a clear concept for a King State
café. Underøath has also reunited and plans to tour in 2016, although
that won’t keep McTague away for too long.
C+Co meanwhile has two more tricycles under construction, to add to
the one currently out on the streets. Each trike features custom
carpentry done by Ascend the Hill bassist Hayden Davidson, who’s also a
semi-pro woodworker. The company has an office for their administrative
needs, gated parking for their growing pedal-powered fleet, and space
inside a licensed commissary kitchen for brewing and kegging in
accordance with state regulations that treat the business essentially
like a food cart. Their next step is find a “more grown-up” production
facility, which may or may not include a public-facing service
component.
“I just don’t want to get caught up so much in the rat-race of ‘oh,
we gotta have a coffee bar now, we gotta be the next new hot thing for
these neighborhoods,'” said Davis. “I want our craft to sustain the
people who are involved, and create a comfortable and enjoyable
lifestyle for us, and be good for our community.”
