Culture Club: In downtown’s Cannonborough/Elliotborough hood, The Eclectic Café & Vinyl pulls in a unique assemblage of music buffs and millennials who appreciate solid brews and good tunes.
Balzac Brothers’ coffee lab
Top Pot: In the lab at Balzac Brothers’ Fulton Street office, staffers utilize a rigorous tasting procedure to analyze the merits of a particular origin.
Higher Grounds: Charleston Coffee Roasters’s Lowell Grosse demonstrates the art of cupping using deep spoons made expressly for the practice.
Bean There: Prior to establishing Charleston Coffee Roasters in 2005, Lowell Grosse spent 17 years learning the trade as a coffee importer.
The Daily Grind: At King Bean’s North Charleston facility, head roaster Richie Young and assistant Andrew Hayden roast green coffee beans on a 60-kilo Petrocini, monitoring color, temperature, fragrance, and cracking sounds
Bags of beans at King Bean’s North Charleston facility
Green (unroasted) beans
King Bean head roaster Richie Young and assistant Andrew Hayden
Dark Matter: A Black Tap barista uses drippers perched on a pour-over bar to brew perfectly saturated cups of joe.
Coffeephiles Unite: Since opening its doors five years ago, Black Tap Coffee has brewed a cult following of its iced coffee creativity; specialty roasts; and minimalist, succulent-dotted space.
