Why are there so many European roasted coffees in LA?
In a city thought of as having a thriving coffee “scene”, the number of roasters from out of town and out of the country represented here is surprising and impressive. I admit this not-quite-a-rant unfairly singles out a handful of good shops I won’t name, and my (mis?)perception of the scale of this phenomenon is probably due to my being a mostly happy regular patron of these shops.
This post is less me grinding an axe than thinking out loud and scratching an itch. Here’s a half baked perspective from someone who has been thinking about coffee here too much for too long. Tl;dr: get off my lawn you crazy Euro kids.
It began with some carpetbaggers
When third wave style coffee was rising in places like the Pacific Northwest in the early aughts, Los Angeles, like New York City before it, was conspicuously mostly untouched. Here chains like Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf were ascendent. Every other strip mall had a dusty old donut shop. There were a handful of places like Cafe Urth and Groundwork where you might sometimes see latte art or learn the origin of the beans for the bulk brewed drip, but there wasn’t yet much to put this part of California on any coffee connoisseur’s map.
I left Seattle in 2006, landing here to shepherd Chicago’s Intelligentsia through their first LA shop and roastery. Coffee here felt like a large, mostly blank canvas. We seized the opportunity to push the coffeebar and barista concept a little further in a place that was uniquely open to culinarily adventurousness and trying new things. Intelli made such a splash here that lots of other companies took notice and started colonies.
Now there are many medium size roasting companies who started elsewhere in California or in other states who have set up strong presences or established wholesale beachheads—Stumptown, Blue Bottle, Verve, Sightglass, Counter Culture… there was even a period where a lot of Australian operators were sniffing around and signing leases.
But LA is an international city. And the movement around excellent coffee is a global one. Even our large industry trade group the SCAA merged with the European trade to become the SCA a few years back (not to be confused with this SCA which is much much cooler). The US headquarters is near here in Irvine. And of course coffee is grown around the world and the small amount grown here in California remains priced out of reach except as a novelty.
Shops need to stand out
There was a time when any new shop taking coffee seriously opening here was an event. Eater would be there with the play by play, food bloggers would descend, the late great Saint Jonathan Gold might even weigh in. LA seemed thirsty for and big enough to support many more shops, but the novelty of what these shops were offering was waning fast. Good coffee was no longer the hot new thing. The baseline of customer expectations had been rising as the ambitions of new shop operators waned, meeting in a safe good-enough middle fueled by a growing base of skilled baristas.
I talked to a friend opening a new shop this fall who felt it was essential to bring in beans from an out of town roaster, both to stand out and avoid playing favorites among the companies competing for accounts locally. When everyone’s menu is essentially the same, the brand of your beans is one of the few ways to differentiate.
The meh of many micros
The “coffee industry” with it’s numerous trade shows and trade publications has slowly morphed into something like an MLM that convinces would-be entrepreneurs to start microroasteries or coffee brands. A coffee shop is basically an adult lemonade stand with surface-level economics that seem graspable by people who’ve maybe never worked restaurants or had a service industry job. Even shops blessed with daily long lines out the door will find it’s still a real struggle to turn a buck or properly compensate their employees. The roasted coffee brand space is crowded with vanity projects, phony white label influencer brands pretending to be real roasters, and well-packaged trend chasing that rarely hits the mark. Hard to blame people for spinning the wheel with more reputable roasters from far away.
Some of this is clearly my sour grapes of having to compete in a noisy landscape full of inexperienced people who cut corners, make false claims, or can bleed cash. I truly love what I do and am extremely proud of our product, but doing marketing in today’s hustle culture hellscape leaves me feeling grumpy. Some of it is old man nostalgia for the days when the scene was small enough that almost every new roaster would show up on the radar and everybody knew each other. Instead of sharing knowledge with upstarts I find myself more inclined to hoard secrets. I miss being a mensch.
The Canadian girlfriend phenemenon
You wouldn’t know her, she goes to another school. The grass is greener (and the healthcare free-er) overseas. It’s always been an easy flex to claim that things are just more sophisticated in Europe, or that the Scandinavians have a more thoughtful approach (maybe, sometimes). There’s an automatic perception of luxury from imports, bolstered by pretty packages and higher prices.
And we’re seeing more brands adopting excessive, expensive packaging more appropriate for consumer electronics or sneaker drops than fresh roasted coffee beans that should be consumed within days or weeks. I’m happy to see people willing to pay more for good coffee, but sometimes it’s a little too pricey even for me.
The homework assignment style of connoisseurship
Gotta catch ’em all. I feel it. The compulsion to try every roaster, every origin, every botanical variety, or every new double macerated, anaerobic, carbonic, zero gravity, laser-pulped experimental process. Some subset of coffee nerds is all about collecting these kinds of novel or vanguard-ish experiences. Having a shop that caters to this is a signal that you’re serious and share the fascination. I’m susceptible to this too, but would caution it’s not the only model for or pinnacle of connoisseurship. You can just love and brew great coffee without having to become encyclopedic about it or becoming a lab rat for funky flavors.
Part of why we don’t do wholesale
A couple reasons you won’t find our coffee on retail shelves or served in shops. The big one being simply that Yes Plz possibly remains THE ONLY roaster 100% dedicated to serving the home barista. We have a unique model for how we curate our weekly releases serving only one master, and only putting out stuff we want to drink daily ourselves. I believe it’s why our batting average is much higher than larger roasters playing in broader channels.
Being a good supplier to wholesale channels requires juggling priorities and making compromises that are different than a focus on only delivering the best. Sometimes smaller businesses are better served by leaning on bigger ones and I have no interest in running a sales team, installing equipment, or chasing down past due invoices. It’s a competitive enough landscape that I feel okay with us staying in our underserved home user niche.
So all of these observations come from someone who (at least at the time of this writing) is not interested in entering the wholesale arena (but might be open to supplying handfuls of retail bags to select multi roaster shops). To be frank, it’s a little galling to feel we’re competing against bags of several week old European roasted beans from companies and countries that enjoy advantages of operating where there’s universal healthcare and stronger support for small businesses. Though I’m not ready to call for tariffs or anything.
But let me be honest to the point of pure hypocrisy… I very much enjoy being able to sample these roasters. Getting to regularly encounter and taste lovely beans from old friends like Koppi in Sweden or Luna from Vancouver is awesome. And the pretty (perhaps excessive) packaging from the likes of Copenhagen’s April often gets me opening my wallet.
I feel both a desire as a coffee lover and as an ambitious professional to keep up with what other top roasters are doing. That several LA shops afford me good options for doing that is a blessing, even if it maybe comes at the expense of a perpetually nascent, insufficiently championed native roasting scene.
All this aside, there’s enough of a homegrown scene to deserve a more thoughtful post down the road. Some people I admire have built very cool stuff here. Back in February the LA Times put together a package about LA a coffee city that was very thorough and kind—except for their absolutely unforgivable oversight of not mentioning Yes Plz at all. You should check it out anyway.
Anyhow, if you’re an Angeleno reading this who frequents LA shops and regularly indulges in pricey but pretty bags of beans from overseas roasters—might I nudge you to try a bag from Yes Plz? Delivered fast to your doorstep, delicious to the point of blowing your doors off, and roasted locally by a small dedicated crew of weirdos that wants to give you our best.