Cross-Country Coffee Tour Inspires Tiny House Café: Part Three

Last year, we followed Barista Magazine contributor Don Niemyer on his cross-country tour of the United States in search of inspiration for his own coffee shop. Now, we follow Don in this ~~three~~ four-part series (more to enjoy!) as he uses the lessons he’s learned to build his own cafe.

Part Three: Dreams Become Reality

I have two beautiful daughters. They are really fabulous little ladies, each with their own distinct personalities, and special things that make them uniquely valuable to me. I love them both endlessly. But as different as they are, I could never imagine loving one of them more than the other. They are both just wonderful.

That’s the way I feel about all the coffee shops we visited on The Rialta Coffee Tour. People always want to know which places and coffee shops we liked the best. The fact is, there were so many that were so endlessly fabulous, we could never pick just one! Some we liked for their quality coffee, others because of the kindness of the barista or the generosity of the owners, and still others we enjoyed because of their beautiful, innovative spaces. So picking which were our favorites isn’t a productive conversation. But we love to tell about our experiences with some of these great shops, and how they inspired us to create Story Coffee Company to tell their stories. In part one of this series we shared how we became œaccidental minimalists while touring coffee shops around the nation, and part two was about how that experience inspired us to create a tiny house coffee shop. Now, we’ll look at just a few specific examples of how our coffee tour inspired our project, with photos where possible:

Shops like Front (San Francisco, pictured above) and Aviano (Denver) inspired us with their sharp dressed baristas.

Barista Parlor (Nashville) inspired us to create shelving in the end of our bar to hide our serving wares and maximize the counter space.

We loved the way Alchemy (Richmond, VA) and Harbinger (Ft. Collins, CO, above) customized their pastry cases. We made ours like a tall drawer. Customers see the shelves from the front, and from the back it pulls out so the barista can grab items as they're sold. — We loved the way Alchemy (Richmond, VA) and Harbinger (Ft. Collins, CO, above) customized their pastry cases. We made ours like a tall drawer. Customers see the shelves from the front, and from the back it pulls out so the barista can grab items as they’re sold.

Stone Creek (Milwaukie, WI, above) and Bird Rock (San Diego) both serve a little treat with every cappuccino, which just makes the experience feel a bit more special. We serve our cappuccino with a sea salt and dark chocolate covered almond.

We loved seeing places like Coava (Portland, Ore), Not Just Coffee (Charlotte, NC, above) and Tandem (Portland, ME) do excellent work in tiny spaces, with simple menu offerings. The correlation is probably obvious on that one.

Lots of places like Five Watt (Minneapolis) and Mockingbird Hill (Washington D.C., above) were doing innovative things with coffee cocktails. We always feature one drink on our menu like our œHot Buttered Yum or the œCoffee Old Fashioned .

Palace (Amarillo, TX) inspired us to put our logo on the wall behind our bar.

After seeing great self serve water stations like the ones at Old Town (Lander, WY, above) or Kingdom (Springfield, MO) we built this one in our space. We wanted customers to be able to get themselves as much water as they wanted without coming back up to the bar and interrupting the service flow.

We saw lots of great espresso and one-and-one presentations, such as these from Dichotomy (Waco, TX), and Sterling (Portland, Ore., above) that inspired us to do something elegant as well.

We loved the way Brash (Chatanooga, TN) created the feeling of a kitchen table, where everyone could gather around. We recreated this as well as we could in our tiny space, with a bar that has access from all sides (even though it has this handy flip-up extension!)

After seeing so many shops with awful traffic flow (no names here) and a few with such great flow, like Ozo (Boulder, CO, above) and Sightglass (San Francisco), we knew we wanted to create a space where if you enter and keep moving you automatically end up at the right place and have a clear option for exiting.

We saw so many beautifully customized machines, like this one at Ma'velous (San Francisco). For ours, we did a custom case with our design elements of raw steel, brass, and wood, which our classic Linea simply bolts into. — We saw so many beautifully customized machines, like this one at Ma’velous (San Francisco). For ours, we did a custom case with our design elements of raw steel, brass, and wood, which our classic Linea simply bolts into.

And on it could go for hours, but hopefully you get the idea. There are just so many wonderful cafés out there, and I’m sure we only saw a handful of them. But the ones we did visit were just so deeply inspirational, and we are so grateful for having experienced each one!

SO ¦now that our tiny house coffee shop was nearing completion, we just had one final nut to crack: where to put it! We had always believed that if we built something compelling that an opportunity would open up for us. Did that happen? Or did we just build a $50,000 paper weight? We’re out of space for this installment, but we’ll finish up next time with The Story of Story Coffee. See you then!

Don Niemyer used to own three coffee shops in Portland, Ore., where he and his wife Carissa spent 8 years immersed in the excellent coffee culture there, milking it like a dairy cow for every drop of expertise it would give them, making lots of friends, doing some USBC judging, and learning all they could. One day, they decided to move their kids closer to family, so they bought a tiny RV, moved into it, and have been œmoving to Colorado ever since, visiting coffee shops, practicing minimalism, and having lots of fun. That was over two years ago. One of these days, they might even end up living in Colorado.