Counter Culture Coffee is a

Durham, North Carolina Durham ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County, North Carolina, Durham County. Small portions of the city limits extend into Orange County, North Carolina, Orange County and Wake County, North Carol ...

based

coffee roasting Roasting coffee transforms the chemical and physical properties of green coffee beans into roasted coffee products. The roasting process is what produces the characteristic flavor of coffee by causing the green coffee beans to change in taste. ...

company founded in 1995. It has regional

training Training is teaching, or developing in oneself or others, any skills and knowledge or Physical fitness, fitness that relate to specific practicality, useful Competence (human resources), competencies. Training has specific goals of improving on ...

locations in

Asheville, NC Asheville ( ) is a city in, and the county seat of, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, it is the largest city in Western North Carolina, and the state's 11th-most populous cit ...

;

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;

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

;

Charleston, SC Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of ...

;

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Durham, NC Durham ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County. Small portions of the city limits extend into Orange County and Wake County. With a population of 283,506 in the 2020 Census, Durham is the 4th-mos ...

;

Emeryville, CA Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 as ...

;

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

;

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

; and

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Counter Culture training centers provide education in the fundamentals of preparing and serving

coffee Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulant, stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world. S ...

and serve as classrooms and event spaces. Training centers are not only for vendors of Counter Culture Coffee, but are also available to anyone that is interested in the production of coffee. Training centers also host competition training, food events with guest chefs, and professional

workshops Beginning with the Industrial Revolution era, a workshop may be a room, rooms or building which provides both the area and tools (or machinery) that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods. Workshops were the only ...

. Counter Culture Coffee buys primarily from small coffee producers at prices between $1.30 and $25 a pound. As such, they are regarded as a "boutique" coffee roaster, a company which sources from multiple small estates and

cooperative A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-control ...

s rather than a single large grower.

Company history

Counter Culture Coffee first started

roasting Roasting is a cooking method that uses dry heat where hot air covers the food, cooking it evenly on all sides with temperatures of at least from an open flame, oven, or other heat source. Roasting can enhance the flavor through caramelization ...

coffee in Durham in 1995. Founded by Brett Smith and Fred Houk, their main focus was creating custom coffee blends for some of Durham and

Chapel Hill Chapel Hill or Chapelhill may refer to: Places Antarctica * Chapel Hill (Antarctica) Australia *Chapel Hill, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane *Chapel Hill, South Australia, in the Mount Barker council area Canada * Chapel Hill, Ottawa, a neighbo ...

's southern restaurants. They sold their first coffee to Pop's Restaurant in Durham in 1995. The company has expanded its operations to areas along the

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. The firm has also diversified their line of products and services, offering

seasonal A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and po ...

coffee selections and

educational Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty. Vari ...

programs that focus on

sustainability Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and have varied in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels (e.g. sustainable livi ...

and the

coffee brewing Coffee preparation is the process of turning coffee beans into a beverage. While the particular steps vary with the type of coffee and with the raw materials, the process includes four basic steps: raw coffee beans must be roasted, the roasted ...

process.

Sustainability

Counter Culture Coffee directly collaborates with

artisans An artisan (from french: artisan, it, artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, s ...

who grow the coffee and their partnership with

farmers A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer mi ...

is a basis for their

sustainable coffee Sustainable coffee is a coffee that is grown and marketed for its sustainability. This includes coffee certified as organic, fair trade, and Rainforest Alliance. Coffee has a number of classifications used to determine the participation of grower ...

model which involves working with progressive and environmentally sensitive farms in the trade. In 2008, they launched a third-party Counter Culture Direct Trade Certification, which established

direct trade Direct may refer to: Mathematics * Directed set, in order theory * Direct limit of (pre), sheaves * Direct sum of modules, a construction in abstract algebra which combines several vector spaces Computing * Direct access (disambiguation), a ...

standards for sustainability, quality, and fairness in the coffee chain. Additional initiatives include their Sustaining Educational and Environmental Development at a Source (SEEDS) program and the company's Sustainability Scorecard. The SEEDS initiative aims to support sustainability and education for the origins of the products while the Sustainability Scorecard is used to measure the impact the company's efforts toward building a more sustainable supply chain.

Education

The firm also provides consumers, its employees, and its wholesale partners with educational programs on coffee brewing, origin, and history. Professional development courses offered include topics such as Brewing Science, Barista Fundamentals, Coffee Origins, Cupping Fundamentals, and Brewing: Technique & Troubleshooting.
Public educational initiatives include free "Tastings at Ten" every Friday morning, as well as home brew labs for coffee enthusiasts offered at a fee. Educational courses are offered at thirteen Counter Culture Training Centers across the country.

Locations

Coffee is roasted in two production facilities in Durham, NC (also the company's headquarters) and Emeryville, CA.

References

External links