Trip Report: Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters
Posted by TheShot on 25 Nov 2012 | Tagged as: Café Society, Home Brew, Local Brew, Machine, Roasting
Trish Rothgeb and Nick Cho are coffee notables from the Northwest and D.C. area, respectively, and they’ve combined forces in recent years as the roasting/brewing partnership behind Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. Nearly seven years ago on this Web site, Trish and Nick became a rather infamous pairing ever since Trish was first credited with coining the coffee term “third wave” — i.e., before it was immediately co-opted by coffee hucksters and carnival barkers.
The idea behind Wrecking Ball is that Trish — a former Director of Coffee for Seattle’s Zoka — focuses on the coffee roasting. Meanwhile, Nick — portafilter.net podcast host, former Murky Coffee owner, and famous wannabe cockpuncher — focuses on the brewing and coffee service.
While their roasting operations are near Redwood City, they have a lone retail café in SF in the Firehouse 8 event space. A former firehouse (there’s even a brass fire pole towards the back), it’s a vast, airy space that’s frequently inhabited by pop-ups that sell jewelry & clothing or weekend waffles. There are occasional display cases to show off some of these wares (giving it a slight museum feel), plus brick masonry at the entrance, stone floors, tall ceilings, and a row of simple café tables lined up at the entrance. Wrecking Ball is something of a permanent fixture here, however — just opening earlier this month.
In a rear corner they sport Kalita Japanese brewers (Nick has long been quite a fanboy) and scales for measuring coffee grounds precisely. They also sport a two-group La Marzocco Strada and a La Marzocco Vulcano grinder. For their espresso they use their 1UP blend ($2.25 for a doppio) and pull shots with a dark, even, textured crema. There’s a strong herbacity to it, and fortunately it tastes more like coffee and less like blueberries and flower petals like many new roasters seem to profile too heavily.
Solid stuff: this is definitely one of the finer (if not quieter) places for an espresso in the city. And credit to Trish, as the take-home 1UP beans worked great on our home espresso setup as well. We only wish the roast dates weren’t approaching two weeks old when we bought it.
Read the review of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters.
2 Comments »
I LOVE this place. Keith is an absolute gentlemen and I couldn’t agree with you more about the ambiance of the place. Quiet and not stiff, like other trendy places in town. Also very much enjoying the recent opening of more coffee spots in the north side, even with the four barrel in the Rapha retail store.
I am so glad to see you are blogging, not sure why I hadn’t bookmarked this earlier.
This is Meli, nice to meet you. I have written casually, about coffee and coffee shops for a few years now. Were you at the panel last night?
-Meli
Cool blog yourself, btw.
Nope – I didn’t do the panel Monday. Wish I could go to them all, but unfortunately you have to pick and choose!
Though I have been working a little with Stanford Biological Sciences Prof. Virginia Walbot on some ideas for a more academically leaning variant for next year. She recently helped put on a great Stanford symposium on chocolate (“Inspiration Chocolate” on Stanford campus in May 2011), and we’ve been linking up to consider coffee next.