“Anyone here speak with a Kiwi accent?”
Norm announced as we stepped out of the snow and through the door of the tiny coffee roasterie Ungrounded, in Rawsonville, Vermont, some 15 minutes away from Stratton Mountain Resort. I quickly scanned the small intimate room; the familiar whir of a mazza super-jolly grinder comforted my ears, coupled with the heady aroma of freshly roasted beans and recently extracted coffee.
Ahhhhhh....I was going to survive the next six weeks.
This small gem in rural (middle-of-nowhere) Vermont, was the answer to my “I need a decent coffee” prayers. America is not well-known for the perfect coffee, at least not by Kiwi standards, in fact it is very difficult to find a nicely extracted coffee and silky steamed milk - if you are lucky enough to find a cafe that has an espresso machine at all. But here, in a wintery wonderland, was a Kiwi guy and his family, living the dream, making coffee and slowly gathering momentum in terms of popularity amongst the locals.
I was intrigued.
How did a New Zealander end up in such a tiny community, roasting and making coffee, and why was he not doing this ‘back home’? A quick chat revealed that even though Kristoffer Lynch had grown up in New Zealand, he was in fact born in USA, shifted to NZ as a young child where he was raised in Nelson and Art-Schooled in Dunedin; living there until relatively recently.
In my eyes he was as Kiwi as one could get.
To understand why this was such an interesting enigma to me, to find decent coffee where I would least expect it, there needs to be some context.
Vermont sits in the group of states collectively known as New England. It shares borders with Canada to the north, Massachusetts to the south, Maine to the east and New York to the west. The total population of the state is 626,000 spread over 25,000 square kilometres; so people enjoy relative isolation amidst prolific lush forests and gently rolling mountains which remain snow-covered for around five months of the year. The state is known for its forestry, maple syrup, snow sports and is the home of the famous Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (an asset not lost on me). It is home to a vast variety of wildlife which includes moose, coyote and coy-wolf, bear, fox, lynx, catamount (eastern couger), plus a host of rodents large and small.
There is a quaint rawness to Vermont, accentuated in winter by the stark landscape and perennial whiteness. There is a sense of wholesomeness and a tangible feeling of time slowing down. It is a world away from the frenetic pace of New York city; one almost expects the smell of baking cookies and moose droppings to permeate the air here.
Customers stand in the small space marinating in the smell of coffee, chatting over their brews about the latest snow plough attachments for their over-sized trucks. People linger even though there is no seating and very little standing room. Four or five customers, and the place feels crowded. Looking around I see sacks of coffee beans stacked wall to wall in a back room where a small Pavoni roaster is housed, emphasizing again, the industrial nature of this small venture.
A blackboard on the wall offers a coffee spiked with maple syrup - a local specialty, and gallon-sized containers of Vermont maple syrup sit stacked on a shelf above the sacks of coffee beans; not a sight you would come across anywhere else. Jessica (Kristoffer’s American wife) and Kristoffer work the space well, taking the time to converse with customers and all the while maintaining the busy ambience that sets this place apart from any other coffee-serving space I had been to in this country. I could just see that the focus here was coffee.
This was good.
“A short double shot latte please, with whole milk”; I have garnered the knack of asking for what I want here in the U.S, but with the added confidence of knowing that in THIS small cafe, when I say short - it WILL be a small cup, as opposed to the standard big, bigger and super-size that seems to have somehow become synonymous with the word ‘small”. As I have discovered, “short” or “small” can mean a cup size anywhere from 15oz to 20oz (or in Kiwi-speak 450 - 600mls!). I found it almost impossible to find a cafe that offered its brew in a cup less than 400mls (13oz), except for in New York city where good coffee seems to be escalating. This, however, is Rawsonville (population around 300); one of four other small towns within a five mile radius, known collectively as the town Bondville, making up a total population of around 1500 people; and here the locals are catching on.
You wouldn't be wrong in wondering how on earth a Kiwi roasting coffee could make a living here. It was a lifestyle choice that brought him back to the country of his birth. In Vermont in the Green Mountains, they could buy a house for $60,000, own and operate a business, open only for half a day and spend the afternoon with their young kids (Cole now 13 and Mikaela 12, who by the way, both sported a decent Kiwi twang to their American accent), enjoying the myriad of outdoor activities the area has on offer. They truly were living the dream, but it wasn’t always that way.
At one point, they lived in a house truck, sharing the confined space with their newly acquired Pavoni, trying to figure out what they were doing, where they were going and how to craft the life they wanted for their kids. Their story is crayon colourful and truly inspirational.
As I stand there waiting for my coffee, I am treated to a display of Cole’s double-jointed capabilities. Extroverted, open and friendly, he twists and contorts himself in front of me, all the while chatting about what he remembered and liked from his last trip to New Zealand - pausing to ask me if I knew “the hole-in-the-wall cafe in Dunedin” - clearly a place he was impressed by (and that I have yet to discover). I admire his Amerikiwi accent and he then proceeds to complete the entertainment by showing me tricks he could perform on a snowboard, asking me if I was a skier or rider.
“Skier”, I admitted, “oh......you should snowboard” he informs me with the authority of an adult.
Soon I had that liquid warmth cupped in my gloved hands, sipping the smooth sweet caramel notes of the bean roasted to perfection, and wondering how on earth I was so lucky to have been acquainted with a fellow coffee-lover way out off the beaten track (and a New Zealander no less); someone so committed to the pursuit of the perfect coffee that he chose to bring its nuances to the people of the Rawsonville, Vermont. They may have moose, catamounts, lynx and maple syrup; they may skite about Ben and Jerry’s, but they can't lay claim to the genius of this American-born Kiwi coffee-enigma.
To find out more about how this came to be, I asked Kristoffer and Jess if they would share some of their story with me. Here’s what I asked and what they said:
Why coffee?
Ultimately it’s to find a way to support our family. We wanted something that gave us the flexibility to live the life we believe in. We wanted interaction with people, to be part of a community and we started a coffee cart together in 2009 and in 2013 bought the roaster. We roasted coffee in the house truck initially. We sold our beans at local farmers markets, just buying a sack of beans at a time when we could afford to, and roasting it. That is how we learnt about Sumatra, Bali, Costa Rican and Ethiopian coffees. We got amazing feedback from locals and when we ran out, people started showing up at our house - looking for our beans.
All our coffee is organic - we go for freshness. The standard American coffee is a hot watery drink usually with lots of cream and or sugar. Usually it was ground months ago and brewed a while ago - its about the caffeine, not the coffee experience for them.
Have the locals been responsive in a positive way?
We couldn’t do it without them. We have a good group of every-dayers. Some drink flat whites, lattes, maple lattes (espresso steamed with locally made maple syrup). We have just finished our 3rd winter in this location. We have created a funny little space where a huge variety of people come; the working crews, the old man locals, the visitors, the New Yorkers, New Zealanders, (they come back because we make it like they do in NZ), the snowboarders and skiers. We get a lot of foreigners, all looking for that better coffee. Coffee is the thing that brings them here - to our tiny little shop in the middle of nowhere.
Tell us about Vermont. What grabs you?
Its painfully charming. The snowboarding is good, the summers are beautiful, the foliage, the rivers, winding roads. Its like the American version of New Zealand. Its strikingly beautiful.
Where we live the population is small - most of the houses are second homes here. So we could create the life we had always talked about; having a house with a barn, some land to park the house truck, trees big enough for a tree-house. We can open the shop for half a day and spend the rest of the day with our kids (who we home-school). Even though we close the shop in order to do the things we want, the roasting side of the business continues to operate outside these hours.
Do you visit New Zealand at all?
Kristoffer went back to New Zealand early 2014 for family reasons but right now it doesn’t make sense for us to go back - its too expensive and we have priorities further up the list such as a new kitchen and a house renovation. We also wish to know Vermont more; it seems a bit wasteful to travel just for the sake of it when there are so many amazing places in our back yard that we are not familiar with yet. But as time passes, visiting New Zealand again seems to be inching its way up our list - we miss our friends there.
Did you ever feel as if the dream would never become reality?
There were many times when it felt like it was never going to happen - like we would have to give up (the idea of having a cheap house in a beautiful place and freedom) and conform in an unfulfilling job just for the sake of security. We would rally each other into believing it could happen; live in the house-truck a bit longer, save some more cash, keep looking and eventually we would have the life we wanted. We just didn’t know where. Having met in Vail, me from the East Coast and Kristoffer from New Zealand, not even a country could be pinned down! We moved a lot. Colorado to New York, then California and back and forth between New York and New Zealand, then Massachusetts. Dreaming this dream, drawing crayon pictures and driving friends and family crazy with our constant babble about houses and markets and impending doom - still believing at some time our dream would be a reality.
How has New Zealand influenced what you do here in Vermont?
New Zealand’s coffee culture definitely influenced us - long blacks, flat whites, strong short lattes.
Oliver Lequeux’s Mon Very on George Street in Dunedin, was part of the inspiration.
Tiny, friendly, quirky and most importantly, really good coffee, roasted in-house. We spent hours in that stinky little brick alley. It was the kind of place you found yourself talking to a bull-rider, an American, a professor, a Frenchman, a Russian tourist, an art student, a mother, a musician …
As I stand in this tiny, quirky aromatic space,
I cannot help but think there is more than a little bit of New Zealand in this crayon-drawn dream space. There is a tangible sense of having landed; of ownership in one’s direction. Cole continues to enthral me with his double-jointed act, daring me to try the limits of my own joints, whilst his younger sister plays on top of sacks of coffee beans in the roasting room. Customers come and go, the space breathes in and out; the snow outside continues to fall, and I am happiness fulfilled.
Downtown Rawsonville!