Remodeling delays student café
By Emma Grygotis
Work on the student-run coffee shop continues, although remodeling complications have prevented the store from opening this semester as planned. While some questions remain unanswered, student leaders are now working on details from what type of coffee to serve to their vision for the shop’s role in the campus community.
Currently, the shop’s student organizers are planning a soft opening for the end of the current term. This will be a chance for the Earlham community to see the space and taste the coffee that will be sold once it opens officially next fall.
Once it opens, the shop will be entirely student-run. One of the current tasks at hand is organizing a staff of baristas who will receive free training and work on a volunteer basis.
Preparing the space for opening has also been a very involved process, involving weekly workdays from 1-5 p.m. every Saturday.
Senior Aaron Goldbeck, one of the original student organizers, said, “We’ve been doing a lot of work on the interior, we’ve thrown on a couple of new coats of paint … trying to undo a lot of superficial damages that’s been done to the structure, so it’s been looking really nice.”
The students still manage to enjoy the afternoon projects.
“We usually get a couple of pizzas down there and have fun,” said Goldbeck.
However, the progress has not been without trouble.
“Our goal was to open this semester, but [encountered] delays in construction — not related to student participation, but related to availability of supplies,” Goldbeck said.
Meanwhile, the organizers have been busy planning for the future.
“We’ve settled on serving Intelligentsia coffee, which is a roaster out of Chicago. They do organic and direct trade, which differs from fair trade, who often go through large wholesale distributors,” Goldbeck said.
“They have direct transactions with the actual growers, which is pretty cool.”
He then spoke further about the brewing system they plan to install.
“We’re going to be using a trendy new system for brewing the coffee called the ‘true brew system,’ which means that we’re going to be making the coffee by the cup,” Goldbeck said. “It’s going to be a slow drip system using ceramic Melitta’s to hold the filters.”
Freshman Mary Williams, convenor of the barista committee, explained that in spite of the focus on coffee, the shop will be a community location available for a broad range of uses.
“Coffee’s an excuse, but not really what it’s about,” she said.
Molly McCracken, assistant for institutional research and one of the minds behind the coffee shop, described her hopes for the coffee shop in terms of what it expects to give back the community.
“We want to be a student-run, non-hierarchical consensusbased, volunteer based, studentrun coffee shop,” she said. “But more importantly, a student and community space and a space that students can used for open mics, for club meetings, organizational meetings and a space to display artwork because there’s no space on campus where students can display their work if they’re not in a class … basically a student run space to shed the pressures and the barriers of the institutional center.”
Goldbeck has dedicated much of his Earlham career to getting the coffee shop up and running. As the semester draws to the close, however, he is passing things on to what he describes as “a core of really dedicated kids,” many of them freshmen who will be able to see the shop through to an established presence on campus.
Though he will not be around to see his project come to fruition, Goldbeck expressed relief at passing the baton on to others.
“After you dedicate a lot of time over four semesters to a project like this, you’ll have no problem with letting it go,” he said.
Students who want to get involved are invited to contact Williams at mwwilli09@earlham.edu.
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