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KEEPING COFFEE KOSHER Straight From Seattle Espresso Inc.The Jeffersonian 08/05/02 OWINGS MILLS The Pikesville-based company Straight from Seattle Espresso Inc. will be soon be opening its 18th retail espresso outlet and its first to carry only kosher-approved beverages and food. The new location, scheduled to open on Aug. 11 _ just in time for the Maccabi games _ will be in the main building of the Jewish Community Center, next to the Gordon Center for the Performing Arts in Owings Mills. ``We'll have a cart there for the time being," says Ashley Stark-McCauley, who, with her husband Matt, launched Straight from Seattle Espresso in February 1997 with a single cart in Columbia Mall. ``But JCC is looking at a substantial build-out in the next couple years, and part of that will be us having a full cafe there," she adds. Seattle Espresso already has carts, coffee bars and cafes at Mr. Charles Market on Park Heights Avenue, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland Medical Center, Georgetown Medical Center in Washington, VA hospitals in Baltimore and D.C. and elsewhere. In the near future, expect the company to be opening three outlets at campuses of the Community College of Baltimore County. Ashley McCauley says that, even though she was born and reared in Pikesville, she had to take a crash course in kosher certification to properly retrofit her lattes, espressos, cappuccinos, mochas, Americanos and steamers to JCC's all-kosher standards. Every ingredient had to be submitted to and certified by a local company licensed to do kosher certification. ``We had to modify our menu at the new location and we can't use the tried and true baker and food preparers we use at other locations. Unlike our other locations, we're working only with kosher vendors at JCC," she says. In the coming weeks, Straight from Seattle Espresso Inc. will make another big move when it opens its own coffee roasting plant in Seattle. Using a relatively new technology called ``nitrogen sweating" that keeps roasted and packaged coffee unusually fresh, they will have the roasted beans shipped to the Baltimore area via overnight express. ``We have recently developed relationships with green coffee brokers who import the coffee," says McCauley. ``We use only small-batch, micro-roast coffee that's the rarest and best found." McCauley, who can talk for hours on the science of properly making top-notch espresso, got the drink in her veins in the 1980s while attending graduate school in Seattle. That's where she met Matt, then a law student. It's symptomatic of their devotion _ to their favorite drink if not to each other _ that on their first date, they spent 11 hours in a Seattle coffee bar drinking espressos and lattes. When the couple moved back to Pikesville in 1996 McCauley says she discovered a huge coffee void. In the Pikesville area, there were only one or two Starbucks and, other than the bubble pot at a local cafe or 7-Eleven, few other choices. But Ashley, who still works out of a home office in Baltimore County, seems to have filled that void nicely. She says their espresso bar in the basement of Johns Hopkins University's Milton Eisenhower Memorial Library _ one of several they have on the Hopkins campus ``does $800,000 a year from a 9-foot espresso bar." The McCauleys point out what they consider the key to their caffeine-fueled rush of local success. They retrofit each outlet to its location, just as they are doing at the new JCC site. ``We modify ourselves and wrap around the host institutions and communities we serve," says McCauley. ``We also make it a point to hire the very, very best people." Click here to go to the Straight From Seattle Espresso website. ©2001 MyWebPal.com.
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