top of page
nyc-speakeasy2_edited.jpg
The Life and Times of Vinnie Stravinski

Drink Coffee Do Stuff

Stravinski's Italian Restaurant

Chapter 8 | Scene 4



Vinnie's obsession with coffee is legendary. While it extends to making sure his restaurant only serves the finest coffee, some of Vinnie's favorite coffee brands and roasts he keeps for himself. After all, your average Italian restaurant customer doesn't appreciate quality coffee roasts or unique blends. When he sees people pouring unnecessary amounts of sugar or creamer into a cup of coffee, he wonders why he even bothers spending extra money on premium roasted coffee.

So, while the restaurant's "house" coffee and espresso beans are very good, he tends to only share his favorites with friends or family that appreciate a good cup of coffee.

Vinnie finds many new coffees from Trade Coffee, a specialty coffee subscription service, which boasts some sort of algorithm for recommending (and auto-delivering) coffees based on preference settings and your ordering history. While it's still a hit and miss proposition – when Vinnie discovers a coffee he likes, he makes sure to add it into his regular delivery rotation.


So is the case for the coffee he's drinking at home on a cold, snowy Saturday morning in Massapequa, Long Island, New York. This morning – Vinnie is trying a different roast from one of his favorite coffee roasters – Drink Coffee Do Stuff. He has brewed up a pot of Ethiopia Dur Feres.

Drink Coffee Do Stuff (DCDS) is a specialty coffee roaster based out of Lake Tahoe, California. Established in 2017, their name is derived from the active lifestyle and mantra of owner and former professional snowboarder, Nick Visconti.

While "do stuff" may have started as a youthful and clever way of saying "get off your ass", it has evolved into something more important. The company now promotes and participates in ways to "do stuff" in their local community of Lake Tahoe to help clean up and preserve the environment.

All of the coffee beans from DCDS are sourced from high-elevation, certified organic coffee bean growers from around the world. Being a Lake Tahoe-based company, they have doubled-down on the high-elevation angle by roasting at 6,000 feet above sea-level. All of this high altitude treatment – from growing, to natural processing, to roasting – is the backdrop for delivering the claim of a more sweet, less bitter cup of coffee.

"More sweet, less bitter" sounds like a hollow marketing tag line, intended to capture the naïvivity of your pedestrian, Whole Foods coffee drinker. Might as well throw "gluten-free" and "vegan-friendly" on the label and jack up the price.

However, in the case of this Ethiopia Dur Feres cup of coffee from DCDS that Vinnie is sipping at the kitchen table – "more sweet, less bitter" is exactly how he would describe it.

The DCDS website describes the flavors of this single origin roast as having "hints of chocolate fudge, honey drizzle, pomegranate and lavender." Vinnie's not sure he tastes the pomegranate or lavender, but he definitely tastes the chocolate and honey, with a sweet fruitiness undertone to it. There is a subtle smoothness to this coffee. The chocolate, honey or fruitiness description is by no means overpowering or meant to sound like this coffee is "flavored". It simply has a tone that keeps any kind of bitterness away. It creates that moment you have when you taste something different and enjoyable and look at the label or packaging to see what "this thing" is called. It's memorable.

Vinnie looks out the window. The snow is starting to pile up. Three or four inches now. The forecast calls for more, before turning over to rain later in the day. A real mess. The restaurant will be slow today, but he still needs to go to work soon, so he can help the busboys clear the walkway of snow. He still has some time, he decides. Another cup of this delicious coffee from Drink Coffee, Do Stuff will definitely fuel him for the rest of his day.



88 views0 comments

Related Posts

See All

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page