Mathew Deshotel

Five Brooklyn Coffee Bean Shops

If you're a lover of coffee, then you will want to try out a coffee bean shop. These stores offer a wide assortment of whole beans from all over the world. They also offer unique kitchenware and trinkets.

Some of these shops offer subscriptions to their coffee beans. Some shops offer coffee beans in bulk buy coffee beans.

Porto Rico Importing Co.

Veteran coffee vendor who specializes in international brews, loose teas, and a variety.

The scent of freshly roasted beans fills the air when you walk into this West Village shop. The sacks of dark roast coffee beans brown beans are stacked on the shelves along with sugar jars coffee-making equipment, tea and other accessories.

Porto Rico, originally opened in 1907 by Italian immigrant Patsy Albonese. At the time, Greenwich Village was seeing an large influx of Italian immigrants who established businesses to meet their culinary requirements. Albanese named the shop after the famous Puerto Rican Coffee she imported and sold - a drink that was so well-known that at the time, even the Pope would drink it.

Today, Porto Rico sells 130 varieties of beans from around the world at three locations in New York City including their Bleecker Street location, Essex Market and online. Porto Rico roasts their own beans and provides wholesale distribution for 350 restaurants in NYC, Brooklyn and Brooklyn.

Peter Longo, the current owner and president of the company was raised over the bakery of his family located on Bleecker Street where his father was the owner of Porto Rico. He continues to run the shop in the same way to his father and grandfather.

Sey Coffee

Located along Grattan Street in Morgantown, Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, Sey Coffee is both a roaster and coffee shop. Co-founders Tobin Polk and Lance Schnorenberg, both 33 started roasting in a fourth-floor loft across the street from their new store in 2011 under the name Lofted Coffee (with local clients including Greenpoint's Budin and Soho cart service Peddler).

Sey's reliance on micro-lots -- or even whole harvests from single farmers earned it the respect of the most discerning New York City coffee aficionados. Last year they made a six-bag micro-lot purchase of Danilo Dones Sitio Catucai 785 from Brazil's Espirito Santo region. The beans were picked at the peak of ripeness, and floated to remove any imperfections. They were then dried on the farm after a 36-hour dry fermentation. The result is a blend that is a little fruit and melon.

Sey's mission extends beyond the shop to improve the overall wellbeing of growers and staff, and customers. It utilizes biodegradable disposables as well as composts, keeping waste out of the landfill and converting it into substances that help reduce harmful greenhouse gases and enrich the soil. It also does away with gratuity, a move that puts the baristas in a position to provide their livelihoods and inspire them to concentrate on their profession.

La Cabra

La Cabra is a modern specialty coffee company that was founded in Aarhus, Denmark in 2012. It started with a small shop and a dedicated team. Their honest and innovative approach to providing an outstanding coffee beans types experience has earned them a devoted fan base not just in their home town, but worldwide.

La Carba has a rigorous process to find their perfect beans, going through hundreds of different lots each year to identify the ones that fit their ideals. Then, they roast them in a light manner before dialing the roast to create their desired flavor profile. This gives their coffees an enhanced taste and clarity.

The East Village store opened last October, with a minimalist and sleek style, and has been praised by international coffee lovers for its meticulous pour-overs and baked goods supervised by head baker Jared Sexton, who's previously worked at Bien Cuit and Dominique Ansel.

The shop is equipped with a La Marzocco modbar and the cups and plates are designed by Wurtz ceramics in Horsens, which is a father-son studio. In a recent interview Atlanta Coffee Shops General Manager Ian Walla revealed that La Cabra serves 250 different types of coffee per day and typically has seven or eight varieties on offer at any given time.

The Plant Coffee Roasting Plant Coffee

The Roasting Plant A multi-unit retailer of 500g coffee beans, roasts and brews the coffee on site. Each cup is brewed and roasted according to your specifications in less than an hour. It is a search engine for the highest-quality specialty beans that are directly sourced to give customers the option of choices and high-quality.

Their on-site roaster is an automatic fluid bed machine which is different from the traditional drum machines found in UK coffee beans unroasted shops. The beans are blown about in a heated box by high-velocity air which keeps the beans in a suspended state and allows roasting to happen in a steady manner throughout the machine.

I tried the Sumatran coffee and it was a rich cup with an enveloping mouthfeel, dark chocolate scent was present. The coffee began to cool while you sipped, subtle flavours of citrus fruit were evident.

The coffee that has been roasted will be taken to the store's Eversys Super-Automatic Brewing Machines to be brewed according your preferences in under a minute. Customers can pick from nine single origin options and a range of blends.

Parlor Coffee

Parlor Coffee was founded in 2012 behind a barbershop, with a single group espresso machine. It has since morphed to become a burgeoning roastery, and its beans can be found in a variety of great cafes, restaurants, and home brewers across the city. Parlor Coffee is dedicated to sourcing only the highest quality beans that have all been through a long journey before reaching its roasters.

The owners, who are self-described as "passionate about coffee and believe that good coffee should be accessible to all," have created a place that is a bit more grounded, with chalkboards, compost bins and up-cycled products, and a minimalist interior.

They roast and create their own blends as well as single-origins (there were six when I was there) Also, they offer cuppings on Sundays, which are open to the public. Imagine it as a brewery tasting room--you can smell and taste the ground beans, from chocolatey to earthy (one was very tomato-like!). It's a bit off the beaten path but well worth the trip.