Journal — February 2025

Hey there Yonderers! I hope winter has been treating you well. Here in NC, we just enjoyed our third snowfall of the year (after almost 4 years with no snow) and this last one had the biggest fluffiest flakes—it felt like the cafe was in a snow globe. Then, this past weekend, Durham hosted the 2025 national coffee championships, and a coffee from KWC, a Colombian roaster we featured a while back, won this year’s Brewer Cup (local friends: it was the coffee Juan shared with us at his Coffee Omakase event a few months back!). It was so much fun getting to host coffee industry people from all over the US and provide them a chill spot to escape the intensity of competition.

As I said last month, with the tariff situation changing by the day, we are taking a short break from featuring international coffee roasters and will be bringing in some of my favorite roasters from around the US. I’m hoping this is a short term change, but I really don’t want your coffee getting caught up in the middle of trade wars and shifting geopolitical issues (FedEx gives us enough trouble every month without an understaffed FDA slowing clearance down even further). So until I’m confident that we’ll be able to reliably deliver from abroad again, I’ve decided to use this as a chance to share some the stateside roasters that I love.

Coming up first is New York’s Regalia Coffee. Paolo Maliksi founded Regalia with his wife Chisato in 2018 as a collaborative roasting space under their apartment in Queens, where micro-roasteries could get started without the huge upfront costs required to build out a roastery. That space became a hub of creativity and community in the New York coffee scene, until 2022 when it tragically burned down. But then, in 2023, they reopened better than ever.

Now, Regalia is Paolo’s roasting project, and the community roasting space has taken on a life of its own, as Multimodal, a 7000sqft coffee roasting, barista training, and community event space. It’s so much more than the Maliksis every imagined it could become. I’m grateful to call Paolo and Chisato friends and am so proud of what they’ve built in New York and beyond.

This month, they’re excited to share four beautiful coffees with us. The first two are Bourbons from Burundi, grown in Kayanza, and processed at the Ninga washing station (a part of the Long Miles Coffee Project). One lot is honey processed, and the other is washed. Next up is Abel Salinas’ Typica Mejorado microlot from Saraguro in Loja, Ecuador. And rounding out our feature is a Colombian Pink Bourbon called Panela Bacana from the renouned Finca Buena Vista in Huila. All four are fantastic, and I know you’ll love them.