Coffea is the quintessential overpriced coffee shop, and I'm from Washington State, so feel free to go ahead and assume I'm better than you at judging all things artisan and hipster.
Coffea should be celebrated for creating a vision and beating the odds to bring it into fruition. Frankly, creating a truly snobby coffee shop in South Dakota is a monumental challenge. The challenge is not creating the decor - the raw neo-industrial crossover look can be bought for a price. The stained concrete floors, suspended packing crates and artfully created niches for reading and highly intellectual conversation are not unique to this establishment.
Neither is the challenge creating a superior coffee. With enough money, anyone can invest in the massive, over-engineered machines that take coffee from a mere beverage to a sacred liquid, requiring spiritual contemplation and appreciation. Granted, it would be difficult to differentiate normal good coffee from the Holy Black Ointment Coffea serves in a blind test, but loving Coffea isn't about perceptible differences, it's about faith. And Coffea wants your love, faith and devotion in its Sacred Merciful Grace to be blind - not double-blind tested.
What Coffea has done to set them apart does not consist of wood or stone, liquid or metal, but consists of flesh and blood. The first step of any successful religion is to convert true believers, acolytes full of zeal to maintain the purity of the faith, eliminate apostasy and proselytize to the heathen. Coffea has found its apostles in its employees - Coffea's Truest Believers.
In the monastic tradition, the men are dressed identically. Each thin and scrawny, their hair is trimmed closely along the sides of their head, but kept long and combed on top, and each is allowed a different facial hair style depending on their position in the priesthood. This conformity keeps each man from standing apart from the rest, and reminds them that they are all equally inferior to the Holy Liquid they serve, but superior to the lay-people who come to pay their devotions to the Glorious Libation. Each have tattoos of visions they have been granted by the One True Drink, artful depictions of trees in a forest, or a songbird caught in flight, or a poem that came to them while meditating on the nature of Holy Drink.
These zealots are what set Coffea apart from the mere idol-worshipers of other coffee shops. These True Believers refuse to smile, laugh or otherwise bring disrespectful cheer into the Holy Sanctuary of Liquid Elysium. They frown with judgement at any layperson who attempts to defile their peaceful sanctuary with sinful happiness. I saw one high priest, who was asked by an ignorant layperson to commit sin by defiling his raw sugar latte with cinnamon. This priest nobly refused, castigating the layperson for his ignorance and reminding him that the way of Our Roasted Lord is a path laid out by the artisanal choices of the priesthood and not in the wanton and willy-nilly application of spice.
Such is the glory of Coffea. Come and worship. read more