RK: Dave Battjes, our roastery manager, is a great artist and specializes in lettering, and so we’re working with him on some messaging to put up there. The entire building is 10,000 square feet, and right now 5000 of that is Brewery Vivant next door.
The photo you’ll see in the press release is part of a vision we’ll have a mural up on the wall too. The building was kind of an eyesore, this garage had been converted into an office of some sort, with an 80s stucco exterior. TC: The structure was transformed in the 80s at some point, and so it had all this weird stuff on it-our exterior wall is actually inside our cupping lab. Tell us more about this 1930s auto garage. Transparency is a big part of how we’re thinking about the design. We want our baristas to be connected to what we’re doing on the QC side of things, the roasters to be connected to the offices…you’ll literally be able to stand in the cafe, order an espresso, and in one direction see training or cupping happening, or look through and someone’s roasting coffee on the other side. The word gets thrown around a lot as a buzzword, but it’s always at the core of what we’re doing.
RK: With both these places, the concept of transparency is a big piece of it. So it’s not a “roaster in the cafe” type of thing this is an intense, healthy-sized roasting company that has a lot of quality control in place, and you’re still able to have a cafe in the midst of that, and able to kind of see that all happening. The idea has always kind of been that the whole process is somewhat highly visible, to create a unique environment.
MADCAP CAFE WINDOWS
The roastery has these huge windows-people can actually see in from across the street with these huge access windows-and we’ve also huge windows into the front training area and the cupping room. Trevor Corlett: It’s going to be an interesting experience, which we’ve always hoped for. But the cafe will run with its own coffee shop and identity-it’s got more to do with the neighborhood than it does necessarily to the roastworks. When you’ve got production going on, it means pulling people into that story and getting them one step closer to our hand in the production, which is something we’ve always tried to do. In looking for a space we wanted something people could glance in at, to walk in and see that something’s happening there, and that’s been at the heart of what we’re doing. Ryan Knapp: It will definitely have its own identity. We are curious: with the cafe located next to the roastworks, will this be like a “roastery-cafe” in the traditional sense? Hi Trevor and Ryan! Congrats on the new space. To learn more about the space, slated to open in Spring 2016, we sat down digitally with Corlett and Knapp for a quick chat (between interview requests from local TV). The space will be designed by longtime Madcap collaborators Seth Herman and Chuck Anderson, responsible for the brand’s industry-leading logo and packaging work. Madcap’s popular original cafe is in a rapidly revitalizing district of downtown Grand Rapipds their new space is in the Fulton Heights neighborhood, a mix of accessible residential and historic commercial real estate with plenty of residents commuting to work elsewhere in the Grand Rapids area.
The building, originally built as an auto garage in the 1930s, also houses operations for Brewery Vivant, makers of French and Belgian style beer. East, directly adjacent to the company’s all-new roastworks, which began operations in 2015. The space will be located at 1039 Fulton St. This will be the second cafe in Grand Rapids for the roasting company, founded by Trevor Corlett and Ryan Knapp in 2008. Some exciting news out of Grand Rapids, Michigan this week, as our longtime friends & partners at Madcap Coffee have announced that they’ll be opening a brand new retail cafe in early 2016.