Vermont Artisan Coffee & Tea Company

Travel down Route 100 from Stowe toward Waterbury and you will come upon a gleaming new building that is a hub of all things coffee. Vermont Artisan Coffee & Tea Company now occupies a new 15,000-square-foot space that houses their offices, café production facility and coffee school. For those who worship the bean, this is the place to come whether for java education or just a meticulously curated menu of coffees or teas from around the world.

Owner Mané Alves began Vermont Artisan Coffee in 2000, in downtown Waterbury. Mané had previously been in the wine industry in California. He met his wife Holly on a ski lift in Squaw Valley in the ’80s, and they fell for each other fast enough that when Holly was offered the job as head of marketing for Ben & Jerry’s three weeks later, he followed. In Vermont, he started working for Coffee Enterprises in Burlington. As Holly explains, translating his wine skills into coffee was a natural. “They are very similar, they are both agricultural products, both change with weather and climate, terroir, so it wasn’t a big leap to go from wine to coffee.” Holly stayed with Ben & Jerry’s until 1998 and continued marketing for other companies until she shifted over to Vermont Artisan Coffee full-time in 2010.

Mané originally started Coffee Lab International in 1998, which tested coffee for other operations. His work took him to coffee-producing countries to meet with farmers and exporters. In his travels, he discovered exquisite coffees, each embodying the character of the soil and surroundings from which it was grown. It wasn’t a giant leap to start importing his favorites to sell in his new home state. He found a large coffee roaster in Europe and had it shipped to Vermont. The company then sold these coffees to restaurants and co-ops and now have accounts across the state but are mostly concentrated in the greater Burlington area. The Davis Center at UVM and the Skinny Pancake are two of their biggest customers.

In his travels both for buying and teaching about coffee, Man. also found excellent teas. His approach to sourcing the best tea is the same as for coffee; he meets with the actual farmers growing the product, not with the middleman. Vermont Artisan now imports 16 different teas from China, India and Sri Lanka.

Although the company offered products from around the world, local weather impacted their plans. In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene flooded the Winooski River near their facility and heavily damaged the building. The giant roaster stationed on the ground level was submerged under three feet of water. When the waters finally receded, there were some tense moments as they attempted to start it up again. They succeeded, but Holly says at that point, if the roaster had been damaged beyond repair, their roasting venture would have ended. The cramped space and threat of future floods convinced Man. to move the operation to higher ground, in the well-traveled area of Route 100, near Stowe.

Their new building was finished in 2017. Inside, the architecture achieves that elusive quality of looking clean and industrial without feeling sterile. Concrete floors are interspersed with repurposed wood from an old barn. In the café,  gleaming stainless equipment contrasts with a countertop made with repurposed flooring from a bowling alley. All throughout the facility, from the warehouse to the offices, there is coffee-related art on the walls, all collected by Mané in his travels.