Are We Affecting Sea Ice? Ready Coffee Opens in Chicago’s Wicker Park

Facebook photos by Ready Coffee

Chicago has yet another new micro roastery and retailer, with the opening of Ready Coffee in Wicker Park last week.

Ready Coffee is a project of restaurateur John Grbac, who ran Jimo’s restaurant in Wicker Park in the 1990s, at the birth of the north side neighborhood’s renaissance as a restaurant and retail destination.

Working with roastmaster Greg Striver, Ready is house-roasting Fair Trade-, Organic- and Rainforest Alliance-certified beans, expressing a particular commitment to environmental sustainability, including a soft spot for polar bears. Here’s more from the Ready team:

We’re certainly not the only coffee company offering delicious coffees. But we are also proud of our green initiatives: We have a commitment to polar bears; they are one of the first animals to be effected by climate change; we ask ourselves with every move that we make, are we effecting the sea ice at all with this decisions?  We are carful to select environmentally safe supply chains, we use recycled materials, refurbished equipment, and environmentally safe disposables in our stores; all this combined with Midwest friendliness.

With a custom-designed, penny-covered coffee bar and a wicker Harley Davidson, Ready is open at 1562 N. Milwaukee.