10-Year-Old Upstate NY Brewery Sprouts Common Roots Coffee

At the brand new (in city’s oldest building) Common Roots Coffee production headquarters in South Glens Falls, New York. Image by Nolan Murphy, courtesy of Common Roots.

In the foothills of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, a fresh coffee business called Common Roots Coffee is shooting up like a sapling alongside its well-established craft brewing parent tree, Common Roots Brewing.

The South Glens Falls beer business launched 10 years ago by father and son Bert and Christian Weber has sprouted to three locations in the region. Inside one of those locations, the beer hall and event space across the street from the flagship, is the new Common Roots Coffee cafe.

The Common Roots campus in South Glens Falls. Image by Jess Mead, courtesy of Common Roots.

The coffee side of the business officially launched last year as a one-person roasting operation led by brewery employee John Reed, who now serves as roaster and operations director of Common Roots Coffee. The business recently added seasoned New York coffee pro Luke Rock as a barista and director of coffee.

With the cafe up and running, Common Roots Coffee is now putting the final touches on its new roastery inside what Reed said is the oldest working building in the city of South Glens Falls, dating back to 1831.

The cafe inside the beer hall. Photo by Jess Mead, courtesy of Common Roots.

“The owning family bought and fully renovated the space to make it functional for the coffee company,” Reed recently told DCN. “It maintains a lot of the Adirondack ‘industrial chic’ style featured across all of the parent company’s locations, highlighted by keeping the exposed beams in the roasting spaces — beams that are extinct American Chestnut.”

At the new roastery, Reed and the coffee team operate two small electric roasters, a small Santoker machine and a new Bellwether Shop Roaster, acquired through Bellwether’s early access program.

Reed said that the all-electric Bellwether aligns with Common Roots’ company-wide environmental sustainability initiatives, including minimizing emissions and production waste, solar energy usage, hundreds of pounds of weekly composting with Adirondack worm farmers and donations of other biomass for local farm soil or feed enrichment.

Image by Nolan Murphy, courtesy of Common Roots.

The coffee company also leans on Bellwether’s green coffee platform to make informed purchasing decisions.

“Our company’s core values dictate the way in which we source coffee,” Reed said. “The lots that we source through our rep at Covoya and lots available through Bellwether both feature information on farming practices, fair trade, RFA and organic farming certifications [or] practices.”

Many of those bona fides are communicated to customers on recyclable, nitrogen-purged 12-ounce bags of Common Roots Coffee. At the coffee bar, the shop offers filter brews through a Curtis Twin Thermo-Pro machine. Espresso drinks come by way of a volumetric La Spaziale two-group machine flanked by a Mazzer Super Jolly grinder.

Crossover from the brewery has naturally benefited the coffee venture, as Reed said people in the area are readily familiar with the idea of “specialty liquids.”

Image by Nolan Murphy, courtesy of Common Roots.

“The specialty coffee community in our area has certainly grown at a rapid rate over the past five to 10 years, especially south of us in the Capital Region from Saratoga to Albany and beyond,” Reed said. “We are excited to add to the few shops in our immediate vicinity that roast and serve more modern takes and high-end coffee.”

The Common Roots Coffee bar is located at 62 Saratoga Ave., South Glens Falls, New York. Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. 

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