Think you know coffee? Find out at this new coffee training center in Silver Lake

North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee, which began 21 years ago and helped pioneer the direct-trade movement, has opened a training center in Silver Lake. Essentially a schoolhouse for coffee for its wholesale partners, with weekly coffee tastings and other events for the public as well, this is Counter Culture’s second training center in California — the first opened, along with a roastery, in Emeryville last year — and it’s the 11th nationwide.

Counter Culture generally roasts its coffee for complex sweetness; if you had to peg its roast level, it’d be somewhere right on the medium level. But because the company is a wholesaler and doesn’t have cafes of its own, you can only try its coffee at a restaurant or coffee shop. Nationally, the company supplies the coffee at restaurants such as Alinea in Chicago, Canlis in Seattle and the Spotted Pig in New York City; locally, you’ll find Counter Culture at the Assembly in West Hollywood, Teuscher Chocolates & Café in Beverly Hills and L&E Oyster Bar in Silver Lake, among others.

To support the restaurants and coffee shops that serve its coffee, Counter Culture has taken to building training centers, which are outfitted with espresso machines, brewing gadgets and employees who live and breathe Counter Culture coffee. The earliest centers were actually intended to be learning facilities for its own customer-service staff. Over time, said Allen Yelent, who oversees wholesale sales in the Los Angeles area, Counter Culture realized these spaces could serve as something considerably more than glorified office spaces: they could also be used as a coffee lab and classroom for its retail partners.

It is not uncommon for coffee roasters to dedicate educational spaces for their wholesale partners. What sets Counter Culture apart is how much real estate and energy it devotes to the explicit purpose of coffee education.

“We’re seeing a really great interest in coffee — specifically, in specialty coffee in Los Angeles,� Yelent said. That explains why Counter Culture decided to drop a training center here. The space the company decided on in Silver Lake is a bright teal Art Deco building next to El Condor and a short stroll away from Pine & Crane. At about 1,500 square feet, it’s larger than some coffee shops in town.

Designed by Design, Bitches, the training center is an open, airy place, with a large area for espresso education and another for brewing and coffee cupping. There’s also a kitchen and a tech room for machine repair. Wholesale partners can have specialized one-on-one training, attend weekly tastings of the company’s catalog of coffee and plan their own menus, and enroll their baristas in a formal educational program the company calls Counter Intelligence (not to be confused with that other Counter Intelligence). “We’re proactive,� Yelent said. “We’re constantly working with our customers to advance their abilities and their skill set.�

All of this is designed to ultimately benefit customers.

“Empowering baristas to have the knowledge base of, say, brewing science — what water and coffee do together — gives them a foundation to make great coffee on the bar and be confident in their coffee shops,� Yelent said. “And when you have a confident barista who knows exactly what steps and techniques they can do to make a coffee taste as best as it can, consumers will absolutely get the best coffee experience.�

This is a sentiment echoed by Shi Jun Ng, who runs the Assembly in West Hollywood. She said that her baristas are excited about utilizing the training center as a facility for advancing their own skill sets. That will “improve how we serve coffee and understand coffee,� Ng said. “And that will translate to the cup.�

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Over in Beverly Hills, Phil Covitz is the proprietor of Teuscher Chocolates & Cafe. With a team of six to eight baristas, he said he too is very much looking forward to taking advantage of the training center.

“The training center will allow us to learn and take time crafting drinks and trying new techniques and recipes,� he said, noting that customers these days expect not just good coffee, but baristas who know about the coffee they’re serving. With the training center and its wealth of resources, he expects his “customers will be served a very great drink by a very knowledgeable barista.�

Though the training center is geared toward supporting its wholesale partners, it will also have programs available to the wider coffee community. Its professional development program is open to any barista who may want to sharpen his or her skills. Every Friday, the training center will host Tastings @ Ten, a free event where anyone, coffee professional or otherwise, can stop in to sample a selection of coffees or explore, say, how a coffee might taste differently depending on whether it’s pulled as an espresso, filtered in a pour-over cone or turned into a cold-brew. Public brewing classes are also in the works. 1601 Griffith Park Blvd, Silver Lake, www.counterculturecoffee.com.

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