Live Oak’s Roots Grow Deeper With New Coffee Roastery
Live Oak Coffeehouse has started roasting its own coffee.
The popular Midtown gathering place — which has been serving local coffee roaster Creation Coffee (formerly Heirloom Coffee) since its opening — has plans to create different in-house blends and single-origins of its own.
“We have dreamed of branching out and roasting our own coffee since our beginning,” a press release from the coffeehouse reads. “Our partnership with Creation Coffee has been wonderful and we will continue to bring you their amazing coffee.”
Live Oak has tapped Sean Bartley as its Coffee Roaster.
“Sean has served so many Live Oak guests over the years with his amazing coffee knowledge, latte art and friendliness as Barista and Uptown’s (Bay City) Manager,” the release reads. “We are so honored to see him fulfill a long time dream and we are so excited to enjoy the many coffees he plans to develop for Live Oak.”
The coffeehouse plans to start roasting large batches in January. In the meantime, they are using a sample roaster for small batches.
“We do have a full size, 10-kilo roaster coming, but for right now we got [the sample roaster] to sample our coffees because we’re in the early stages. We’re figuring it all out, our coffees,” Bartley tells the City Paper.
Bartley says that he and Live Oak general manager Daniel Terhune are working on trying to source the official blends and roastings that they will release next year.
Live Oak’s first coffee is a holiday blend called “Good Cheer,” a blend of African and South American coffees, roasted light-medium that, Bartley says, will “bring out notes of the holiday spices and flavors we all love this time of year.”
Good Cheer, its packaging says, has tasting notes of molasses, cinnamon, and ginger spice.
“I found some coffees that I really liked in these two and I’ve always had a thing where I’ve always thought holiday blends have been very like weird for me,” Bartley tells the City Paper.
Bartley says that for him, a holiday blend isn’t just about African coffees and that he always wanted to do a more ‘warm-tasting’ blend, putting an emphasis on the spice and nutty flavors.
“So this one is an African — it’s a mixture of half-African, half-South American coffee,” Bartley says of ‘Good Cheer.’ “The African coffee is roasted a little bit lighter to kind of bring out those sweet, fruity notes. And then the South American is a little bit more medium roast and that has a lot of nuttiness to it.”
A good holiday blend, Bartley says, should have less fruit notes and more spice and nuttiness.
“When I think of a holiday blend, I think of like a warm, kind of nutty, something like a reminder — this is just personal for me, doesn’t necessarily mean this is what’s going into our product — but I always felt like it was like sitting with your grandma in front of the fire, enjoying like a nice, comforting, warm cup of coffee,” he says.
That’s in contrast to some other Christmas blends, Bartley says.
“They’ve been in the past, nicer, really fruity acidic and yeah while I understand that to a certain extent, that’s not what I always thought of when I was like, oh, ‘Holiday life,'” he says.
Sean Bartley
Bartley is the natural selection for Live Oak’s new coffee roasting adventures. He is widely known in the community as one of Live Oak’s social media stars, and he has been roasting coffee at home, as a hobby, for years.
“I’ve been home roasting for about three years right on my own but it’s a little bit different. So we’re doing a lot of learning when it comes to like the technicalities of roasting coffee in general,” he tells the City Paper.
His passion for high-quality coffee started in Chicago, on a trip with his late brother, Aaron Ullom.
“So when he was in the Navy, we went to visit him in Chicago when he was going through boot camp, and at that point he was like, ‘oh, I’m in the Navy and I have a little bit of money now,’ and he thought he was all cool,” Bartley says, laughing. “So he took us to Intelligentsia, which is a coffee shop in downtown Chicago, and at this point, I was just a Maxwell House [drinker] and he’s like, ‘Anything you want on the menu!’ and I jokingly ordered like a $12 cup of a Kenyan something or other. It was like that first sip that I took I knew like this is way different. Like this isn’t just a cup of coffee. Something happened. So from that moment on it was always like I wanted to learn about coffee and I wanted to learn.”
In order to cultivate that desire to learn, Bartley’s first job, at 16, was as a barista for Journey’s Coffee at a local church: Messiah Lutheran.
“I was 16 years old. Yep, and it wasn’t necessarily like I wanted to be a coffee professional, right? It was just I’m very interested and this will be perfect.”
Working as a barista soon made Bartley yearn for a deeper connection to the coffee he was serving.
“So I kind of jumped ahead, from I want to learn about the coffee, to I’m a barista and I need to learn how to prepare people’s coffee,” Bartley says. “It’s always been that missing section where I said, I wanted to learn about why this happens. How did this come to be? So the more that I researched and learned about the origins of coffee, it led up to roasting. Because that was the point where the the coffee becomes a product.”
To start, that meant learning about the different regions of origin for coffee.
“I always was really passionate about learning about the origins of coffee. How it’s made, how it’s grown out. I just had this like weird thing where I just wanted to roast coffee, I want to make the coffee, I want to create something that’s cool,” Bartley says.
Bartley says he loves his job and equates his life with the phrase: “If you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
“So that was always in my mind. It was like my comfort. I love being around people and I love coffee. So it just made sense that I would be in the coffee machine,” Bartley says, “I’m not an artist. I make music, but I don’t paint. [Coffee’s] like a canvas. Yeah, another cliche I get that, so I wanted to be able to create that to be provided to people to enjoy it.”
Live Oak Coffee Roasters
Bartley says that with the roastery, Live Oak has an opportunity to bring in the community to learn more about coffee.
“We have an amazing opportunity to teach and lead a whole new group of dreamers and leaders not only in coffee, but in leadership and community service,” Bartley says. “We want to include the community in public cuppings, direct feedback on different roasts, and our new offerings etc. This is for you.”
Bartley went into more detail with the City Paper about Live Oak’s plans.
“How cool would it be to have a roasting class where we teach people how to home roast like these are, just things like we want to do all of that,” Bartley exclaims. “We have been asked ‘Why roast, right?’ It’s just another chapter to the Live Oak tree. We want to be able to bring people in, hire new people to do the roasting, provide them with education, make them part of the community and bring the community in.”
Live Oak plans to develop different roasts for sale next year. Plans aren’t exact, but they expect to develop less than 10. Currently, there are no solid plans for retail sales of Live Oak’s roasts in local grocery stores, but Bartley doesn’t discount that idea.
“I mean, this early, like the more that we can spread our coffee and the mission of Live Oak through the community, absolutely, but it’s not like on paper,” he says.
The roastery will develop single origin coffees as well as blends.
“We love single origins. We love Comfort cups, right? So Live Oak is kind of that perfect balance of specialty coffee and comfort. They can come in and get a caramel vanilla latte, or they can come in and get a pour-over of a really good single origin,” Bartley tells the City Paper. “So we want to as a roastery, provide that same type of comfort for people. We want to provide a really good selection or at least a few selections of good single origin, lighter roast coffees, but we also want to have those medium and even darker roast that are available for people that like those just drinkable cups.”
Bartley says that for some of their roasts, they will look to underused regions, such as Mexico and New Guinea.
“We’ve been looking at places like Mexican coffee, New Guinea, places like that. [Places] that you don’t see around here. We want to look at a lot of different places that aren’t necessarily super common around around here that we’ve seen,” Bartley says.
Live Oak’s first roast is a blend because they are still learning the process, but the idea of roasting its own coffee was a natural progression for the coffeehouse that’s had a hand in transforming Midtown in Midland.
Good Cheer is available now, in both Live Oak locations (Midland and Uptown in Bay City) as well as online.
“The whole vision of what we want to do with the roastery kind of fits into the general mission of Live Oak. Our slogan is ‘like coffee, love people,’ and we love bringing in people, you know, giving them a place to work, giving them a place to be part of the community,” Bartley says.
Michael Westendorf is the chairman and executive editor of Chemical City Paper. As Executive Editor, he leads the City Paper’s news coverage and editorial team.