3 Cups, Conscious Coffee (and Chocolate!)

There are things in life I’ve learned to appreciate: beets, mushrooms, The Smiths, religiously inspired art, weeding. It’s an odd thing—why take time to work on developing an appreciation for something when there are already things in the world that are instantly enjoyable?

Sometimes you try and try to appreciate something, but appreciation just never develops. Other times, you experiment, you remain open to the possibilities of enjoyment, and understanding unfolds. You get it.

I always thought that someday this would happen for me with respect to jazz, but that’s been a no go. It has happened, however, with coffee, wine, and dark chocolate. I did not like any of these things when I first started to try them, but I’ve since come to have a great appreciation for them, which is why I knew that 3 Cups was going to be my kind of place.

3 Cups is part coffee shop, part wine bar, part gourmet chocolate pusher, part obsessive visionary. They take their stuff serious. But, it’s still accessible, eminently so. They’re not one of these places that expect to deal only with people who have cultivated the same breadth of knowledge about the products as they have. If you’ve got the lingo, they’ve got the lingo, but if you walk in and demonstrate no actual knowledge about coffees, but a real interest in tasting something good and interesting, the guy behind the counter, say his name is Jake, will be very cool and tell you about their “rockstar” coffee, El Vergel, a batch of coffee from Columbia that is only being sold at 3 Cups. It’s a micro-lot of coffee. There’s not much of it and when it’s gone, it’s gone. This is not coffee mass grown on huge agribusiness farms, harvested by machines, ground up and packaged up to be shipped out to grocery stores where it will sit around on the shelf indefinitely. This is fresh—fresh roasted, fresh ground, fresh pressed.

My friend and I took Jake up on his suggestion and ordered the El Vergel. At 3 Cups they prepare all of their coffee in a press pot, arguing that steeping the grounds in hot water allows all of the essential oils to be released into the water. The grounds that they press will have been ground that day and the beans will have been roasted that week. Coffee, they say, is at its best for no more than two weeks after it’s been roasted. All of this means something for the coffee for sure because it tastes indescribably different and is notably among the best coffees I’ve ever had.

Somewhat hyperbolically, the owner of 3 Cups, Lex Alexander (who, by the way, keeps a blog), submits that 99% of the whole bean coffee sold in the U.S. is stale and that 3 Cups specializes in the other 1%. Bold claim, but 3 Cups also has a manifesto, (again, my kind of place) so it seems par for the course. But beyond issues of superior freshness and flavor, there’s more substance to the differences the coffee at 3 Cups has in comparison with others.

3 Cups sells sustainable products that support the environments and people who produce the coffee, tea, and chocolate that they sell. The products are all handcrafted too—from picking to preparing. They work with Counter Culture Coffee to get the best in single-source sustainably produced coffee.

A few years ago my brother and I traveled together in Costa Rica. That experience really taught me a lot about coffee and chocolate production and agribusiness/monoculture models. These farming models clear out huge swaths of land to make room for planting rows and rows and rows of the same crop. Such methods present a huge drain on the soil and interrupt the natural balance of plant and animal life, which has both abstract and really immediate impacts.


For example, in Costa Rica, there is a direct relationship between agribusiness coffee farming and the poisonous snake population. This is because the machines which harvest the crops leave beans behind on the ground, which creates a very well-fed rodent population, which in turn prompts an increase in the snake population, presenting an obvious danger for workers and for anyone living in the area.

The food we buy and the ways it's produced have these real impacts on the world and its people. You could do worse than to reflect on having made a choice that at least represents an effort to have a positive effect on the world over a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate, even if you’re still learning to appreciate them, and if you’re ever in the Chapel Hill area, 3 Cups is the place to go for it.

3 Cups is located at 431 W. Franklin St., Suite 15, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, (919) 968-8993