Partners Coffee began in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2012, started by two childhood friends who wanted a place to celebrate coffee. Its first home was a flagship roastery, education lab and café, meant to make coffee “fun, approachable and social”, and it has roasted ever since. Its view is that it is “only as great as the sum of our partners”: farmers, producers, baristas, roasters, businesses and customers.

Partners tries to buy from the same producers and communities year after year, and directly when it can. Alongside microlots it seeks dependable volume coffees, bought in large, planned purchases at non-commodity prices that give growers the security to invest. Its El Ramo project buys twice a year from a single municipality in Antioquia, Colombia: every Colombian coffee from that region on its menu was found while sourcing components for El Ramo, and the most special lots are sold on their own as single origins. In Guatemala it works with Los Volcanes Coffee, an exporter buying from thousands of farmers that runs an experimental farm, Finca La Esperanza, in Antigua, where an organic plot came to outperform the rest of the farm by a factor of four. Eight mainstay coffees sit beside the rotating single origins.

The cafés are in Williamsburg, in the West Village and in Long Island City, Queens, where tables sit on a tree-shaded patio. Its coffee is also sold in grocery stores across the country. Its wholesale side delivers across New York in its own vans, roasts to order and keeps an in-house team of service technicians. Brew School classes are paused while a new Education Lab is built, and return in 2027.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Partners Coffee