___ Perform 9.4 ___
academic
Coffee Community Interview and Photography by Daniel Garcia
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rank Nguyen has been on a journey for several years— moving toward opening his own crafted coffee house. From building out the space on South Second and Williams to running a pop-up from Five Points on West Santa Clara Street, Nguyen is looking to share his special coffee and select pastries with the community, and to help others to brew that perfect cup.
Our thing is, “OK. Here’s the coffee. This is how we make it here. If you like it, you can go home and make it the same way.” We want to give people the brew-print. You grew up in San Francisco, and is your wife from San Jose? Kathy’s from San Jose. We met in college at Berkeley, and then we reconnected years later. She was in San Jose working. I was in San Francisco. We were commuting to see each other, and I was like, “OK. This is kind of crazy. One of us should move.” I decided to do it, and it’s been good.
How did you come up with the name? When I began my coffee journey, there was so much to learn. I decided to enroll in the Specialty Coffee Association and get certified. I took some courses and did some testing with them. I just went through the first level of certification, and I was like, “OK. Wow. This is just the tip of the iceberg.” I began talking to a lot of different roasters to figure out which coffees I wanted to work with. From roaster to roaster, everyone was doing something completely different, which is a beautiful thing. You see so much diversity. I realized coffee’s going to be a lifelong learning process. Academic means that I’ll always be learning, always growing. Also, I once spent two weeks on a Russian ship called The Academic.
Was that because you saw the opportunity to grow the coffee? That wasn’t even in my mind at the time. I was still working in marketing. When I came here I’d find coffee shops I was excited about, but I’d have to drive like 20 or 30 minutes to get there. It was the same with getting great pastries. I’m the kind of guy who will wake up really early and drive 25 minutes just to get a fresh croissant or bread. So I said, “This is crazy, there needs to be more.” I talked to my wife about it, and she agreed with me. She said, “I support you, let’s do this.”
[Laughs] You liked the ring of the name? Yeah, I liked the ring of the name. And, since Academic Coffee is always learning, it worked. That’s what we do with our staff too. Even right now, just a pop-up, whenever there’s downtime, I encourage our baristas, “Hey, let’s read up on a coffee that we’re serving, so we know where it’s from, what’s being done to it, and why it tastes that way.” Also, we’re putting up a mini library of coffee resources.
You say coffee and community go hand in hand. Can you describe your focus on that? A community coffee shop, for me, means a few things. Any business, whether it’s coffee or groceries or anything, is part of that community. The people who work there live around there, so your customers are your neighbors. I see that even in the pop-up. So from the community aspect, we want to only hire people who live in the area, in San Jose. We’ve had applicants from Santa Clara, but it’s like, “Hey, you’re in Santa Clara? There are great coffee shops there. You guys should work there. You shouldn’t be taking 30 minutes to get to work.” Also, we’re trying to be really competitive with wages. Minimum wage goes up in July. I know the Bay Area, San Jose, and Santa Clara County are trying to get up to $15 by 2018 or 2019. We’re starting off now at $15 an hour. We have one of the most competitive wages. I’m paying myself
Is that for the customers to look at, or just in the back for the employees? It’ll just be a shelf for the employees. For our customers, we want to have coffee tasting events and coffee brewing events. One thing I always do is, whenever I go to a coffee shop and find a coffee I really like, I buy it. Then, when I get home, I’m like, “It doesn’t taste the same as it did in the shop.”
instagram: academiccoffeesj
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