commonly coffee

This June, our Coffee Roster of the Month is taking us on a one-way trip straight to Funky Town!

Let me introduce you to none other than House of Funk! This specialty coffee roaster (and craft brewery) based out of North Vancouver, British Columbia has set out to bring the funk, proclaim that acidity is not a crime, and package it all up in some of the coolest containers out there!

I’ve had the opportunity on multiple occasions when I’m out in BC to swing by their brewery & roasting HQ and I gotta say it’s an incredible space. When you’ve got the opportunity to enjoy craft beer and craft brews all in one space there’s no reason to leave!

So I reached out to their team, and they were stoked to have the chance to share their story. So let’s get at it, and give it up for House of Funk, our June 2024 Coffee Roaster of the Month!

Alright, as we get going here, please introduce yourselves, and briefly share how you got into specialty coffee?

Let’s start with Chris Fraser, our head roaster! It was through a healthy obsession with baking that he entered the coffee world. He was making doughnuts at a bakery and coffee roastery in Vancouver, and his penchant for experimentation and exploration spilled over into the coffee side of the biz. When the company shuttered the bakery, they invited Chris to work in the roastery. That was 13 years, several roasteries, and many cuppings ago…

Stepanka Sustrova is our production roaster, dance queen, coffee trainer, and so much more. She worked as a barista in the Czech Republic for many years, and even competed in the Czech Barista Championships before coming to Canada in 2020. Though she originally intended to settle in Whistler, fate brought her here to House of Funk, and she’s been elevating our coffee program (not to mention our moods and sense of fun) ever since.

Finally, Alison Ensworth started in specialty coffee as a barista, never imagining it would be such a source of fascination, inspiration, community, and connection. That student job began as a way to support her Communications degree, but now it’s the other way around — she revels in the chance to use writing, photography, event planning, digital media, and e-commerce in service of the coffee community. She joined the House of Funk team last year where she gets to do all of that — with funk, to boot!

Special shout-out to co-owners Darren Hollett and Kurtis Warren, who believed in a partnership between brewing and roasting from Day One!

Maybe before we go much further, share with our readers what you’re drinking/enjoying these days when it comes to coffee!

Almost always something fruity and funky: a jammy Costa Rica natural, an anaerobic Brazil, any sort of co-fermented innovation! In fact, we just released an incredible washed Colombian from Finca Milan, which was co-fermented with cultures from passion fruit and panela. Prior to that, we couldn’t stop talking about a blackberry honey co-ferment from Stopgap Coffee in Taiwan, and a Koji fermented Colombian from Continuum Coffee.

Can you tell us a bit about the history of House of Funk?

How long have you been around? How many cafes do you have?
How did you come up with the name?
Anything else?

We first opened our doors in May, 2019 — that was our location in North Vancouver, where the brewery, roastery, and tasting room all share a roof. Most folks know they can get a coffee there, but it’s a beer-forward venue; then we launched FUNK Coffee Bar downtown last year, which is a much more coffee-centric concept. House of Lager, which will also have a coffee window, is slated to open in Squamish this fall.

Prior to starting House of Funk, our founder Darren Hollett got into home brewing and wanted to do it professionally. After working for several local breweries under a few great mentors, he actualized his dream of starting his own brewery with a focus on using wild yeasts, selling almost exclusively in-house (a huge challenge when the pandemic hit a few short months later).

The name was inspired by our friend Brettanomyces, a yeast that grows naturally on fruit skins (such as that of a coffee cherry!). Brett-fermented beers tend to be quite distinctive, with tart, spicy, fruity flavours at the fore. “Funky” is the word that comes to most people’s minds when they taste such a beer, and since Darren wanted a brewery with a whole array of those on tap (and a playlist of funk and related music genres), “House of Funk” was a natural choice. It’s representative of the coffee and beer flavour profiles and processing methods, as well as the somewhat rebellious daring it takes to devote a whole business to them.

So, home-base for House of Funk is North Vancouver. When it comes to specialty coffee, the whole Vancouver area is known as one of the best in Canada if not the world. So, what sets House of Funk apart from so many other cafes & roasters? What can people expect when they visit your space?

High praise for Vancouver! We’re into all things experimental and innovative, so we lean that way when we source and roast our coffees. We’re after those exciting, unexpected, and well, funky flavours that just might challenge the palate of most everyday coffee drinkers. Each month we release two of these unique coffees, produced by conscientious farmers and roasted just lightly to accentuate those vibrant characteristics. Coffee-lovers can sign up for a subscription and receive these releases before the rest of our friends and fans.

But in fact, the thing that stands out for most people is our coffee cans — they’re like crowlers, with ample space for a vivid label, non-porous material to prevent sun and oxygen exposure, and an oxygen-scavenging seal in the lid (a hot tip from our brewery partners) that draws oxygen away from the beans, even after the lid has been opened and closed.

Not everyone might realize that you’re not just a specialty coffee roaster, but you’re also a craft brewery. So, like the chicken and the egg, which came first? Beer or coffee? How does being a part of two craft-driven industries strengthen and benefit you as a company?

Our founders come from the beer industry, but they have a keen interest in coffee and understood the two craft industries share many similarities. So we’ve been a roastery for as long as we’ve been a brewery, though admittedly the beer side grew its reputation much more quickly at first.

The greatest advantage to the brewery/roastery partnership is the pooling of knowledge, resources, skills, and communities. It’s become a very symbiotic relationship, and each side has benefited from the strengths of the other. The oxygen-scavenging seal we mentioned earlier is a prime example — we don’t know of any other roaster that utilizes that particular device, but it’s common in the brewing world. Our nitro cold brew is a collaborative effort between our brewers and the coffee team, as is the cascara soda on tap in the tasting room as a refreshing non-alcoholic option. When our beer reps noticed their bartending clients were laboriously pulling shots of espresso (or walking to the nearest cafe to order 20-30 shots at a time) for coffee cocktails, they turned to the coffee team to craft a cold brew concentrate as a much more economical solution. And of course, there have been many coffee-beer variations over the years.

On your website you speak quite a bit about four core values: Challenging the Status Quo, Sustainability, Community & Decentralization. Can you share more about how these impact everything you do?

It’s part of our mission to change the way people think about beer and coffee, which usually means breaking the mold and even going against what’s most commonly done in our industries. It also makes room for experimentation and invites folks to question the expectations they have — conscious or subconscious, new or inherited. Maybe it seems like this could alienate a large population of beer and coffee drinkers, but in fact, it’s done the opposite: it’s broadened the scope of taste profiles to include those who may otherwise have thought beer or coffee simply weren’t for them. So we’re an active part of two very vibrant communities, and we welcome inspiration from everyone within.

We also believe that as much as we love diving deep into the minutia of coffee and beer, they’re really just catalysts for building community, celebrating diversity, and sharing great moments. That’s why events are such a huge part of our focus — a lot of meaning and connection can be made around rounds of either beverage!

Given that it’s in your name, and all over your website, what does FUNK mean to you? And somewhat related to that, share a bit of the thought process behind your slogan “Acidity is not a crime”. What that does that mean to House of Funk?

To us, FUNK is a culmination of those values mentioned earlier: experimentation, curiosity, play, pushing boundaries. It’s a reference to the transformation cultivated by the incredibly diverse array of micro-organisms during the fermentation phase of beer and coffee production. It’s wild yeast, it’s barrel-aging, it’s organic off-the-nose flavour profiles… It’s where tradition meets innovation, much as funk music and culture evolved from a mixture of genres into a whole new groove.

We emphatically assert that “Acidity is not a crime” because so often the word is treated with disdain, like it’s a scourge to be eliminated, when in fact acidity is what makes all our favourite foods so delicious! No way we’d love pizza so much without the tang of tomato sauce, fries without ketchup or vinegar, hot sauce on chicken wings, potato salad without the pickle juice, or even bananas, which would be saccharine mush without the tartaric acid they contain. If you’ve ever wondered why food at a restaurant tastes so much better than the same dish made at home, chances are it’s because the chef has masterfully balanced the ultra-palatable salt, sugar, and fat with just the right touch of acidity. And it’s acidity that elicits those delightful fruity, jammy, and tropical tasting notes in a coffee. Often, the word “acidic” is conflated with “sour” when really it’s more like “sparkly” or “bright”. We’re on a mission to change our collective relationship with acidity.

Getting back to the challenging the status quo…what would you like to see change—either locally or globally—when it comes to the specialty coffee space? How is House of Funk moving the needle towards this change?

So many things… but what comes to mind most prominently is gender inequality and the belief that professionals in the industry are more knowledgeable than consumers and enthusiasts. Much has been said already about the need to see and respect people of all genders equally, and we’re trying to make opportunities for leadership, growth, collaboration, etc. accessible to everyone on the team, regardless of gender. We also actively support collaboration and transparency, which we hope will help empower the community and break down the barriers that have historically made specialty seem pretentious, privileged, and unapproachable.

If your desire is to “envision a House of Funk in every city to ferment the culture around the world” are there any growth plans you can share with us? Can we get a House of Funk out here in Calgary please! LOL.

An outpost in Calgary would be amazing! Putting it out into the ether. In the meantime, there’s our new location in Squamish, House of Lager, opening later this year, which is up the Sea-to-Sky highway (albeit not the most exotic or geographically distant expansion). We’ve also been discussing a coffee collaboration with a roaster over in Ireland, which to our knowledge isn’t very common at all, but offers a unique way to share our love of exceptional coffee with a community across the pond. Stay tuned for more growth to come!

Before we wrap this up, one final thing I would love to hear more about. Can you share a bit of what people can expect from your House of Funk coffee subscriptions? Because maybe, just maybe, those reading might want to know this for a little something-something coming up in a few weeks!

Thanks so much for asking! We offer two types of subscriptions — our monthly new release subscription, which we mentioned earlier, and subscriptions to any of our Timeless Series coffees, which are available year-round and can be ordered automatically at the frequency and quantity of the subscriber’s choosing. Subscribers to our monthly releases not only receive the latest drops before anyone else; they also get special perks like samples of a secret blend, additional background info about the coffees, and in the case of our latest releases, a version of a feature espresso that we roasted for filter, just for subscribers. The two cans plus perks all ship for free across Canada!

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Contact Info:

web: www.houseoffunkbrewing.com/collections/coffee
instagram: @houseoffunkroasting
facebook: facebook.com/houseoffunkbrewing
email: info@houseoffunkbrewing.com

Find their beans: If you’re looking to get your hands on some beans then definitely check out their web-store for what they’re currently roasting. Or visit one of their locations below.

House of Funk Brewery & Cafe: 350 Esplanade E #101, North Vancouver, BC

Funk Coffee Bar: 1025 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver, BC

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I just want to say a huge thank you to the entire team at House of Funk for being such a huge contributor to the coffee culture in not only North Vancouver, but across Canada! Check out their site, grab yourself some beans, and enjoy! 

Stay Caffeinated,

Tyler