commonly coffee

One of the highlights for me every year attending SCA Expo is their Roaster’s Village. It’s a gathering of a few dozen coffee roasters from across the world who bring some truly remarkable coffees for attendees to sample.

One of the roasters who caught my attention early on, was Night Swim Coffee. And I’ll confess I returned quite a few times over the weekend to try more of their offerings. It felt like when I was a kid at Costco trying to sneak extra samples…without putting a hat on, or taking off your jacket so you trick the person into believing you were someone different. (I can’t be the only person who ever did that right?)

After trying numerous coffees, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to get to know the team at Night Swim even more, and to share their story with you. So I reached out to Evan Wood – Director of Coffee for Night Swim, to share more as our Coffee Roaster of the Month for July 2024!

Hey Evan, so great to get the chance to connect with you! Help our audience get to know you a bit better…

Thanks for inviting us to be a part, Tyler! It’s a pleasure!

Coffee has always been a part of my life – my mom has always been a huge coffee drinker (and is still our biggest customer to this day!), and so I have a ton of core memories sitting around kitchen tables drinking flavored decaf coffee with family. Growing up, coffee was what the adults were drinking, so I wanted to drink it too.

I grew up in Savannah, GA and towards the end of my highschool years, my mom started shopping at a newly built WholeFoods in Savannah. This meant that she started bringing home fancier groceries, including “fancier” coffee. I specifically remember picking up a bag of coffee from Perc Coffee (shout out the homies), being struck by the branding, reading a bunch of information on the back of the bag and inclined myself to check out their website. What I found turned out to be life changing. I read stories of people; farmers, importers, roasters and the like. I saw different kinds of coffees and different ways to brew them. To put it briefly, my conceptual understanding of coffee was remade and opened a big ‘ole can of worms.

I don’t take hobbies or interests in doses, I charge headlong into things I find interesting and don’t put them down until I’ve exhausted every resource or mastered a subject matter. Thus, my career in coffee began. I bought brewing equipment, signed up for coffee subscriptions, scoured youtube and coffee blogs to consume as much information about coffee as I possibly could. Once, I felt like I knew what I was talking about, I got a couple of subsequent cafe jobs. The latter was at Collective Coffee in Charleston, SC. My intellectual curiosity about coffee caught fire into a passion for hospitality and coffee service while I was there thanks to the legends, DJ Piazza and Diego Castro.

My coffee journey then took me to Raleigh, NC where I joined the team at Black and White Coffee for a couple years as a production roaster. This opportunity was my first interaction with the coffee value chain, green coffee, and building a coffee program.

I left BW in 2020 amidst COVID, moved to Charlotte, NC and starting working on the Night Swim project. My convictions, passions, and interest in regards to coffee have changed quite a bit since high school and now I spend my time building relationships with coffee producers, narrating the coffee supply chain, and building a coffee program that both myself and our producing partners are proud of.

The shine and sparkle of working in specialty coffee definitely fades after ten years, but the most important things never ever get old. My greatest joy is finding ways to put our customers’ hands into the hands of coffee producers in meaningful ways.

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

I guess I can answer this in two ways. We’ve spent the first half of this year trying to highlight under-represented coffee growing regions so I’ve had the absolute pleasure to work with coffees from all over Asia, which has been a really pleasant experience.

And secondly, man I’m on the Rwanda hype train these days. We’ve been working with our friends at Sun Dog the last couple years – they’re an importer based here in the states that’s partnered with a producing group called BAHO Coffee in Rwanda. Coffees coming out of Rwanda have been absolutely stunning the last few years. The confectionary, syrupy thick sweetness of Rwandan washed coffees have been my favourite thing the last couple of years.

Can you tell us a bit about the history of Night Swim Coffee?

Night Swim Coffee was born in Charlotte, North Carolina as the centerpiece of a unified venture for Not Just Coffee and Undercurrent Coffee to create a specialty coffee roaster in Charlotte. Miracle and James Yoder along with Erin and Todd Huber, long-time friends turned business partners, shared a common vision for the future of their companies and decided they could do more good together than apart.

Having been an integral part in the foundation of Charlotte’s coffee culture, this new venture seeks to contribute to the ever-growing coffee community and the community at large. We

understand the privilege afforded us by guests, farmers, exporters, importers, and the many other essential parts of coffee’s supply chain.

When deciding on a name for this collaborative venture, we chose Night Swim Coffee to embody nostalgia, invoke feelings of excitement, adventure, and presence that are central to the experience that we seek to create, both in our cafes or simply when our coffee is consumed!

We have 13 cafes across all three brand concepts now, a blooming wholesale business, and a retail platform for home enthusiasts and coffee drinkers.

So, home-base for you is Charlotte, NC. Can you share a bit more about Charlotte’s coffee culture with our readers who might not be as familiar with this part of the country. What sets Night Swim apart from so many other specialty coffee roasters?

Charlotte has a pretty big coffee footprint with dozens of roasteries, and dozens more cafes. We’re a mid-sized city, and so there’s a lot of coffee to go around. Unfortunately, I perceive our coffee culture to be quite segmented and insulated by location or by brand, but there is a ton of fantastic coffee professionals in Charlotte, and I think it’s a pretty great coffee destination.

I think the reach and expanse of our cafes makes us stand out at first glance. However, beneath that I think you’ll find a hospitality operation and a coffee program that is centred on people and genuine passion for coffee producers and coffee consumers alike. We’ve been operating cafes since 2010 but our roastery has only been around since 2021. I think our aspirations have been grand from the outset, but we’ve also determined to grow organically and genuinely.

I see you’ve got five cafes scattered around Charlotte. If any of our readers are heading your way this summer on holidays, what can they expect when they stop by?

The five Night Swim cafes are all pretty unique. Our headquarters houses a cafe and roastery that basically functions as a showroom. We have a couple cafes in the Wells Fargo and Bank of America towers in Uptown Charlotte. Then, the last two cafes are stand-alone concepts in a couple of different neighbourhoods. All of our cafes serve our coffees, house-made pastries, seasonal specialty beverages, and a couple of them have full service kitchens with breakfast and lunch options.

It was amazing to connect with your team at the SCA Expo back in April. Was this your first time there at Roaster’s Village? How did your team feel the event went? How can these types of events help to grow the specialty coffee community?

This was our second time vending in the Roaster’s Village and we enjoy it every time. It’s a fantastic opportunity to connect with folks who haven’t ever interacted with Night Swim and share coffees that we’re excited about.

This year we had the pleasure of hosting a couple of our producing partners at our booth while we served their coffee and that was an absolute treat. It’s always an unbelievably busy event, but that’s not a bad thing. I think the annual Expo serves as a great moment for the coffee community at large to come together, set aside differences of opinion, and celebrate our commonalities.

I think what strikes me most about each Expo I’ve attended is the depth, breadth, and diversity of people that all call the specialty coffee community home. It’s really encouraging to take a few moments to sit back and just observe. I think each person and company that attends or vends at the event spends most of the year insulated in their own little bubble, and the SCA Expo creates an opportunity to take inventory of our perspectives on what the coffee industry is and is not

Keeping on the theme of growing the specialty coffee community, where are areas you’d like to see growth happen when it comes to the overall coffee culture? Are there any ways in which Night Swim is leading the way?

Overall, I think we can improve on our ability to listen to other people. I think a lot of people, myself included, end up in this habit of listening so that we can speak in return. However, this kind of mentality is ripe for both misunderstanding and impatience. I think western culture propagates a notion of individualism and determinism that doesn’t bode well for the equitable advancement of our industry at large.

I don’t know that Night Swim is leading the way in anything, but have committed to connecting with people in the most meaningful way possible. We believe that information should be freely available, because our industry moves forward when it goes together – with a wide array of voices and perspectives. We don’t aim to convince or persuade that our ideas are primary or most important, only that we have knowledge to share. Night Swim contributes its voice, ideas, coffee, and assets to the betterment of the coffee value chain and the industry at large. This is why we use cutting-edge technology in our roastery, use our voice loudly on social media, are never afraid of being wrong, and aim to be on the forefront of innovation. Our approach should be modern and agile, but never trendy.

For those wanting to get their hands on your coffee and learn more about Night Swim, can you share a bit more about your philosophy of roasting coffee? Maybe share about a few producers you’re really enjoying working with at the moment. And what kind of equipment do you roast on?

The main goal of our roasting operation is to connect people with the place where their coffee comes from; we act as a liaison between consumer and consumable, producer and customer. This also requires us to be excellent at our craft and provide the clearest picture of each coffee we source.

More than anything, the Night Swim coffee menu should also provide narration for the coffee supply chain. We are the heralds of each coffee we sell. We are provided the privilege of making money off of many people’s hard work and generational investment. This is not to be taken lightly and should be stewarded well by how we tell the stories of each coffee, their creators, and their journey from farm to cup.

I’ll share a couple of producers/producer groups that we have available currently. The first being Yunnan Coffee Traders. We have had an absolute blast sourcing, roasting, and serving a couple of coffees from Yunnan, China this year. China is growing some unbelievable coffees and most folks in the States don’t even know that China grows coffee.

Secondly, we have coffee back on the menu again this year from our friends Ronaldo and Valentina from Boyaca, Colombia. Ronaldo is 27 and Valentina is 23. They run a coffee roastery called Disruptiva Coffee and work on Ronaldo’s family’s farm. Their work has started shifting the entire coffee culture in Boyaca to producing specialty grade coffee. They’re super sweet and passionate coffee professionals that are paving a way for themselves and their community.

As far as equipment in our roastery is concerned, we roast on a 15kg Loring Falcon and a 35kg Loring Kestrel. We also utilize an optical color sorter and weigh and fill machine from our good friends at SOVDA.

It’s been amazing getting the chance to help share your story. Any last words to our readers before we wrap this up?

I think I’ve probably typed enough at this point but I will say this – coffee roaster’s aren’t the most important part of the coffee value chain. We take green things that cost $4-$8/lb and turn them brown and charge twenty-something dollars for them. We add the most monetary value, but we don’t actually add true value. That comes from producers and communities of small farmers that have often invested generations of hard work and care so that other coffee consuming countries can enjoy a beverage. The best thing that we, you, and any person involved in coffee can do is represent coffees to the best of our ability and then get out of the way. Coffee provides a story that we can share about people who don’t often get their stories told. The more ways we can find to do so equitably will push our industry forward towards kindness, consideration, and thoughtfulness.

Cheers!
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Contact Info:

web: www.nightswimcoffee.com
instagram: @nightswimcoffee
facebook: facebook.com/nightswimcoffee
email: info@nightswimcoffee.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 their cafe & roastery, just one of a few locations in and around North Carolina!

Night Swim Cafe & Roastery: 4500 Old Pineville Rd, Charlotte, NC

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I just want to say a huge thank you to Evan and the entire team at Night Swim Coffee for being such a huge contributor to the coffee culture in North Carolina! Check out their site, grab yourself some beans, and enjoy! 

Stay Caffeinated,

Tyler