Elizabeth Davis
BREW Coffee Bar is a new coffee shop that recently opened up in downtown Raleigh in the Seaboard Station. The owners, A.J. Viola and Mike Sholar, serve coffee from local roasters and local beer and baked goods are made by Cynthia, Viola's wife.
Brew Coffee Bar on Seaboard Avenue in downtown Raleigh is a hub for people of all ages and backgrounds to come together and share the experience of well-crafted beer, coffee and art—all originating from within the Triangle.
Thanks to owners A.J. Viola and Mike Sholar, at roughly seven weeks old, Brew is already establishing its roots in the Raleigh area by bringing together quality products from around the region and highlighting them in one venue.
“For us, we liked the idea of acting as a gallery for coffee, beer and people. We do that through a lot of different ways, like rotating art on a monthly basis,” Viola said. “It’s just another way of highlighting some great people in our area. We [don’t] try to reinvent the wheel because there’s just so much good stuff already in our area. We just get to highlight it and say, ‘This is what’s great about Raleigh.’”
Viola and Sholar have carefully cultivated Brew since its inception to be a strong establishment that reaches a high standard of quality. Excellence is the goal for all aspects of how the coffee bar operates.
“Whatever standard you’re being measured against, it should meet or exceed whatever the best is out there,” Sholar said.
Viola continued to explain what standard they hold their establishment to: “It’s like if you would be disappointed in any way if you got that, don’t serve it because it needs to be just as good, if not better, than what you would want served in front of you.”
From their days running the Raleigh Coffee Club, a weekly coffee subscription for people to try a bunch of different coffee beans, Viola and Sholar forged relationships with coffee roasters in the area.
“We were getting coffee directly from coffee roasters, and we were meeting people on street corners and giving bags of coffee. It was weird; we essentially turned into a weekly roaster coffee subscription,” Viola said. “You’d get to taste coffee from all around the Triangle. It was really cool and that really allowed us the opportunity to meet a lot of local roasters and to get to know a lot of the coffee shops in the area and see how they were producing coffee.”
Viola and Sholar soon realized they needed to expand their business after the Raleigh Coffee Club became too large to handle. They both fell in love with the idea of opening their own coffee shop.
“For us, we wanted to create a space that would combine the things that we love; which was always coffee, beer and people. We wanted a place where all of those can come together and thrive and live in harmony,” Viola said. “I love coffee, I love beer, and the greatest conversations and relationships I have in my life tend to happen around those things. So we wanted to create a space that would make that happen. What if we made a coffee and beer bar? We were like, ‘Yeah we can do that. Who says we can’t?’”
The duo quickly accomplished their goal within a year-and-a-half thanks to loans, help from friends and donations from patrons on Kickstarter. They raised $10,000 in two weeks and were blown away by the generosity of people in the community. Kickstarter patrons stop by to see their establishment all the time, according to Viola and Sholar.
“Even if we’d never gotten a dollar from it, just to have people feel invested and feel connected to [the Brew] is worth the time and effort,” Sholar said.
By featuring beer from regional breweries and coffee from roasters within the Triangle, the Brew is able to showcase all of what the Triangle has to offer its Raleigh residents.
“Because our goal is to feature the best the Triangle has to offer in coffee and beer, we also feature an additional guest roaster on a rotating monthly basis,” Viola said. “Right now we have Torch Coffee Roasters out of East Raleigh. In November, we’ll have somebody else and that will always be rotating to highlight what other great coffee we have in the area.”
“It’s the Raleigh Coffee Club all over again!” Sholar added.
With beer from select establishments on draft, Brew implements a sort of tap-takeover to highlight a different brewery from the Triangle every month. Right now, they are featuring Raleigh Brewing Company and will feature Fortnight Brewing Company out of Cary next month.
“We try to stick with some smaller microbreweries that aren’t getting a lot of attention and some newer people to have on draft where they might not be on draft at some of the bigger places,” Viola said.
Brew continues to draw in customers thanks to the way the owners carefully present themselves, their products, and their business both in the shop and on social media. Brew has pages for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Foursquare.
“That’s all our advertising; we don’t do any traditional advertising. It’s all word-of-mouth or social media-generated,” Sholar said.
According to Viola, social media holds them to a higher standard because everything is documented.
“Social media’s been huge for us. Especially when we’re on bar and I tell Mike, ‘Listen, do you want somebody to take a picture of that? Because if not, don’t send it because chances are they will,’” Viola said. “We have to think of that mentality [when serving] that everything is documented. Everyone is posting stuff and sharing it; we live in the most documented age ever.”
What sets Brew Coffee Bar apart from other coffee shops in Raleigh is that it’s one of the only places to feature a Nitro cold-brew system for its coffee. They use cold-brew coffee that takes anywhere from 16 to 24 hours to brew. Once it’s ready, they keg the coffee and run it through their draft system with 100 percent nitrogen and pull it out through a Guinness cream-tap handle. This allows the coffee to pour like a beer and form foam on top like a Guinness or a Nitro-stout beer, so it’s creamy in color and cascades like a beer would, according to Viola.
“I saw some people doing [cold-brew] on the other side of the country on the West coast, but nobody’s really doing it around here like this. So I knew we were going to serve cold-brew,” Viola said. “I always say cold-brew tastes like coffee smells. Nitrogen gives a little bit of an airy texture to it without adding any cream or anything like that. It’s one of our most popular items we have. Right now, we’re the only place really doing it like that in this area.”