I love visiting the US. There’s just something really unique about this huge country that always gets me excited. Especially when visiting some of its most inspiring and dynamic cities like San Francisco. This high tech city on the west coast is probably one the most multicultural places on the planet, calling so many different nationalities its home. But it also has such a moving history that it has largely defined a large part of modern American culture.
On my first full day I decided to hit up Haight Ashbury, an area I love not just for its alternative lifestyle and beautiful architecture but also because it has some really great food and drink. After hopping off the bus I wandered down past the Whole Foods Market – a secret passion of mine – and popped in to see Aquiles who runs the area’s best specialty coffee roastery. Located inside a former bike shop, Flywheel Coffee Roasters is a magnet for techies working away on their laptops, young families and visitors alike.
The space is deep and open and retains many elements of its former two wheeler past. Aquiles who originally hails from Nicaragua and comes from a family with a significant history in coffee – he told me over a glass of cold brew that as a young boy he used to pick coffee on his family’s farm – spent two years looking for the perfect space to open his own specialty coffee shop. When he found this spot overlooking Golden Gate Park he knew it was exactly what he’d been looking for.
Although his family runs a small coffee empire in San Francisco, Aquiles wanted to take things up a notch and focus on the best coffee he can source and roasting this coffee to more progressive standards. He told me that he has a large turn around of coffee and it never lasts beyond ten days after being roasted. “Freshness is king,” he said.
I was curious to find out if the name “Flywheel Coffee Roasters” had any special meaning. “Yes it does actually,” he nodded. “The flyhweel effect is a term coined by Jim Collins who analyzed 1500 companies and narrowed his list down to the 11 most successful. He wanted to find out what united them and as it turned out they were all companies that took time to grow and all of them had a big breakthrough at some point, which then accelerated their growth substantially. This is what he called the flywheel effect. And it’s a bit of a hommage to this space’s past as a bike shop.”
Aquiles roasts three – four days a week and focuses on single origin coffees. Sometimes he also makes blends for his espressi but overall he tried to stay away from that. My cold brew coffee, which he serves in a mason jar was made using his Brazil single origin just smelled so strong of dark chocolate that I wanted to eat it all up in one go.
Since recently Aquiles is also an authorized reseller of La Marzocco is he’s planning to replace his Faema machine with a new Italian-made model in due course. One thing is clear, Aquiles found the perfect spot to help coffee lovers from all walks of life to get the caffeine injection they need. For me, this was a great start into a coffee heavy adventure around the Bay Area’s best roasters.
