Conversations with Witch Craft Coffee

Today we’d like to introduce you to Witch Craft Coffee

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Witch Craft Coffee is a queer, family-owned business. Our story started years ago with Bryn, who is our recipe creater and the brains behind all things edible and drinkable!
When Bryn was younger, they faced a struggle that is familiar to a lot of queer youth; homelessness. Finding adequate food was always a difficultly, but it was even harder on Bryn, who was vegan. Most people would probably have made exceptions in such dire circumstances, but after seeing animals being farmed first-hand when they were younger, they just couldn’t justify hurting an innocent creature like that, even if it made eating harder for them.
Through struggle, they found resilience, and started creating recipes from what they had. They began to identify the subtle flavor notes of common foods and figured out how to create delicious recipes from next to nothing. Once they were on their feet again and able to utilize real ingredients, they took that skill and pushed it further, creating delicious vegan dishes out of healthy foods with minimal ingredients.
Sometime in their early 20s, Bryn started work as a barista, and their love for coffee took off. Suddenly the refined palette they’d developed in creating recipes out of scarce ingredients turned into a passion for tasting notes in single origin, craft coffee, and a new era began.
Creating a cafe had been a dream of Bryn’s ever since, but with so many barriers to small businesses ownership, it seemed like a faraway dream.
Bryn met Alex in late 2021, and they became best friends immediately. Without the pressure of courting, their love was able to grow organically, and after bonding over stories of a mutual ex, they quickly became a couple. Starting the business from the perspective of their new family only made sense. While Bryn was a genius recipe creator, they were more interested in staying behind the scenes. Alex, on the other hand, was an author, a slam poet, and a rapper who went by the stage name MC Crumbsnatcher, AKA The filthiest gay rapper alive, so he was no stranger to interacting with an audience. Suddenly, Witch Craft Coffee was born.
When coming up with the concept, we wanted make something that was more than just a coffee shop, and more than just a theme. We kept encountering great shops with boring layouts and snooty baristas, and fun, themed, shops with terrible drinks. We knew that we needed the best of both worlds. We had to create high quality recipes with fresh, hand-made syrups and high end beans, while still keeping it accessible to everyone and interesting to interact with.
In addition to our recipes and our art, something that has always been very important to both of us is our spirituality. Witch Craft Coffee felt like the perfect name to blend a forward thinking, new age spiritual mindset with the craft coffee we were creating.
Now that we had a name that represented us, a handful of recipes, and a bold look, we began booking events at spiritual markets, LGBT themed spaces, and vegan fairs.
What started off as a feeble, “Hi, can we please have a space at your event?” quickly turned into an onslaught of requests for us to come vend!
We were always proud of our product, but we were shocked by the response. As we gave out samples, the most common replies were either people doing a double take because they weren’t expecting it to be so good, or people saying, “Whatever was in that sample, make me one of THAT!”
We take pride in hand-crafting our recipes to really make the flavor shine and the response has been enormous. First, we became known for our rose-flavored coffee, but once we started serving our London Fog, people began telling us that they dreamed about it, and couldn’t wait for our next pop up! We started serving matcha that is organic and super-ceremonial grade, and we also came up with some killer caffeine-free options, so our stimulant-sensitive fam knew that they are always welcome with us too, and people loved it! Our cookies have gotten such a bold response that some of the reviews are too explicit for the purpose of this interview!
Our menu started off with just a few flavors, and we keep it small for events, but lately we’ve been rotating a couple of flavors and some new cookies every month to keep it fresh and try out new recipes for our future cafe. We are so excited to not only expand upon what people think is possible for vegan flavor, but also to showcase Bryn’s Mexican culture from time to time in our seasonal offerings.
Now, we are trying to spread the word and spread the love as much as possible so that we can gear up to open our first brick and mortar. We’ve been so excited and felt so lucky to serve such a vast array of people, and we can’t wait to be able to open a space for queers, POC, neurodivergent folk, and all the other girls, gays, theys, and allies to feel safe and enjoy a nice cup of coffee (or one of our many caffeine free options!)

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The road has been rocky, but it’s been smoothed out by love! Truth be told, the behind the scenes stuff gets really hard at times.
Dealing with health department after health department where everyone gives you a different answer is a challenge that definitely takes patience and tenacity to navigate. The amount of fees that go into starting a small business from scratch can also be crippling. We’ve definitely gotten a first hand glimpse at why so many small businesses fail, but throughout it all, the massive support and love from our patrons and vendor family has really pushed us through and we couldn’t be more grateful.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
What sets us apart from others is threefold: Our attention to flavor, our commitment to making our items as healthy as possible, and our attitude when serving our customers.
Something we notice frequently is that we’ll go into a cafe and order a flavored drink, only to be served sweet coffee that tastes like maybe the flavor was hanging out in the other room. If we are serving rose flavored coffee, we want you to taste the roses. If we are making you a tea, we want it to be a flavorful delight. We take time dialing in our coffee for maximum flavor, so even if you just get it black, it’s still delicious.
From a health standpoint, we strive to make the healthiest product possible without compromising the flavor, while still being realistic. At the end of the day, a cookie is still a cookie thats made with a lot of butter and sugar, and flavored syrups (even if they are house-made) are also never going to be considered a health food. That said, we use organic, vegan certified sugar, and as many other organic ingredients as possible to mitigate needless health risks, and we bake all of our cookies on stainless steel pans so that there are no harmful chemicals infiltrating them as they bake.
We filter our coffee with thick, non-bleached filters to create a smooth cup and get as many of the harmful oils out as possible, and frequently hear people say that its much easier on the stomach and doesn’t have the same unpleasant mouth feel that many coffees do.
We use as many organic ingredients as we can, and we are committed to staying away from things like artificial food dyes. We try to keep all of our recipes minimal so that you’re getting mostly just real foods that are better for you, better for the environment, and do no harm to animals, while still maintaining bold, fresh flavors. It’s a win-win-win!
As far as our customers facing attitude goes, I think we’ve all walked into a cafe where the barista is rude and unwelcoming. If you’re new to the world of third wave coffee, and don’t know what all the jargon means, that can be particularly overwhelming. How can you even order if you don’t understand the menu and the person talking to you is being a total jerk?!
Our goal is to make high end coffee accessible through kindness. We don’t expect you to come in knowing everything. You didn’t sign up to be a barista! We’re happy to guide you and help with any questions, and bring you into an elevated experience of coffee with someone who talks to you like an actual friend.

What’s next?
Our plans for the future are to open up a brick and mortar shop that showcases our recipes, upholds our standards, and creates fun animations. We don’t know where the space will be or how large we’ll be able to go, but our dream is to open a cafe where people can go find a sense of community over some delicious flavors.
We’d love to get a space big enough to host open mics, marketplaces, and maybe even small local bands if the area allows it.
We are so disconnected from each other as a culture right now, and marginalized people and our amazing allies need more spaces to exist and feel part of something. If we can use our skills to provide that comfort for our community, our work will have all been worth it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @witch.craft.coffee