After a successful opening at Divisadero's newest toast and coffee bar, The Mill, Four Barrel Coffee's Jeremy Tooker is looking forward to his next project: a completely off-the-grid coffee shop away from the hipster enclaves in the city's wildly under-blogged Portola District. The new caffeinating station will be more like a coffee cart inside of a renovated former greenhouse space, complete with solar panels, wind power, composting toilets and filtered runoff water used to brew coffee.
From Tooker's recent interview with coffee blog Sprudge.com:
The shop’s only like 800 square feet, maybe 900 square feet, so the plan is - we’re going to open with that, and we’re gonna have all the pieces in there, the counter, this could be like a cart setup, and the condiment station, the retail shelving, and the ceiling piece is all going to be done by local fabricators [...] the land next to it is what I’m excited about. It’s 300 ft by 30 ft and it’s owned by Caltrans but they are just going to lease it it to us and we can do whatever we want.As long as we maintain it - very cool, so I wanna do solar panels, wind power, filtering our own runoff water, compost toilet, oxide bed, the whole sewer - the filtered water will hopefully supply the coffee shop as well as a water bottle station.
As far as we can tell, no one in town sources their coffee brewing water from anywhere closer than Hetch Hetchy, so that's a big win in the "locally sourced" department.
In addition to the eco plumbing, Tooker also hopes to install an electric vehicle rapid charging station so roadtripping Tesla Model S owners can fuel up and caffeinate all at once. The charging station (which apparently takes about 15 minutes to top off an electric vehicle) is "perfect for our coffee shop," Tooker says, "because what else are you going to do? You’re not going to stand next to your car for 15 minutes."
As for this timeline on the new coffee utopia? Tooker says it should only take "two or three months to get going" and the final product will be "very much Hayes Valley style, but a little more indoor." There will, of course, be a parklet adjacent.
