Crema wants to show Nashville coffee lovers how their coffee is made, where it comes from, and why they should care

“This is what the beans look like when they’re green—unroasted,” Ben Lehman explains over the hum of Crema’s sole roasting machine. “Well, actually they’re not beans—they’re seeds. Coffee actually comes from a fruit, and we call that fruit the cherry.” Ben speaks clearly with a patient, professorial tone. This is important to him, and he wants it be important to you too.

Crema’s roasting facility is built into a back room in their coffee shop on Rutledge Hill downtown. Most of its meager square footage is occupied by the roaster, supplies, and gallon buckets of green and brown coffee beans. Packed into the spaces in between are Ben, myself, Ben’s wife and business partner, Rachel, Crema’s roasting maestro, Winston, and a younger girl named Abby, who is combing beans out from the basin of the roaster—any bean that doesn’t meet their specs has to go.

Abby hands me a small bean—one of the undesirables—and I pop it in my mouth. It tastes like dirt. Ben grins, and Winston tells me how these underdeveloped coffee seeds, known as quakers, impart a nuttiness to the flavor that doesn’t suit this particular roast. “You won’t see every coffee roaster doing this,” Ben points out, proud of the care they take to ensure quality control. “That’s what makes Crema different.”

It’s loud in here. In addition to the roasting machine’s mechanical purr, steam hisses out of the espresso machine out front, and there’s a dull roar of conversations spilling out from the adjacent sitting room. Searching for a quieter place to talk, Ben leads us out back toward a stout shed that’s just barely wider than its single garage door. Inside, huge burlap sacks of imported coffee beans are stacked high, leaving just enough room in the middle for a small card table and three chairs. After some debate, Ben, Rachel, and I take the chairs. Winston hoists himself up onto the closest—and shortest—of the stacks.

A car alarm is going off in one of the parking lots that surround the shed. There are so many cars outside Crema’s humble storefront that it’s almost hard to believe everyone can fit inside. In today’s world, it’s commonplace to see twenty people waiting in line for single origin coffee and artfully crafted espresso drinks. But when Crema opened its doors seven years ago, Nashville hadn’t caught the coffee fever that was gripping other parts of the country.

Crema isn’t Rachel’s first coffee gig—she worked at the Berry Hill coffee shop Sam & Zoe’s for years and at coffee shops in Denver before that. Through Sam & Zoe’s, she made many friends and connections within the city’s nascent coffee community, but she knew from prior experience that Nashville was behind what was happening in the nation’s coffee hotspots—Portland, Seattle, et al. “[In Nashville] it was all about blending different coffees together for just your standard cup of coffee. And so that’s what we did—we bought all blends,” Rachel admits. “Single origin coffees, or highlighting a coffee for its actual cup quality, was nothing at the time. That wasn’t something you did here.”

Back then, most of the coffee shops in town were driven by food sales. To most, changing that model to start selling more expensive coffees with a lower margin seemed like bad business. Rachel knew that if she wanted to raise the bar, she was going to have to go out and do it on her own. Ben shakes his head slightly, smiling. “We didn’t have any kids, and it was kind of: well, it’s either now or never. So we did it.”

Ben and Rachel chose their location on Hermitage Avenue carefully. They wanted to be part of a community and far enough away from the other major coffee players to create their own identity. But the big selling point was the traffic. “Fifteen thousand cars a day were passing on Hermitage,” Ben says. But traffic isn’t enough on its own—as they soon found out. “It doesn’t matter how many cars drive up and down the street, because those fifteen thousand people may not care about [specialty] coffee.”

If Crema was going to succeed, they had to educate people—to connect with them on a personal level and build a community around their coffee. Crema’s identity was formed in the long-hour grind of those early months. The axiom that drove all their decisions was, “The smallest detail matters the most,” and that value remains at the core of the company even today. “Even though we’re a lot busier than we were when we first opened, that’s ingrained in our community and our culture,” Ben says. “You know people’s names, and everyone matters—no matter how deep the line.”

Ben and Rachel both have memories of interactions with customers in those early months—some of which shaped the direction of the whole company. “The first month Crema was open, this guy came in from Portland and grilled me about the coffee,” Rachel remembers. He was interested in more than the coffee’s flavor profile—he wanted to know about the farm it came from, what the farmers were paid, how environmentally sustainable it was, and Rachel didn’t have all the answers. “He was like, ‘What do you mean you don’t know—that’s what specialty coffee is!’”

That sparked something in Rachel, and she knew that she had to do better. “I started reading about farms, and I started reading about green coffee. I started asking our roaster at the time these questions. We wanted to do single origin coffees, and we were interested in the wages of the farmers and the quality of it. We wanted to actively cup the coffees, taste the coffees, and do quality control.”

Rachel called up their friend Aaron Blanco, who runs Brown Coffee Company in San Antonio, and he was happy to help. He told her his roasting philosophy, how he picks green coffees, and who he purchases them from. “That was a turning point for me, when I was like, I know the name of the person that produced this coffee, the year it was harvested, the micro-lot name, the altitude. It was mind-blowing.”

Crema made Brown Coffee Company their primary source and got great feedback from their customers. But before long, that wasn’t enough. They knew that if they wanted absolute control over every element of their coffee, they had to start roasting their own. Fortunately, they had just hired Winston, who was as green to roasting as Rachel and Ben, but had culinary experience and an eagerness to learn the craft. Winston, along with then-co-roaster Sean Stewart (now of Steadfast Coffee), went down to San Antonio to learn the basics of roasting from Aaron, who was as eager to teach as Winston was to learn. “That really got us three steps ahead of where we would have been had we just started on our own,” Winston says, “so we were very fortunate to have good friends who cared a lot.”
Even with Aaron’s expertise, learning to roast took practice. Winston explains, “It’s like any sort of artistic endeavor. When you start into it, your taste is greater than your skill. So you get pretty excited about it and have high standards, but your ability to execute it to those standards takes a little more time.” Still, Winston remembers the experience fondly. “I look back on it now and look at what I was doing, and yeah, I wish I had known more, but that’s how you do it. You just jump in.”

But learning to roast coffee wasn’t the only roadblock Crema faced; they also had to sell their customers on the idea. “There’s a pretty funny guy that used to come in here pretty regularly—always gets decaf—and he’s kind of a personality,” Winston says. “So he comes in one morning and he’s kind of got this cockeyed thing, a sort of swagger. He orders his decaf, and he goes, ‘Wait a minute! You’re not using Brown coffee anymore?’” Winston shouts in a theatrical voice. “And I was like, ‘No, we actually started roasting our own coffee.’ He said, ‘I don’t know about this. That was the best coffee. I don’t know. We’ll see.’ I made his drink for him, and he was looking at me the whole time. He drinks it, and he goes, ‘Okay. It’s still the best.’”

With their roasting technique improving daily and their loyal customers on board, Crema was poised for success—but roasting the coffee beans is only half of it. To bring a truly unique flavor to the coffee world, they needed to go out and find coffees that no one else in town was roasting. Aaron got them connected with Central and South American growers, and they got to work developing relationships with growers wherever they could. They used the same skills they had honed in building a local customer base—no detail is too small, every person matters, and lasting relationships are what really counts—to develop a network of quality growers throughout those regions.

This year alone, they’ve traveled to Costa Rica, Panama, and Guatemala in search of unique coffees from ethical growers, and the relationships they’ve developed with the small coffee growers will last the lifetime of the business. All three of them are filled with stories about the people they’ve met in their travels, and they can back up every coffee they serve with a story about the farmer who grew it.

Winston seems particularly fond of Wilford, a farmer they met in Panama. “Wilford cups his coffee every day. Every single lot. He knew what it tasted like, he was experimenting with all the small changes he could. We would sit there cupping coffees and he would say, ‘Ah, the difference between this one is that I dried it outside for eight hours and put it in the mechanical dryer for two. This one I dried outside for ten hours and put it in the mechanical dryer for one. Taste the difference?’ And it was just mind-blowing. He’s so focused on it, and his coffee is really some of the best on the planet.

“[Our philosophy is to] find good people and be good to them,” Winston explains. “We really care about forming lasting relationships with the people we work with, getting to know them, and making it more communal. It’s not just a buying thing—it has a heart component to it.”
Crema pays more for their coffee because they consider it an investment in the individual grower. If a farmer can count on them to buy coffee at a competitive price for years to come, it gives them the security to invest in their own farm and the quality of the coffee they produce. But that investment doesn’t come without sacrifices.

“The family we work with in El Salvador, we’ve been buying from them for three seasons now,” Winston says. “Last season they had a very hard time. They got hit hard with rust [an airborne fungus that attacks the coffee plant], which is a big issue in Central America . . . Their production between three years ago and two years ago went down almost 90 percent. So when that happened, they were still producing good coffee, but nowhere near the volume. Miguel [the farmer] came to us and he said, ‘I’m really sorry to do this, but I’ve got to raise my prices—I hope this is okay.’ And we were like, ‘Of course it’s okay. Of course we’ll pay more for your coffee. We’ll absolutely do that.’ That’s part of forming that relationship. If he has a good year, that’s great, but if he has a bad year and he doesn’t get as much as he’d like, we’re not running away.”
Relationship coffee is a buzzword in today’s coffee culture, but for Ben, Rachel, and Winston, this isn’t a fad. They talk about their growers like they’re family, and I can tell they’d do just about anything for them. Above all, they want their customers to understand where their coffee comes from and to know—as best they can—the faces and personalities behind it.

Crema’s mission—beyond great-tasting coffee, ethical sourcing, and community engagement—is still on education. They hold coffee classes that cover everything from espresso basics to latte art to home roasting. They have a blog where they interview other roasters, share stories from growers, and even explain some of their own roasting secrets. And they continually educate their baristas and always make themselves available, so that every time you walk through the door you have the opportunity to gain fresh insight into the coffee in your cup.

But as much as Crema has taught Nashville about coffee, they have learned even more from the growers themselves. One of their greatest insights came when they were in Guatemala visiting the Martinez family. Even though the Martinezes wanted Crema’s business, they weren’t shy about introducing them to their friends and neighbors and encouraging them to buy from them as well. Down there, they’re not competitive—they’re collaborative.
Ben, Rachel, and Winston brought that lesson home with them, and they encourage anyone to get involved in the Nashville coffee community—even if it means more competition. Rachel smiles, “The more shops that we can get where the focus is on training and quality of execution—that helps tremendously.” Winston adds, “It brings more people in. It spreads awareness and education.”

Because of this attitude, Ben is confident in Crema’s position within Nashville’s coffee culture and excited about the city’s growing profile among the national coffee community. “I think we are kind of at a crux in Nashville—an apex, maybe . . . I think that we’ll probably overtake Seattle and New York with the inventiveness of coffee and the things that we’re doing—or at least maybe that’s my hope. We could do that here.”
Ben pauses, seeming to wonder if he’s been too bold, then continues. “I just have a gut feeling that we have more inventiveness and creativity, and that that’s going to be—that the other parts of the country are going to look to us.”

Starting a specialty coffee roasting company in a city where single origin coffee had barely broken through wasn’t easy. Ben, Rachel, and Winston didn’t have any local influences, and they had to create their own distinct style basically from scratch. But in doing so, they created something special—an exploratory yet principled approach to purchasing and roasting coffee that makes Crema stand out among their peers. “Having had some of the big coffee from the West Coast—like Stumptown and Heart and all that—and then tasting our coffee . . .” Ben smiles, humble, but unwavering. “I just have a gut feeling that we’re doing something a little different—and a little fresher.”

By: Scott Marquart | Photo: Ryan Green and Ben Lehman