Volta Coffee, Tea & Chocolate: Gainesville, FL

We're turning 5 on Saturday, April 27. Seems like a good excuse for a party. We're starting off at 11 with a very special coffee cupping with the latest coffees from Intelligentsia, Toby's, Sightglass, and Bows & Arrows. Later, we'll fire up the smoker for hot dogs and cake on the patio. At some point Anthony will start churning out ice cream for a round of affogatos. At 2 pm we'll have a set by Ricky Kendall, and at 6:30 we'll have a performance by Sad Scout. Other guests musicians might be playing throughout the day.

All week long we're going to have our own version of an espresso festival, celebrating new single origin offerings and blends from some of our favorite roasters. 10 different espresso offerings over 6 days. We're bringing in two blends from London's Square Mile Roasters. A Colombian and a blend from Victoria BC's Bows & Arrows. A new Ethiopian espresso from Toby's Estate. New espressos from Sightglass and Intelligentsia. Each coffee will only be available for a limited time.

A rare concert at Volta: join us as we welcome Walter Salas-Humara back to Gainesville.

Who is Walter? From his bio: Chasing the punk prairie fire from Gainesville to New York just in time to sift through the ashes, Walter formed The Silos in 1985 with guitarist Bob Rupe and violinist Mary Rowell, plugging the main cable of American rock idiom into the jerry-rigged soundboard of Velvets-era feral experimentalism. The unlikely result, as evidenced by About Her Steps (1986), the seminal Cuba (1987) and their RCA debut The Silos (i.e., The One with the Bird on the Cover, 1990) was a loose-limbed conceptual country-rock that in turn influenced (if not outright inspired) the alt-country No Depression movement just around the corner. The band was voted Best New American Band in Rolling Stone Magazine's Critics' Poll of 1987 and appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990. He forged connections in Austin, another lost outpost tailor-made for his particular set of influences, where he formed the poor man’s supergroup the Setters with songwriters Michael Hall of the Wild Seeds and Alejandro Escovedo of the True Believers. Moving to Los Angeles, he recorded and toured with Tom Freund, Manny Verzosa, Jon Dee Graham, Gary Sunshine and Darren Hess. Those middle records – Hasta la Victoria! (1992), Susan Across the Ocean (1994), Heater (and its remixed mutant twin Cooler) (1998) validated the early acclaim and expanded Salas-Humara’s reputation as one of the finest songwriters working in the American vernacular.

Walter will be performing a solo show at Volta; cover is $5, show starts at 8pm.

Volta has a place open on our baking team. The position requires you to be creative, inspired, and self-managing. We have a very small kitchen (a bit like baking in a ship's galley), but we provide the best ingredients we can find and the freedom to improvise whatever you want to make on a daily basis. After the first few weeks, you set your own schedule as long as there are fresh scones in the morning. Between 20 and 40 hours a week. Previous professional baking experience preferred. Stop by the shop and fill out a baker's application if you are interested in the position.

Nice video report from The Tampa Bay Times on the first Tampa Bay Barista Jam, hosted by Buddy Brew Coffee. Anthony went down as a judge as is featured in the new report.

First Tampa Bay Barista Jam and Latte Art Throwdown

Our winter break is over and it's time to make more coffee.

Mon - Fri: 8 am to 9 pm
Saturday: 9 am to 9 pm
Sunday: 9 am to 5 pm (no change)

Finca Buenos Aires is something of a miracle coffee. The farm is located just outside of the small town of Nilo, in an area just now recovering from years of neglect thanks to Colombia's civil unrest. It is situated in the small department of Cudinamarca, north of the more famous coffee growing region of Huila-- not exactly a region known for producing specialty grade coffee. The coffees are grown in the foothills of a series of volcanos in a national park; the terrain is rugged and undeveloped. Single-track jeep trails wind up steep mountain sides, and the farms run wild under the cover of rain forest vegetation and banks of clouds. Unlike other regions with clearly delineated farms with neatly planted rows of coffees, the farms outside of Nilo are very small and draw upon both recently planted coffee and over-story fruit trees along with legacy coffee trees growing wild up and down the sides of the mountain trails.

Farmer Carlos Vargas is undertaking a herculean task of producing amazing coffees under very difficult situations: unusually heavy rains, almost no infrastructure, and crazy single-track trails in and out of the farm.

Amber Fox, writing about the farm, notes "the well-being of the environment and the workers are intrinsic to the approach Carlos Vargas takes to sustainability and further improving quality, and the results of his holistic approach sing in the cup."

The coffee is a bit wild, like the farm itself: dark red berry notes under layers of tobacco and cinnamon, but it picks up the flavors of mulled red wine as it cools. Ecco describes it as juicy pineapple and citrus with florals and red fruit flavors as it cools.

The coffee from Finca Buenos Aires is also of very limited supply-- Ecco was only able to purchase 7 bags of green coffee from Vargas this year. Try it soon, because it will be another year before coffee from this farm will be available again.

January 26, 8pm

Volta is pleased to be able to join with the University of Florida Department of English in presenting Glenn Freeman reading from his recent poetry collection "Traveling Light."

A graduate of UF, Freemen's first book of poems, Keeping the Tigers Behind Us, won the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2007. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Cimarron Review, The Lullwater Review, and Zone 3 among many other journals. About his recent book Traveling Light, poet Kathleen Halme says "Freeman's gorgeous poems conjugate in registers of emotion 'we didn't even know we were trying to feel.' Contemplating our deep needs and meanings, he writes in a voice that is 'the lush language of relation, the All.' A remarkable book of moving, illimitable poetry-a gift."

Volta is pleased to announce the latest schedule for the UF MFA poetry and fiction reading series. Stop by the shop to hear works read by up-and-coming authors and poets from UF's acclaimed writing program. Readings begin at 8 and last about an hour.

Spring 2012 Schedule

• February 2: Fiction: Carrie Guss, Poetry: Hai-Dang Phan
• February 15: Poetry: Andrew Donovan, Fiction: Emma Smith-Stevens
• March 15: Fiction: Rebecca Evanhoe, Poetry: Rebecca Baumann
• March 29: Poetry: Claire Eder, Fiction: Amy Scharmann
• April 12: Fiction: Sabrina Jaszi, Poetry: Guest Poet TBA

School is out, GNV is slowing down, and Volta is going into maintenance mode.

Volta will be closing at 6pm on Monday-Saturday until the new year.

We will be closed on Christmas and Boxing Day, but open every other day including New Year's Eve and day. Regular hours resume on January 2, 2012

Additionally, we have no scheduled public coffee cuppings until after the winter break.

End of the semester. End of the year. End of Herman Cain's campaign. There's got to be something out there that you should be celebrating. And we have the coffee for you. Manantiales del Frontino Geisha, from Colombia. Selected as coffee of the year by the SCAA. Intelligentsia sells it for $109 a pound. We're offering it for 8.50 a cup. Yes. It's expensive-- but still less than a bottle of craft beer at most bars. And if you like coffee, it's an amazing treat. For starters, it tastes like sugarcane and flowers. As it cools, it starts to taste more like sweet honeydew melon. We have one pound left. It will be gone soon. It's your last chance to try what was picked by the specialty coffee industry as the best of the year.

You can learn more about the Mananitales del Frontino from Intelligentsia's snappy new website.