Transcription of Brittany Feltovic for the show Caffeinated #184
Dr. L Belisle: Having worked in the Old Port with Maine Magazine, Old Port Magazine and Love Maine Radio, I have spent some time across the way at Bard Coffee. This individual who is here to talk to us today has also spent quite a lot of time at Bard Coffee. This is Brittany Feltovic. She is the manager of Bard Coffee. She has eight years of experience working with coffee and has been at Bard for six. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to us today.
Brittany: Thank you Lisa.
Dr. L Belisle: Bard is a really wonderful place to be. It’s not just the coffee. The coffee is obviously great, but the location is it’s really perfect. It’s very central in the Old Port. There’s a lot of brain stuff going on there. A lot of meet ups, a lot of stuff going on. What’s that like to work in that kind of atmosphere?
Brittany: It’s really exciting honestly. I think that we’re lucky with our central location where we don’t get just one type of person that comes in. We have our young teenagers that come in. Then the hipsters. Then we have the guys in their suits and all of the artists from Maine or the restaurant people, so it’s nice to just have this different diverse group of people that are constantly coming in and being able to talk to them and see really what’s going on all over town all the time.
Dr. L Belisle: It’s almost always busy.
Brittany: Pretty much, yeah. It seems like that.
Dr. L Belisle: When you walk by there are people sitting in the window. There are people meeting. There are people in the back. Just it seems like it attracts people from all over.
Brittany: Definitely it does.
Dr. L Belisle: Why would one choose to go into the coffee field?
Brittany: I honestly just fell into it. I graduated high school and was my father told me basically, “Okay, you’re on your own after this.” He’s like, “Where do you want to go? I’ll give you a one way ticket.” I chose Maine because my family is here. He was just like, “If you want to go to college, you’re also on your own for that.” It made me think a little bit more about like, “Well is there anything that I actually want to do right now,” and there wasn’t. I came to Maine and applied to a bunch of jobs at the mall and Starbucks was the first one to call me back and had probably one of the most amazing interviews I’ve ever had where the manager there was just exuding all of this passion for coffee.
I was like, “Whoa I’ve never even thought about all the different things that go into it, from the farm level to the roasting level and the brewing level.” It just made me excited to learn about that since I wasn’t going to school and that’s where the hunger started and it never really stopped.
Dr. L Belisle: Where are you originally from?
Brittany: Hawaii.
Dr. L Belisle: That’s a big leap.
Brittany: Yeah, yep, yeah. My dad was in the military and we got really lucky, so I was there for all of elementary school and all of high school. You can’t really live there [that well 00:37:57] afterwards. It’s just so expensive and there’s not a lot of jobs. I was like, “I guess I’ll come to Maine.”
Dr. L Belisle: You have family here.
Brittany: Yes, yes, his sister is here and her three daughters. I’m really close with them.
Dr. L Belisle: As you’ve gotten to, well first of all did you end up working at Starbucks?
Brittany: Yeah, yep. I worked there for about nine months and then that manager left to work at a local company that has since closed down and I basically followed her. After that closed down, a friend of mine was doing the art for Bard and he was just like, “Go, apply here. It’s a really great place, really great people.” I did. That’s where I’ve been ever since.
Dr. L Belisle: It seems to me that it requires a very unique skill set, not only do you have to know coffee, but you have to know people. You have to know business. You have to do managing. It requires some important skills.
Brittany: Yeah, I think that’s part of the reason that I really like it is that there’s always a challenge every day, juggling all of those things and I like multitasking and doing a lot of things at once, so it’s perfect for somebody like me.
Dr. L Belisle: What has it been like to be living in Maine, having been in Hawaii and now Maine?
Brittany: Yeah, at first it was a big shock, honestly. I had always come here during the summers so that was my only knowledge of what Maine could be like and I was younger. As an adult, I didn’t like it at first. I found it really hard to make friends. Everybody was already in their own thing, but once I moved into Portland that’s when I saw the light. I love the fact that it has the small town vibe plus the city is still going on. I can walk around the streets and I can’t go anywhere without knowing somebody, but at the same time it has really great food. Yeah I just love it.
Dr. L Belisle: You talked about the art at Bard and that’s something I’ve noticed before is that it’s a very consistent thing. There’s always somebody being featured on the walls. I really like that. Why has that been important to your store?
Brittany: I think it’s just a really nice way to connect with that community and there’s also just a lot of talented people in this city and it’s a fun way to change up the ambiance a little bit here and there. Sometimes we’ll have really large pieces, sometimes we’ll have more condense like the clocks that we have right now are pretty cool. It’s just a fun way to be able to showcase what this city has to offer.
Dr. L Belisle: Do you have the opportunity to create a relationship with the artists themselves?
Brittany: Yeah, yeah. We have many artists that are repeats that come again and again, the same time every year. It’s really nice to be able to have that.
Dr. L Belisle: My daughter who’s in college now, she worked for a sadly no longer in existence coffee shop in our town and she really enjoyed the social aspect, but she also really enjoyed crafting the coffee. I’m afraid it’s made her rather spoiled now because her college has only a major chain on campus and I won’t name them, but she doesn’t like them nearly as well. She really has developed a palate it seems from that experience. Tell me about that for you.
Brittany: I definitely had more of an experience enjoying crafting coffee at Bard than any other place that I have ever worked at, especially when you’re working for a company that has a connection with the roasting and the farming level. The barista is the last person at the end of that chain and they’re the person that can mess up all of that hard work. When you working for a company that is so involved with all of that it makes you more proud to want to serve the best cup of coffee that you can serve because you don’t want to let everybody else down in that chain.
Dr. L Belisle: Where does your coffee come from?
Brittany: We get it from all over, Central America, South America, Africa. We get a lot from Indonesian countries as well. We just find the best of the best is our big goal, just to find interesting coffees.
Dr. L Belisle: Who’s responsible for choosing where the coffee is coming from?
Brittany: Bob Garver who is our owner does all of the source trips, so he pretty much has the best job on Earth and gets to go to any coffee farm that he wants to go to. He’s really great about establishing relationships that we can keep getting coffee from these people every year too which is really, really exciting to be a part of that. A lot of companies say that they do that, but don’t necessarily actually do that. I think a lot of times he won’t go to a new farm, instead he’ll just when he goes to Honduras he has two farms that he visits every single year.
The change that’s happened since us getting their coffee has been really remarkable too. There’s one farm who didn’t even have electricity when they first started. Now there’s lines going up the mountains. It’s just neat to be able to see all of that happen.
Dr. L Belisle: Once you’ve created this relationship with the farmer and you’re bringing in the coffee beans, what’s the next step?
Brittany: The next step is to do roasting of it and just sampling it at different levels and see where it likes to be and Bill who’s our head roaster is really great at fine tuning and finding that sweet spot of what it’s going to taste the best at.
Dr. L Belisle: Does he have a roasting facility here in Portland?
Brittany: Our roasting facility is in Topsham and it’s pretty awesome.
Dr. L Belisle: You’ve spent time there?
Brittany: Oh, yeah, yeah. I got up at least once every week. There’s a training café there so I get to bring all of my baristas there. It has the same exact machines, same exact pour over set up. I get to throw them in and just have them sit there for six hours and just make coffee over and over and over again.
Dr. L Belisle: You must be pretty caffeinated by the time you leave there.
Brittany: Yeah, yeah. I’ve gotten in good practice though.
Dr. L Belisle: This is something that I’m also interested in. I know I read the autobiography of the founder of Starbucks and it was really important to him that when they went through this big reorganization everybody made a consistent espresso and the espresso was that was the thing. You start with that and you do it really well. It sounds like you have a similar process that you work with, with people at our store.
Brittany: Oh, yeah, yeah definitely. We don’t start with espresso necessarily for our training just for the way that our café works out. We have I don’t know if you’ve seen but we have the pour over bar that we do so most people we start on register and then we get them to go on to pour overs and make sure that they can craft the perfect pour over and then espresso is the last thing because it’s honestly one of the hardest I think because it’s this constant moving target that’s affected by the air temperature and the humidity levels and even the level of the amount of coffee that’s in there. There’s so many different factors so they really need to be able to understand how to change that and how to make it taste good.
Dr. L Belisle: I wasn’t even really familiar that pour over was a thing until I don’t know maybe three or four years ago. It seems like it’s become more popular in this neck of the woods.
Brittany: Yeah.
Dr. L Belisle: Why is that? What is the difference between a pour over coffee and a brewed coffee?
Brittany: Fundamentally, it’s not really that big of a difference. The big thing is just that you are doing it manually so it takes a skilled barista to be able to do the work of a machine. With just a regular brewed cup of coffee, you know that it’s going to be good every time because that machine is set with all the correct parameters and it’s doing the same thing over and over and over again, so I think it just shows the expertise of the barista if they can make something just as good as a machine.
For us we like to have it just to have the different options. We have two coffees that are ready to go every single day. Then, we have an additional five on the pour over board that you can get at any time, so if you don’t like what the coffee of the day is the you have these other options or if there’s a specific special coffee that’s on the board that you want, currently we have one that’s a dollar extra a cup and you can only get that on pour over. I think it’s just nice to have the different options available to you.
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Dr. L Belisle: It’s funny that I’m sitting here having this conversation with you because I’m really a tea person.
Brittany: Yeah it’s okay.
Dr. L Belisle: Actually I enjoy espresso, but it’s more for the caffeine of it which I won’t admit to, well I just admitted it to everybody.
Brittany: Everyone knows now.
Dr. L Belisle: Everybody knows now, but if I were a coffee drinker, what is the difference between a light roast, a medium roast, a dark roast? I mean what are some of the things that people who actually drink coffee and really enjoy it what are some of the things the people are looking for?
Brittany: Basically, the darker that you roast a coffee the more that you’re masking the flavor honestly in my opinion. The darker that you a roast a bean the more that you’re just getting the smoky charcoal essence out of it which some people really enjoy. That’s what they’re looking for in a cup of coffee. They want that smokiness there and that depth. When you do a lighter or a medium roast coffee, a lot more of those sweet fruity characteristics can come out in a cup of coffee that most people don’t think of when they’re thinking of a cup of coffee. There are times when I’ve had coffee that taste like a cup of tea. It’s so delicate.
Those are my favorite cups honestly. It’s almost like a cup of wine where you’re finding all of these amazing nuances that it’s just a factor of what they’re doing at the farm level, so roasting just helps to bring those out.
Dr. L Belisle: Well I’m glad you said that because I have always felt like the reason that for me coffee I couldn’t get into it it was just almost like hitting me over the head. It was so strong. For me for my palate it often tasted so bitter, but it’s good to hear that really that it’s not, there’s a range.
Brittany: Yeah, there totally is. It also takes a lot of practice. Honestly, when I first started drinking coffee I was that girl that put toasted marshmallow syrup in everything and a bunch of cream. When I started working at Bard, they were like, “Okay [pull 00:50:13] me a shot of espresso.” I was like, “Okay here you go.” They were like, “No you need to taste it.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t drink espresso. I mean I don’t really drink coffee.” They’re like, “Well you’re going to if you want to work here.”
After forcing myself to drink it, I make all of my employees drink their coffee black, the same thing. After a while, you tend to not notice the bitterness as much and then focus more on those pleasant flavors and then all of the sudden it comes together. I think I had my aha moment maybe after a year and a half. It took a while.
Dr. L Belisle: Well that is fascinating. It’s very interesting for me as a doctor because caffeine has some points been vilified, so it’s a bad thing. Nobody should ever drink coffee because coffee is really bad for you. Then most recently we’ve heard that coffee use has been linked to a decrease in multiple sclerosis. We don’t really know whether it’s …
Brittany: Good or bad.
Dr. L Belisle: … good or bad, but clearly people like it. I’m often with people who like coffee so now to know that it only takes a year and a half maybe I will eventually enjoy it myself.
Brittany: Just do one cup a week.
Dr. L Belisle: It’s also interesting because it seems as though this idea of crafting and crafting on a smaller scale is becoming more and more important, the pour over, people get to choose what it is that they are drinking, what it is that their own tastes are more associated with. This is something that I think we used to all be [Sanka 00:51:49] drinkers back I don’t know forty years or ago or whatever, but now everybody gets to be different.
Brittany: Yeah. I think it’s nice. I think it’s nice that people are appreciating quality in a way that a lot of people are attracted to the great beers and the great wines and the great restaurants. I fell like coffee is that last thing that everybody is now starting to pay attention to which is really great.
Dr. L Belisle: There are even pairings that go on with coffee from my understanding and it’s interesting because it’s not just coffee goes well with chocolate for example, coffee goes well with lots of different things.
Brittany: Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Dr. L Belisle: Have you explored any of those?
Brittany: Not personally. I’m not very good at the whole creativity of pairing things together but the competitions that I just came back from, they’re barista competitions and part of it is they all have to make a signature beverage and that signature beverage is supposed to highlight the flavors that they’re finding in the coffee, not necessarily mimic them so I’ve had a lot of interesting drinks that you wouldn’t think that those things would go together to elevate this coffee, but they totally do. I think I had one this weekend that had pine tree syrup and clove in it. It somehow elevated the citrus level of this coffee, so it was really interesting the different combinations that you can do. It’s almost like making a cocktail.
Dr. L Belisle: I really love that. I love knowing that something brings out something else in coffee for example. I think you’re right that it does seem like the final frontier, but it is again so different than, it almost seems as though we got to be a bit of a homogenized society. Everybody is going to eat this stuff that tastes like this, everybody is going to eat the stuff that looks like this, but now we’ve had to almost retrain our palates and get back to a place where we can taste the subtle things, the pine essence or whatever it is that the beans are bringing out.
You’ve worked at Bard now for six years. You’ve been in coffee for eight years. What does the future look like for you?
Brittany: I think that I would just really like to soak up as much knowledge as I possibly can. I’m in a very good environment for that, surrounded by many talented people that have been in the industry for a very long time. I’m also supported by somebody who my boss, Bob, who is willing to send me to anything that I want to go to. There are barista camps and these competitions and everything I get to go do I feel like I’m learning more and more each time. I would really like to learn more about the roasting process. I know a fair amount about being a barista and I think it would be really nice to go to the roasting side and eventually go to a coffee farm and see what that’s like.
It’s so easy to look at all of these pictures and try to figure out how everything is actually done, but I feel like it’s one of those things that until you’re there experiencing the process you don’t really get it.
Dr. L Belisle: It’s pretty great that this all stemmed from your father saying, “Okay, here’s your ticket where do you want to go?” You taking a chance and getting this job originally at Starbucks and now at Bard and just the fact that you’ve stayed with it and you’ve kept layering your experiences and going deeper and deeper into the process. I mean you’ve received this great education having started from not even really knowing which direction you wanted to be educated in at all.
Brittany: There were times definitely where I wasn’t sure if it was going to take me where I needed to go, but just sticking through has really paid off for me. It’s been a very rewarding experience. It’s starting to get to the point with my family where they understand that I am doing really well and this is something that’s really good for me and I’m making as much money as them and don’t have student loans, also a bonus, but yeah it’s been a really great experience.
Dr. L Belisle: Brittany how do people find out about Bard?
Brittany: Most people find out about it by walking down the street, seeing a Starbucks and then seeing this weird little local coffee shop across the street and taking a chance on it, but a lot of people have been, our social media has been growing a lot, so I think that that’s one aspect. I figured out Instagram finally this year. I feel like everybody’s been doing it for years, but it’s been really, really fun. Mostly everybody that finds out about it they’re just walking in. We still have people, we’ve been opened for six years we still have people to this day that are like, “How long have you been here? I’ve never been here before.”
Dr. L Belisle: For people who are out of town and are maybe planning on an Old Port trip, do you have a website?
Brittany: Yep, it’s www.bardcoffee.com. It has a little bit about the shop and then obviously the coffees that we’re currently offering. We have a blog on there as well. You can definitely check out.
Dr. L Belisle: Well I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today. My job is also very fun because I get to learn things and today I have learned a lot about coffee. As a non-coffee drinker that’s particularly intriguing to me.
Brittany: Hopefully, it’s inspired you a little.
Dr. L Belisle: It has. It has inspired. I know that there are foods I now eat that I didn’t eat when I was younger and it just happened with time, so maybe coffee will become one of those things. We’ll see. We’ve been speaking with Brittany Feltovic who is the manager of Bard Coffee which happens to be right across Tommys Park from where we’re sitting now. People who are listening go in and visit Brittany at Bard and Brittany thanks so much for coming in.
Brittany: Thank you.
Dr. L Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show number one eighty-four, Caffeinated. Our guests have included Murray Carpenter and Brittany Feltovic. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
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