business coffee drive espresso shop thru
Day-O. Day-O. Day-O Espresso is opening a new hut in Columbia.
“Hopefully by the first of September,” said owner Patrick Day, of Sonora.
The drive-through coffee, Italian soda and tasty nosh spot, will mark the fourth Day-O in Tuolumne County.
The new Day-O Espresso will be on Parrotts Ferry Road by the Columbia laundromat, which housed another drive-through coffee shop about 10 years ago.
The first Day-O opened up in downtown Sonora in 1999 and was followed by a hut in Mono Vista and Jamestown.
Day said he’s tried huts in San Andreas and Pacheco, but neither were successful.
Day said he and his wife moved from Sonora to Oregon in 1991 and “there were tons of drive-through’s up there.”
They moved back to Sonora in 1998 and there weren’t any drive-through coffee shops.
“We figured we’d try it downtown and it worked out really well,” Day said.
The business has 22 employees and Day said each hut becomes more refined as they go.
“Hopefully this one will be just right,” he said.
Contact Lacey Peterson at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
or 588-4529.
I am particularly fond of days in which I learn something new, and today, I learned that Seattle's Capitol Hill is home to one of the only Kaladi Brothers Coffee shops south of Alaska. I stumbled across their homepage online and noticed that one of the ingredients listed in their single-origin Mexican coffee was "fresh Alaskan Air," so of course I had to go investigate. Any place that promises to let you experience two geographical locations at once, without leaving the comfort of your own city, catches my interest.
Kaladi Brothers Coffee is located at 511 E Pike, and bears a rather unassuming storefront, so trust me on this if you've never noticed it before: it is there. The entrance is crowded, with the espresso bar and shelves of merchandise funneling customers through a strait of sorts, but once you clear the ordering area and collect your drink, you'll find two surprisingly spacious and comfortable rooms. Natural light and the hum of business fill the first one, if you're feeling sociable, and the second is lamp lit and more secluded... ideal for those who, perhaps, were hanging out further up the Hill a bit too late last night.
The facts that 1.) Alaska has roasteries, and 2.) Seattle has Alaskan coffee were not the only two things learned today, however. I also learned that there are different roasting methods. Which doesn't come as a surprise, but I have to confess I'd never invested any thought in it before.
The most common form of roasting is done in a drum (or barrel) roaster, which rotates the beans on a hot surface to "bake" them. By contrast, Kaladi uses something called a Sivetz Fluid Bed Roaster, or "air roaster" ... if you are a diagram person, try this link (and if you're not, don't, because it will give you a headache). These two methods are most readily compared to making popcorn: either you place the kernels on a hot surface with some means of stirring them, or you use an air popper, which introduces heated air to cook the kernels. These two methods produce very different flavors in popcorn, so it's no surprise that they produce different effects in coffee as well. The idea of air-roasting coffee (perhaps a Roaster reader can speak better to this?) is to produce a more uniform flavor, because there is less chance in air-roasting that the beans will stick or be over-exposed in one particular area than with a drum roaster.
