By Dominic Arthur, Staff Reporter.
Populace Coffee in Bay City is looking to get into the market of publishing with its coffee brewing guide – ‘Habitual’.
The coffee shop is currently coming to the end of its Kickstarter campaign with about $2,100 more dollars to go before meeting their goal of $7,000. Habitual provides an “in-depth look at the versatility and behavior of brewing coffee.”
Behind the book is Populace owner and writer Andrew Heppner, and his team consisting of Dave Daniele (creative and marketing director at Populace), photographer Julia Ross, illustrator Morgan Hughes, and writers Brian Beyke, Bryan Schiele, Sandy Bledsoe, Chuck Korson, and Jenn Chen.
“We don’t have much of an expectation. Our hope is that people utilize,” Heppner said. “Whether it’s a person new into coffee and they’re learning about brew methods; or a coffee nerd who wants to expand his repertoire; or somebody that wants a nice coffee table book. We aren’t expecting one thing. We just people to use it.”
[two_third]Collectively, the team has a goal of putting “brewing methods in non-conventional environments to showcase the versatility that coffee lovers have at their disposal.”
Brainstorming the idea for the book didn’t take long. After thinking on a couple of different ideas, they agreed on the coffee brewing guide.
“We’ve been working on this since April and that’s when effort was put into it,” Heppner said. “We talked about it earlier this year. [Habitual] started as a different idea and evolved into what we’ve created now.”
Once their idea got off the ground, they turned to crowdsourcing website – Kickstarter.
“We aren’t a publisher, and we don’t have a group of people behind us that’s used to buying printed materials from us,” Heppner said. “We really wanted to make sure that the time, energy, and money we invested into the project was going sell before we went through with it.”
Heppner continued, “[It’s] part marketing and part necessity; so we weren’t dumped with a couple thousand copies and nobody ever bought it.”[/two_third]
[one_third_last][/one_third_last]Populace isn’t stopping with just a book. Other projects that they have in mind include the second annual Flight of Fancy coffee tasting event.
“[Flight of Fancy] is a fun little contest where people take unidentified coffees, and we give them a bunch of parameters, and they decipher which they think they are based on those [parameters] and our suggestions we give them,” Heppner said. “The first person that gets it right on the day we choose as our submission date wins the grinder.”
Last year, the Flight of Fancy event saw a “little over 70 participants from across the country.” This year, Populace hopes that they will have “a lot more participants” as this year’s prize is a peak grinder made by Mahlkönig.
“People not in coffee probably don’t know what that is, but it’s a very expensive grinder,” Heppner said.
The book is set to be released in October to those that have backed the project. Heppner joked, “I would like to hear that it’s the number one best-selling book in the world,” he continued. “We’re just excited to get it out there in print and actually have it in our hands. We’ve been looking at it computer it for a long time now, creating all the content and lots and lots of people were involved in making it happen. We’ll just be excited to have it… in our hands.”
For more information about Habitual coffee brewing guide and to purchase a copy of it from Kickstarter, visit its website http://www.habitual.coffee.
