Loyal subscribers of our newsletter will be well-versed to the newest addition to the Royal family, The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room. We are proud to share some early renderings of our new space here on our blog. Be sure to check back often for updates. Things are just getting started.

exterior

The Crown is an open-source coffee education center, laboratory, event space, and tasting room, celebrating the importance of Oakland to the international coffee community and its history. An incubator of ideas and promoter of experimentation across the entire supply chain, The Crown is inclusive, transparent, and collaborative.

The Crown will have five key components:

The Tasting Room: The ever-evolving and dynamic tasting room will offer highly intentional coffee experiences not commonly found elsewhere. We want to be the place where industry and the general public can explore the full spectrum of coffee highlighted by professional baristas in a café-like environment.

The Presentation Space & Cupping Lab: Here, we will offer small, medium, and large-scale cuppings centered on unique experiences, education, and purchasing. Additionally, we will host events, lectures, and presentations centered on our industry and our city.

The Brewing Lab: We will offer SCAA-certified courses, CQI courses, cutting-edge original workshops, and guest curricula by the industry’s thought-leaders. The Brewing Lab will be an extension of our already popular Crown Analyses showcasing progressive brewing methods and experiments.

The Roasting Lab: The Roasting Lab is a hands-on learning center focused on bringing the best out of the latent potential coffee. Ranging from sample roasting, micro-batches on our 1kg Probatino, and full-scale production training on a 5kg Diedrich and 15kg Loring Falcon, the space will be a roaster’s playground. We’ll be offering SCAA and CQI courses in addition to original curriculum and guest instructors. Ongoing Crown Analyses will continue to be produced on the machines housed in this, the beating heart of The Crown.

The Event Space: Large-scale events celebrating the specialty coffee industry and the importance of our home: Oakland, California. If the Roasting Lab is the heart, the Event Space is its outstretched arms.

bar

The Crown will have a series of movable glass walls that can open the space into one large facility or divide the rooms into four concurrently operated and functional areas: Tasting Room, Presentation Space/Cupping Lab, Brewing Lab, and Roasting Lab.

section-lab

When you visit us, you’ll be greeted by our open-to-the-public tasting room. While you drink your flight of espressos either in the tasting room or outside in the parklet, our traders will hold industry-facing cuppings in the cupping lab. Concurrently, a member of The Crown team will be hosting an SCAA course in the brew lab. At the same time all this is happening, our Director of Roasting will be hosting roasting demonstrations with new and experienced roasters alike. Alternatively, you might be joining us for a meet the producer event or part of Oakland’s First Fridays street festivals. However you visit us, we can’t wait to host you.

section-presentation

The Crown is the place for both the industry and general public to learn about coffee.

We could not achieve this ambitious project alone. To start, we want to acknowledge some of the people who are helping to bring The Crown to light.

Norman Sanchez, our incredible architect who has been on the project since day one —his vision and leadership has been phenomenal. This project wouldn’t be possible without him.

Joe Chambers, an Oakland-based artist tasked to build and design our one-of-a-kind movable espresso bar.

Studio Terpeluk, our interior design firm who has been essential in crafting our vision and ensuring it’s as beautiful as it is functional.

Needmore Designs, although they aren’t working on the actual building, Needmore was one of the first people we called when we got serious about this project. We knew that in order to reflect the heart and soul of The Crown, we needed a digital representation and online platform where we could share our findings freely and widely.

Julie Chang, an Oakland-based artist and longtime friend of Royal Coffee’s (former barista at the Oakland-based Royal Coffee café, currently owned and operated as Cole Coffee.) She has done a lot of design work for Royal in the past and recently designed our logo for The Crown. We can’t wait to see it throughout the space.

See you in Early 2017.

ROY01-Crown-Logo-1000px