I received some exciting coffee news today out of Durham! North Carolina-based 4th Dimension Coffee, from the team behind Cocoa Cinnamon, will officially change its coffee-roasting company name and branding to Little Waves Coffee Roasters, effective Sept. 4th.
In addition to the name change the roastery will also be featured at La Marzocco Café in Seattle as the roaster-in-residence later this month (from September 17th through October 21st). Little Waves will be one of just 18 selected roasters from seven countries, chosen among hundreds of applicants to be featured in the cafe’.
Back in May 2017, owners Areli Barrera de Grodski and Leon Grodski de Barrera began sourcing and roasting, all of their own coffees in-house under the name 4th Dimension Coffee, building from decades of roasting experience and the grower and importer relationships the pair have cultivated over the years through their coffee shops, Cocoa Cinnamon.
“Our roastery continues to blossom,” says Areli Barrera de Grodski. “Next month we’ll be taking over at La Marzocco to share our way of doing coffee and coffee houses with the Seattle community and the coffee professionals who keep an eye on LMC from around the world.”
“Having started with true love and $75 to our name, building and launching bikeCOFFEE by 2012 and now with three locations and a coffee roastery, we are a team of 41 kind and quirky individuals of so many beautiful backgrounds, languages, beliefs, and stories,” says Leon Grodski de Barrera. “We’re excited for the next steps. The residency prompts us to contemplate, distill and make a kind of living argument about what we believe the experience of being in the business of coffee entails and what it means to create and share coffee and coffeehouses.”
The idea for the name “Little Waves” began in the spring of 2010, when the coffee couple fell in love through an exchange of translating literature for each other, opening up new worlds through language and common passions after six years as acquaintances in the mountains of North Carolina. But then, one undeniable connection sparked through a message that included “little waves rushing up on the shore” in response to a magically real text from Areli led to love. Six weeks later, it was marriage, and six months after that they rode a little wave into a big coffee project.
“With wide eyes, empty pockets, and illogical optimism we started our business in Areli’s mother’s kitchen in the mountains of North Carolina,” says Leon.
Here is a public statement on behalf of Little Waves Coffee Roasters founders Areli Barrera de Grodski and Leon Grodski de Barrera:
“So much hard work has gone into developing our business, and so many near and far have contributed to our project.
We are ineffably grateful to our family, friends, and strangers, from the Bull City to Cherokee, Guadalajara to Germany, Malaysia to Montreal, who have pitched in, inspired us forward with their helping hands, thoughtful words, non-collateralized loans, gifts, loving feedback and daily patronage.These waves reverberate in us, giving us the current to work, improve and bring love and thoughtfulness to what we do each day.
Striving honestly for sustainability is a project that takes little waves every day, every connection, every decision. We believe that commerce, as it is, is the root of so many of the world’s ills. Since the beginning, we have asked ourselves: can we, knowing that our business would be an ongoing pattern of buying and selling, use that pattern to continually express the world we hope to see more honestly, more effectively, more realistically? That is Little Waves. The reverberation of the drip that sets free the aroma in a beautiful coffee is Little Waves.
And so we are opting to go back to our roots and follow the feeling that has that rightness about it. The one that brought us together. The one that attracts so many of our team members to our project and has steered us all these years. Our retail shops, Cocoa Cinnamon, will continue to be driven by the experience that is amazed by the marvel of cities and the roots of languages, whose blood rushes in the awe of landscapes, the wonder of travel and the history, colors, textures, and stories of coffee, chocolate, and tea.”
The Triangle Explorer 