Shark Mountain Coffee – C-VILLE Weekly

Restaurant Week feeds into local community

As you scramble to make your Restaurant Week reservations, as you finally get to your table and lay a napkin over your lap and lift your fork to your lips, take a moment to reflect on how your dinner is more than a treat for your taste buds. It’s helping feed thousands of people right here in Virginia.

One dollar from each Restaurant Week meal served will go to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, this year’s charity partner beneficiary.

Charlottesville Restaurant Week has partnered with the BRAFB in years prior, and it’s been an enormous help, says Millie Winstead, director of development at the food bank. In winter 2015, Charlottesville Restaurant Week donated about $23,000 to the food bank.

BRAFB’s four branches—Charlottesville, Verona, Lynchburg and Winchester—serve more than 25,000 individuals via 200 partner agencies throughout 25 counties and eight cities. For every dollar the food bank receives, 96 cents goes toward programming, Winstead says. In previous years, the money went into the food bank’s general fund.

But this year, the money will go to the Agency Capacity Fund, a new initiative intended to help BRAFB partner agencies meet increasing demands. In March, the BRAFB will issue a request for proposals from its partner agencies, which can submit applications for money from the fund for things such as shelving, refrigerators or coolers.

“Hunger is something that unfortunately persists in our communities,” says Abena Foreman-Trice, director of communications for the BRAFB. “We’re still seeing more neighbors on average per month coming to our partner agencies than we were before the Great Recession.”

Most of the food bank’s agencies are small and run by volunteers; many of them are faith-based organizations supporting a pantry or kitchen that feeds maybe 50 families every other week, serving “a group of people that wouldn’t otherwise have [food],” Winstead says. While the agencies receive regular food donations, Winstead says that pantries often need help meeting physical and organizational needs.

For example, food cannot be stored on the floor; it must be kept on shelves. A $100 shelving unit may not seem like much, Winstead says, but it’s an awful lot for a kitchen with a $1,500 operating budget.

“Food banking is changing,” Winstead says. “Back in the day, when it was starting, it was a lot of canned food items. Now, about one quarter of the food we distribute is fresh produce, so the ability to have a cooler, a refrigerator or a cooler blanket to drape over produce” in the pantry or during distribution to families is key.

Restaurant Week is the chance for the community to “understand how their support can make an impact for someone who is trying to make ends meet,” Foreman-Trice says. “When someone falls short, we’re here to try and make sure they have one less worry, to make sure that they know there’s at least somewhere where they can get food to eat to get them and their families through.”

Winstead says she’s “blown away constantly by the giving nature of the restaurant community here,” noting that they receive donations from restaurants throughout the year.

This time, a record-high 44 restaurants are participating in Restaurant Week, and instead of the usual seven days, the event will run for nine, from Friday, January 20, through Sunday, January 29.

First-time participants include Blue Ridge Café, Los Jarochos, Maharaja, Mono Loco and Petit Pois all at the $19 price point; Aroma’s Café, Heirloom at The Graduate Charlottesville and Timberwood Taphouse at the $29 price point; and Water Street at the $39 price point.

Changes at IX

Last week, Shark Mountain Coffee Co. announced the sudden closing of its location at the Studio IX in an emotional Facebook post written by Shark Mountain owner Jonny Nuckols. Nuckols chalks up the dissolution of the café, which closed January 11 after a year and a half in operation, to “irreconcilable differences between Shark and management of Studio IX.” Shark Mountain will continue to operate its café in the iLab at UVA’s Darden School of Business and will look for a potential new café location.

And Sweethaus has moved out of its West Main Street location and into a space at IX, next door to Brazo’s Tacos. A post on the bakery’s Instagram account states it hopes to open in its new spot by this weekend.

Taste of what’s to come

Junction, Melissa Close-Hart and Adam Frazier’s long-anticipated TexMex restaurant, will open Thursday, January 26, on Hinton Avenue in Belmont. Look for more details on the restaurant in next week’s Small Bites column.

Eat up!

We have three Restaurant Week gift certificates to give away. For a chance to win, leave a comment about which restaurant’s menu you’re most excited about and why.

Cold-brew coffee isn’t a watered down version of the original

It’s been really hot. We’re all sweaty and sluggish, and most of us could use a good jolt to get through the dog days of summer.

Enter iced coffee, which, on a steamy day, can taste like the ambrosia of the gods…as long as it’s done right.

Brew a regular cup of coffee, let it cool and drop in a few ice cubes and you’ll be left with a bland, weak, watered-down brew. It might cool you down, but it won’t taste very good. There’s an art to brewing a flavorful glass of iced coffee, and coffee shops and markets all over town are mastering it with different techniques.

None of them are necessarily better than others, it’s just “a matter of preference,” says Milli Coffee Roasters owner Nick Leichtentritt.

Here are some of the methods local coffee shops are using right now.

Cold brew

A few years ago, almost nobody was cold-brewing coffee, says Shark Mountain owner and head coffee roaster Jonny Nuckols. Now, it’s all the rage, probably because the cold-brew method yields a smooth, flavorful, non-acidic beverage ideal for adding some cream and sipping slowly, he says.

Cold-brew coffee is a distinct way of brewing. As its name implies, it never touches heat. To create a batch of Shark Mountain cold brew, Nuckols finely grinds a light-roast coffee and adds the grounds to a filter bag within a nylon bag inside a five-gallon bucket. He pours about three gallons of cool water onto the grounds and lets the mixture soak for 20 to 24 hours. Then, he pours the filtered, concentrated brew into a five-gallon keg and adds water to bring the brew to a normal, but still fairly strong, strength. It’s dispensed from the keg and poured over ice as customers order.

This method extracts good flavors from the bean while leaving out the bitterness found in hot coffees, says Nuckols. Depending on the bean used, you’ll taste more chocolate, nut and berry flavors than you might with a hot cup of coffee, but you won’t get as robust a flavor profile, because high temperature is what ultimately draws out all of those notes. But still, “cold brew is definitely a good thing for the coffee industry,” he says. You can try Shark Mountain cold brew at Studio IX or at the iLab at Darden.

Shenandoah Joe’s Brain Freeze is also a cold-brew iced coffee. Owner Dave Fafara says his shops use a blend of coffees created specifically for iced coffee. Their 16-hour, triple-strained cold brew is popular: Fafara estimates that, during the summer, Shenandoah Joe moves between 100 and 125 gallons in Charlottesville each week. And JM Stock Provisions also sells cold brew—you can take home a growler of it—which they brew in-house.

Japanese style

Over at Milli Coffee Roasters on the corner of Preston Avenue and McIntire Road, Leichtentritt uses the Japanese-style iced coffee method. The resulting brew is “a little more well-balanced,” he says. “One of the big selling points of cold-brew coffee is that people say it’s very low-acid.” But, to him, “that little bit of acid is what helps make a good, balanced cup of coffee.”

Like cold brew, the Japanese-style method begins with finely ground coffee and a filter, but this method uses hot water. “It’s essentially like brewing really strong coffee” that is immediately poured—and thus cooled and diluted—over ice, Leichtentritt says. The cooled coffee is then stored in a carafe and poured over ice once again upon serving.

Cooling the coffee right away is the key. High temperatures bring out a coffee’s flavor, but the longer a brew is exposed to air as it cools, the more those flavor-packed compounds break down. Cooling the coffee quickly, with ice, helps trap and preserve those compounds.

Other shops around town, including Atlas Coffee and Mudhouse, make their iced coffee using a similar process. It’s the easiest way to make a lot of iced coffee quickly, says one Mudhouse barista.

Nitro

Nitro coffee, one of the latest coffee trends, is more like a craft beer than a brewed coffee, says Snowing in Space Coffee Co. co-owner Paul Dierkes. Nitro isn’t served on ice, but it is cold brewed and served cold from a keg. It tastes great black, but if cream and sugar is your thing, pour ’em in.

To brew nitro, Snowing in Space cold brews coffee on a large scale, kegs it, then pumps nitrogen gas into the keg at a high pressure for a long time to essentially agitate the brew. It’s served directly from the keg’s tap. Dierkes likens the resulting brew to a Guinness (a nitrogenated beer); it’s smooth, thick and creamy, with a foamy head.

Snowing in Space sources its beans from Shenandoah Joe and offers three single-origin brews, including the straightforward, nutty Brazilian Gimme-Dat and the unusual blueberry Lil Blue, and plans on introducing more varieties, including a cocoa mole flavor, soon. “The goal is experimentation,” Dierkes says while admitting he’s not a coffee connoisseur. “Let’s get experimental with styles and flavors and get interesting coffees to people.”

You can try Snowing in Space’s nitro coffee at Paradox Pastry, Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Champion Brewery. But it isn’t the only nitro in town—Shenandoah Joe and Mudhouse offer it as well.