OB Beans Update!

Whewww...to say that 2020 was eventful would be an understatement.  Lots of great things have happened in the life of our small business this year and I wanted to take a moment to reflect and highlight some of them! 

One of our passions as a company is to personally get to know the farmers who grow our coffees.  We have been slowly working on traveling to different origins around the world and have 4 locations we have been to in the past 5 years (Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala). This past January we added a whole new continent and headed to Africa. Some of the best coffees in the world come from East Africa, and we were excited to explore and discover incredible coffees and get to know the people who grow them. We found some amazing coffees that we will be offering in the shop and online soon that we are stoked to share with you. 

Another big milestone for our company was adding our second location. Little did we know that we would be opening our doors and a month later be dealing with the largest international pandemic the world has ever known. Even in the face of that we’ve managed to keep the doors open and the business running. Our newest location is in San Clemente, which is another tight knit beach community without a local roaster in the area. We installed a smaller version of the same Mill City roaster we have in Ocean Beach, and began roasting without too many bumps along the way (unlike the hassle of the Ocean Beach roaster). When we started OB Beans, our vision was fairly straightforward. We weren’t really considering starting other shops so we didn’t fully think through our branding. It was local centric and not really transferrable to other beach communities, so when starting this new shop we had to decide on a name that had the potential to extend our reach beyond OB.  After A LOT of discussion back and forth we landed on the name SUR which is Spanish for “South” and tips its hat to our roots of working with Latin American coffee farmers, along with our geography with being in Southern California.  We are beyond stoked to join the coffee community in San Clemente and Southern Orange County!

We also finally upgraded all of our cafe equipment, most specifically our new crown jewel in the shop, our custom Sanremo espresso machine. Sanremo makes some of the best espresso machines in the world, they are based out of Italy, and are used in world coffee and barista championships.  This machine pulls consistent perfect shots, which increases our quality and honors our hard working farmers by delivering incredible coffee every shot.  We also upgraded to a 3 group espresso head to help us serve our customers more efficiently (hello quad shot people!)  When we started the shop we had to use almost all used equipment, so it was a big deal to finally upgrade this last piece of used equipment. 

Over the years we have tried a few new things in the food department. We always knew we wanted to move into offering more food items besides pastries, but we wanted to focus on roasting and brewing the best coffee in San Diego. Over the past few months our cafe manager, Keally, has carefully crafted a few items that we are stoked to offer to the Ocean Beach community.  Acai has been a staple here in OB and we wanted to offer that as a healthy breakfast item to complement our delicious coffee. Waffles we felt were versatile enough to add different fun toppings to and can be a solid brunch type item. Both are hand made to order in our kitchen fresh daily from 8am-2pm. So make sure you grab some food with your coffee next time you are in! 

As we monitor the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic we will hopefully be able to safely re-open more and more of our indoor seating and patio which means that hopefully soon we will finally be able to launch our newest collab with our friends and local ceramic shop Maek. This collab is our newest installment of "for here" ceramic cups and mugs and will feature new colors, shapes, and sizes. Be on the lookout for these to launch in the near future!

This upcoming year we have some really exciting things in store.  We will be headed to a whole new continent to explore and find some amazing coffee for you, and we will be launching some fun new things.  Thanks for being a part of the journey with us and for believing in and supporting us along the way.  We couldn’t do this without our incredible staff members, our customers, and our community. 

Cheers to ending 2020, and on to 2021!!! 

With love,

The Beans Boys