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From farm to cup: How Devoción delivers the freshest Colombian coffee in Brooklyn

Steven inspecting beans
Founder and CEO Steven Sutton carefully inspects coffee beans on a Colombian farm, ensuring quality before they make their way to Devoción’s roastery.
Photo courtesy of Devoción

Devoción — a “farm to doorstep” coffee chain — does something no other Brooklyn café does.

The team directly imports coffee beans from Colombia in their green state. The beans are shipped overnight via FedEx and roasted within days of reaching the company’s Williamsburg store. This cycle repeats once or twice a week.

“[Coffee] is a fruit. It’s a living being.” Steven Sutton, CEO and founder of Devoción, told Brooklyn Paper. “So think about it: if you’re next to a farm and you grab a tomato and you bite it, it’s going to be a completely different sensation than if you go to the markets. That tomato probably was a month old, frozen, or kept refrigerated. It’s going to be a completely different feeling.”

A bag of green coffee beans, imported weekly from Colombia, arrives at Devoción’s Williamsburg roastery, ready to be freshly roasted and brewed.Photo courtesy of Devoción

Sutton said the entire process of transporting coffee beans from their origin to roasting averages 10 to 15 days at Devoción. Other coffee companies can take around six months to complete the same cycle. Beans often get delayed in the export process, traveling to warehouses for storage, roasting facilities, and finally to coffee shops.

The small roastery within Devoción’s Grand Street location can handle a continuous influx of coffee each week because the company does not store beans. Once they’re in-house, the goal is to roast them immediately and distribute them to the company’s four other locations and coffee retailers as quickly as possible.

When Devoción first opened, the decision not to store coffee on-site was born out of necessity. Storage space was too expensive for the fledgling business.

“Suddenly, this ‘ah-ha’ moment was like, okay, our coffees are fresh just because we didn’t have the money to store them. And this whole industry is not doing that, and there’s a very, very, very clear difference in taste,” Sutton said.

CEO Steven Sutton inside Devoción’s Williamsburg location, where the company roasts its fresh Colombian coffee beans daily.Photo courtesy of Devoción

The coffee shop began roasting its beans at its Williamsburg location in 2014 and has spent more than a decade maintaining its legacy of roasting the freshest beans as quickly as possible.

Where they import from has also stayed consistent. All the coffee on Devoción’s menu is sourced from farmers in Colombia. When the company was forming, Sutton sought to understand why Colombian beans had fallen out of favor with high-end coffee retailers.

Sutton, who was born in Colombia, realized the drop in popularity of Colombian beans wasn’t due to a lack of desirability — importing the beans has become a logistical nightmare.

“Colombian coffee was very, very, very hard to source because of the internal conflict that Colombia had,” he said. “And because of that conflict, me going to the farmer and grabbing my own stuff and bringing it back was very hard and very dangerous.”

Still, the challenge of identifying farmers to work with and bringing beans back to the U.S. excited Sutton.

“I wanted to do something for Colombia, and I felt this need of giving back to the farmers and communities,” he said.

Devoción’s roasting facility in Williamsburg, where fresh Colombian coffee beans are carefully roasted to perfection. Photo courtesy of Devoción

Devoción’s ode to Colombia extends beyond its menu.

Each of Devoción’s five New York City coffee shops is filled with natural light and lush, vining plants. At the Williamsburg location, a skylight illuminates a living wall teeming with tropical greenery. The fresh coffee and vibrant ambiance have made Devoción a favorite among coffee lovers.

Despite its scrappy start, what was once a two-person business has grown into a 120-person team with locations in Williamsburg, Dumbo, Downtown Brooklyn, Flatiron and Midtown. The company plans to open another location in Manhattan within a few months.

And even with its growth and increased production, Devoción has remained committed to freshness and hustle.

Devoción’s Williamsburg shop is located at 69 Grand St., between Kent and Wythe avenues, and is open daily from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. For more information on the company, or any of its other locations, visit devocion.com.