Coffee and Community are Brewing at Ghost Coffee Collab
“This is our first attempt to do something for ourselves, to shape coffee and represent coffee the way we think it should be.”
There are a thousand different ways people drink coffee. There’s diner coffee or office coffee with its dark, bitter taste, watered down by milk and sugar. There’s coffee shop coffee with syrups in lattes or macchiatos. And there is home coffee made on a slow weekend morning, best enjoyed with a big breakfast.
Now, Ghost Coffee Collab in Uptown has made it a thousand and one ways to drink your coffee.
“There's a lot of exciting advancements happening in coffee that Ghost is happy to share with our customer and with Uptown,” said Joe Burns, a co-owner of Ghost Coffee Collab. “All coffee, on some level, is fermented, but it's really only within the last like decade or two where producers have been exploring how that fermentation can change the cup quality at the end of the production line.”
It’s almost like wine, Burns said. The qualities of the production process, like the type of coffee tree, where it’s grown, and how it’s roasted, will create a final product with distinct flavor profiles. Some coffee will taste sweeter and fruity, others will taste more bitter and chocolatey. Burns said it’s ok to come in and learn more about what you like. All you have to do is ask the experts.
“Everybody involved at Ghost Coffee has been a barista for at least ten years. One of the co-owners is from Guatemala and has a family farm on its third generation, so we’re very ingrained in the industry,” Burns said. “This is our first attempt to do something for ourselves, to shape coffee and represent coffee the way we think it should be.”
Success, then, looks a little different.
“It’s not just ‘our profit exceeded our expectations by a thousand percent,’” Burns said. “Being extremely proud of the product that we’re serving, to be able to serve somebody a cup of coffee and know that it’s unlike anything they’ll be able to get anywhere else, and to see their eyes light up when they realize that, it’s profound.”
To help grow Ghost Coffee’s presence in Pittsburgh, the URA supported the shop with a small business loan.
“We used it to upgrade our roaster,” Burns said, “so we have a higher volume roaster. We’ll be able to service more areas and expand our wholesale business.”
On top of that, their location at 23 Miltenberger St. was a former URA-owned property, developed by Epic Development, LLC into its current state as a community destination.
Are you looking for a loan for a new or existing small business within the City of Pittsburgh? Visit the URA website and fill out the business lending intake form to see how we can help you.
