Kansas City is home to a shockingly large number and variety of coffee roasters. If we had a coffee roasting co-op like Aspect Coffee Collective in Portland, I know we’d rival PDX’s huge number of roasters! Heck, I’d be using it if we had access to something like that myself! In any case, Encore Coffee Company is one of the newest arrivals to the Kansas City specialty coffee scene. Owner and roaster Mike King had roasted coffee for years before his dissatisfaction with his career lead him to start looking at his coffee in a little different way. Fast forward to 2016 and Mike said goodbye to the corporate life and the realization that, no matter how bad of bosses you’ve had in your past, you definitely treat yourself worse than anyone else possibly could! LOL
In all seriousness, though, Mike invested serious capital into a full size production roaster (US Roaster Corp) and hasn’t looked back since. Mike is currently gearing Encore Coffee Co. toward the everyday home coffee drinker, elevating the quality of their daily joe without the sticker shock of $21+ for a bag of coffee. Encore currently offers a handful of single origin fair trade and organic coffees, and Mike is working on blends to be released soon, too. Mike is experimenting with cold brew and nitrogenated beverages because you can find Encore at the Merriam Farmers Market every Saturday morning and it has been HOT this summer! He’s still perfecting the recipe and I can only imagine batch brewing gallons at a time is a tricky affair! You can buy Encore Coffee directly from Mike online, too, and I suspect we’ll see some local grocers adding Encore to their shelves in the not-too-distant future, too.