Water for Coffee - The Quest Begins

With 7 other coffee shops within half a mile of the Paleo Treats location at 3275 Adams Ave, it's reasonable to ask, "Nik, why the heck are you & Lee putting in another coffee shop, and what makes it different?"

My Coffee History

I'll start with the "Why" first.  I started drinking coffee in my 30s while riding Merchant Marine vessels.  It was a way to stay awake during the balls-to-4 shift.  It was ship coffee and I was new, so I'd mix it with Swiss Miss cocoa powder to make it drinkable.  We all start somewhere.

It worked, and I liked the coffee bump.  Had I read Stewart Allens' The Devil's Cup, I would have known much more about how and why coffee worked, and where it came from, but I wouldn't read that book for another decade.

It took a few more years before I decided I wanted to drink coffee at home.  I liked the effects of coffee, and I wanted to add a new ritual to my morning. 

Descending Into Coffee

I'm pretty sure that's when I found the home-barista forums and read through a good chunk of it, along ordering every book on coffee the local library had.  For books they didn't have, I bought them and ended up with a slowly growing stack books on how to buy, roast, prepare, and sell coffee.

Keeping Coffee Simple

It's been long enough that I forgot exactly why I bought an Aeropress, though I can guess:  Simple, no reliance on electricity, travel-able, and with a cult following.  Right up my alley.

Thou Shalt Grind

I got obsessed with the process of making excellent coffee and realized I needed to grind at home, so I bought an Orphan Espresso Pharos.  That led me to interviewing and writing about Barb and Doug Garrot from Orphan. 

I was in max learning mode, and when I do that I like to share, so I wrote up a piece on how you should think about grinding coffee.

Over a decade (and I think 3, but maybe 4) Aeropresses later, my Pharos is still going strong and has ground coffee for me damn near every day since I got it.

With the brewing method and grinding method sorted, I was satisfied for a while.  I built my own coffee ritual and followed it more or less unchanged until today, (I'm writing this in April of 2026). 

Then Came The Roaster

Coming back from travel sometime in early 2023 I ran into a buddy who was roasting coffee, and I realized I could roast at home.

He was using a Cormorant 600g and invited me over. We roasted a few times together and I caught the roasting bug.  I ordered my own Cormorant and had a blast installing it in my garage, complete with testing the difference between smooth and flex ducting on air flow. 

Between ordering my own green, roasting it, grinding it on the Pharos, then making it with the Aeropress, by the end of 2023 I started to feel like I had a pretty good idea about how to do coffee for me.  

Ok, I Shouldn't Admit This

I should pause here and say something I've been told to never say:  I don't really pay attention to how coffee tastes. 

I know, I know, that's heresy.   

I'm all about the quality of the inputs and the excellence of the process.  The outputs are far less interesting to me, though I do recognize the power of a fast feedback loop, so...

We're In The Market For A Good Barista

We're looking for excellent baristas who DO care about the outputs in the same way I care about the inputs.   If that's you, reach out.

That's enough about my personal coffee journey, let me now introduce the most important person in my life, and the rest of the reason we're opening a coffee shop on Adams Ave. 

Traveling & Coffee

The last part of the "why we're opening a coffee shop" comes from traveling with my wife Lee.  Every time we travel somewhere, one of our chief joys is finding and experiencing new coffee shops.  

From Jolene in Shoreditch to bica right down the street, we love walking into a place and just getting the vibe.

How do they decorate it? Where does it fit into its neighborhood?  What machines do they use? What's their service like, what's their USP (Unique Selling Proposition for you non-business types), what drinks do they serve, how are their croissants...we are endlessly fascinated and entertained by how coffee shops work around the world. 

After visiting coffee shops from Portugal to Morocco to Egypt to Ft Smith, Arkansas, we decided that we'd open up our own and share our version of what we think excellent is.

So that's the "why".

What Makes You Different?

We live and work in Normal Heights, a neighborhood in San Diego that already has 7 good coffee shops within half a mile of Paleo Treats (3275 Adams Ave, San Diego CA 92116). 

All of them serve good coffee, and we like and patronize them pretty regularly.  Dark Horse and bica (relax, bica doesn't capitalize) are our regular stops, but they all have something good to recommend visiting 'em, and you should.

It would seem there's no great reason to open another coffee shop.

bica has exceptional food and strong community (they've helped us out a bunch so far, which is testament to how awesome the owners Manny & Charlie are), Dos Palmas has great sandwiches, Dark Horse has good coffee and they roast it all just down the street in Mission Gorge, LeStat's has long been the student & study hangout, Maya Moon has a super feminine and clean vibe, Marta is exquisite in layout with great pastries and excellent coffee, and I walk my dog by Parabola every morning, always seeing people inside.  

• Dark Horse - Awesome coffee, locally roasted
• bica - Superb food, strong community
• LeStat's - Classic study and chill hangout
• Maya Moon - Serious about ceremonial cacao
• Parabola - Close to home, local roaster
• Dos Palmas - Fave sandwiches 
• Marta - Clean vibe, great coffee and pastries
• Little While - Fun to stand in line and chat with strangers

So...what's different about the Paleo Treats coffee shop?

What we've found from being in business since 2009 and watching lots of other businesses succeed, fail, flip, pivot, go sideways, backwards, and upside down is that at least two things should be true about your business:

First, there should be a good chunk of your business that you absolutely love to do.  You don't have to love the whole thing, but you need to love a lot of it.

Why?  Business is hard.  You'll need something that you're intrinsically motivated to do.  Trust me, you'll fail and have enough setbacks in business that almost no matter what, you'll face a point where you think, "This sucks, I'm over it."

You need something in your business to counter that, a "Yeah, but I get to do this, and that's worth working through the suck for."

For me it's technology and systems improvement and writing. 

For Lee it's art and getting to be one of the founders of the modern day Paleo movement.

Business is uncertain and has an enormously high time cost.  You should make sure that as much of it as possible gives you joy, so that even if you fail (queue Roosevelt quote), you still have a good time.

Second, the business should do something no one else is doing.  Doesn't have to be big, or crazy (although it's awesome if it is), but you should get the impression that what you're experiencing as a customer when you work with that business doesn't happen anywhere else in the world.

That's Why We're Opening A Coffee Shop

With that as background, we're bringing a coffee shop into existence that leans hard into those things, which is why, when you walk into the Paleo Treats coffee shop when it opens sometime in the late summer of 2026, you should immediately notice that we love art, technology and people, and that we have odd obsessions.

All of that is an awfully long and roundabout way of introducing one of our main differentiators, which is the way we think about water for coffee.

I'll be writing a ton more on what we're doing with water, how we're doing it, and why we're doing it, but I wanted to start by giving you all that background so you have an idea of why we think opening another coffee shop on Adams Ave is a good idea.

Here's what "water for coffee" looks like for us...

Looking forward to sharing a cup with ya!