Gloom Coffee swaps booze for espresso in its cocktails

Gloom Coffee, a café in Seattle's Pioneer Square, has introduced a menu of non-alcoholic coffee cocktails built on centrifuged cold brew, clarified juices and a Kenyan-coffee opener called Side Quest. The café opened in May in the former Elm Coffee space, not far from where Revel recently closed in Fremont after 16 years.

Four owners run it: Alex Sciarrotta, Nate Reppert, Josh Modisette and Brandon Paul Weaver. Weaver, who co-owns the nearby bar Liberty, built the cocktail programme and says the goal was presentation as much as flavour.

"A lot of times they present as like, a cup of brown," Weaver said of typical café signature drinks. Gloom's menu instead aims for drinks that look, and are priced, like cocktails: $11 to $13 a glass.

A lot of times they present as like, a cup of brown.

A cold brew built to avoid bitterness

Side Quest combines Kenyan coffee and blueberry rooibos tea with grapefruit, strawberry and lime juices, topped with a cardamom-nutmeg coconut cold foam and dried fruit. The cold brew base is centrifuged and filtered to strip out oils that turn bitter as they age, a step borrowed from cocktail bars rather than cafés.

Strawberry juice is blended with the stabiliser Pectinex, then centrifuged to remove seeds and pulp. The "lime" juice is made from lime peels rather than the fruit's flesh, which Weaver says keeps it fresher for longer behind the bar.

Coffee priced and poured like a cocktail

Weaver argues the cocktail format changes how customers read the price: a glass that looks like a $13 cocktail reads as reasonable, while the same price on a coffee drink can feel steep. "How weird are we going to get?" was the question he says the four owners faced when they took over the space.

Sciarrotta recently bought Narrative, a shop in nearby Everett, and plans to begin roasting there with Reppert, a move that would add Gloom's group to the roasters tracked by the Podium Index. Weaver says treating coffee like a cocktail ingredient, rather than a finished drink on its own, is meant to pull customers toward the rest of what coffee can do. "Just by accepting that idea, you might get to a more curious place about the rest of what coffee can offer," he said.