Short Sleeves Coffee Rebuilds Community, One Pour-over at a Time

We're honored to partner with an exceptional array of coffee shops around the world. One of our newest resellers is Short Sleeves Coffee in Swannoa, North Carolina. We recently had the opportunity to visit Short Sleeves in person and see how this remarkable coffee shop is helping rebuild their community after Hurricane Helene. 

We caught up with founder Daniel Lancaster to learn more. 

Like most folks who open a shop, I started simply as an avid home coffee enthusiast. When the various pour-overs, immersion brewers, grinders, and accessories to hack the brewing part of the coffee journey seemed to run their course, I got really curious about tackling the roasting part of a coffee's journey. I got an Aillio Bullet Coffee Roaster and began roasting for myself. Soon thereafter, friends started asking for coffee...so I made a simple website so they could order. Then, a few strangers found the website, and suddenly I had a business. 

We've been roasting since 2022. In 2024, we decided to open up a brick-and-mortar location. The cafe setting has always been our dream, and in our town, Swannanoa, NC,  we needed a space for folks to gather. For years, the word "loneliness" continued to spring up in the hearts of my wife and me when we thought about our town, and it became clear that the best way we could address loneliness in Swannanoa would be by building a space for neighbors to meet, mingle, and enjoy something special together. 

We landed on the name "Short Sleeves" as a nod to the simple, ordinary moments of life with the ordinary people around us. We aren't "suit and tie coffee" for a reason. We'd like folks to feel like they don't need to pretend, and put on a bunch of layers here...they can just come in their 'short sleeves'. 

I have what we call a "Short Sleeves Approach" to coffee. There is a lot of tremendous coffee available to folks right now; and its accessibility to the average person is greater than ever. That being said, we aren't too puffed up to think that our coffee is the greatest in the world...and we don't think it's all that important to us to force-feed exotic light roasts to every middle-aged man who's grown up on supermarket coffee. 

However, we also have been blown away by the potential in something ordinary such as a coffee bean...and we take great care and pride in the work we do in coffee sourcing, roast profile development, and quality control. We are constantly straddling the line of, "how do we hack this coffee as much as possible and blow people's minds" with "we also need a coffee for the ordinary folks who don't want to pay $30 a bag for something they'll hate drinking with their breakfast". Keeping this line in check helps us to keep a balanced menu featuring a variety of washed and natural process coffees, and a variety of roast degrees. 

For the first two years, I was against offering a dark roast, and I tried to force customers into the lighter offerings. Eventually, I decided to stop yucking on people's yum and brought a dark roast on. This single decision has introduced so many more people to our coffee, and has created a cool pipeline for education in the industry as a whole. It's really opened up my eyes to what it looks like to meet consumers where they're at, offer something special to them, and invite them into whatever else we have to offer. 

If you want to test a team, a business, or a marriage; you stress it and see what it does under that. It's no different with a community. Our town, Swannanoa, NC has passed that test. 

There are three main intersections in Swannanoa, and if you start at the first, and drive to the last; nearly every building on the left and right hand side (as well as a few rows behind) has been destroyed, or has experienced significant damage due to the river that runs through town that overflowed during the hurricane. 

For the first few days, we were all in shock. Eventually, when physical needs were met, we realized we had a deeper need for connection. Our building is two blocks from the main street in Swannanoa, so when the river flooded downtown, my building ended up being three doors up from its reach. We only sustained minimal (immediate) damage, so we were able to use our space for gathering. We were in the middle of our buildout, so I had some plywood standing around, a folding table, and some miscellaneous two-by-fours that we used to make a temporary coffee shop. I grabbed a generator, and started roasting coffee on the Bullet and brewing drip and flash-chilled iced coffee using a kettle and an Etkin Dripper. 

At first, we had planned to just run through whatever green inventory I had, give it away, and then abandon the project due to the long road to recovery. However, through the process of this pop-up shop, we saw folks gather in a way we've never seen before. Neighbors who'd never spoken to each other now relied on each other for their meals. Businesses that previously were competitors were now serving customers beside one another. Community exploded in a new way for us, and it became clear that if we started this business to fight loneliness in Swannanoa, we would have all the more reason to continue pressing forward. 

I've been really excited about a new washed Ethiopia Guji offering from the Gogogu Washing Station that I've been sampling for a Spring single-origin offering. It's ridiculously floral, which was actually what I was hunting for in a Spring coffee. It's also going to fill a slot in our Spring blend by bringing in some nice high notes and acidity. 

We've always wanted to offer pour-overs at our shop. Oftentimes, however, the level of inconsistency and lack of quality control at cafes causes pour-overs to not be worth it for the end consumer. When we found the Etkin Brewer, we knew we had hit the jackpot. These brewers produce incredibly sweet, clean cups, and are also quite easy to work with. With a dialed-in grind setting, these things crank out delicious coffee every time...despite user inconsistencies. The incredibly high ceiling for quality, and the forgiving nature of these brewers made them a no-brainer for bringing in-house. They are also just beautiful...and will be centered in our bar when you walk through our front door. We love to show them off that way.