Cultiva Coffee offers art atop every latte

Jim Glenn-Hash, second-grade teacher at Lincoln’s Saratoga Elementary School stands inside Cultiva Coffee, waiting for a hot drink on a very cold day.

“I started coming three to four weeks ago,” Glenn-Hash says. “I can’t afford to get a latte every day, but I do it once, maybe twice a week.”

Jon Ferguson, owner of Cultiva, 1501 South St., quickly prepares the double latte with whole milk.

The phone rings.

“Lattes are much more important than a phone call,” Ferguson says without blinking an eye.

Spend ten minutes talking with Ferguson, and you'll find he values coffee above a lot of things.

This is Ferguson’s first foray into the coffee business, although he’s always viewed coffee as “something more than a beverage.”

“I was a Hillside Farming Agricultural Extensionist Peace Corps Volunteer in Northwestern Honduras in 2000,” Ferguson said. “I took three months of extensive language and technical training, mostly related to soil conservation and organic farming.”

The group worked a little with coffee production and visited a few farms, he said.

After the Peace Corps, Ferguson relocated to Seattle and found a job with Zoka
Coffee and Tea Co., famous for training its baristas for competition.

After returning to Lincoln, Ferguson tried his hand selling records, but he got sick of haggling with buyers and sellers.

“I always felt that I wasn’t going the right direction in my life,” he said. “I kept on thinking about my experiences in the Peace Corps … and decided that I should get into coffee.”

Coffee is the second largest commodity traded in the world, just after oil, and it uses more pesticides in its production than any other agricultural product.

“Most everything I have is organically grown, fair-trade coffee,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson opened Cultiva Coffee, which he describes as a micro-roastery, on Dec. 20 of last year.

“I wanted to help improve the lives of marginalized peoples in coffee producing countries, aka the third world,” Ferguson said.

Café Imports, where Ferguson buys his beans, sells direct relationship coffee, meaning the people who buy the coffee have direct dealings with the people who grow the coffee, as opposed to buying beans from a coffee broker, which is basically commodity coffee.

Ferguson buys his beans raw and roasts them right in his shop.

It takes him about 13.5 minutes on average to roast a five-pound batch.

“I can’t do more than five pounds at a time,” he said, explaining that he looks at the roaster “every 15 seconds” to make sure the temperature is right.

“Each bean is different, and each batch size causes each bean to be roasted differently,” Ferguson said. “The more you roast, the better you learn how to handle certain beans.”

For example, he said, really small beans, like a Yemen, crack at lower temperatures than Guatemalan beans, which are larger and denser due to higher moisture content.

Ferguson’s meticulous philosophy on coffee extends well beyond roasting.

“I do latte art,” he said. “The style of drinks that I do is considered to be more of a traditional Italian style. My cappuccino only comes in one size, equal parts espresso, steamed milk and foam.”

Ferguson noted that there are a lot of misconceptions about espresso, which is a mixture of different beans with different flavors. “When you put them together, it encompasses all the good flavors of what coffee has to offer.”

“I try to inform customers of my style without being insulting. I try to define things in a polite way and try to give references to why I do it a certain way, like a macchiato,” Ferguson said. “Anywhere you go, you will get a different style of macchiato.”

And in the end, he said, “It’s all about the coffee.”