If I asked you to conjure a mental image of a coffee goddess, the very embodiment of sacred-jungle-beans- cum-magical-morning-life-force, you would probably envision some variety of high-spirited Incan warrior princess, a guardian of ancient rainforest secrets and earthly enlivenment. While it is true that a muse of morning brew walks among us right here in New Orleans, she isn’t quite what you’d expect: Mother NOLA has appointed a more contemporary standard-bearer for our most treasured mystic elixir. Our patron saint of percolation is petite and freckled, a tatted-up redhead in a smart vintage dress. She is a Lost Girl, a child of the desert who cast herself upon our bayou shores and never looked back. Her name is Anderson Stockdale and she is the reigning coffee goddess of New Orleans.
Stockdale discovered her passion for coffee when she was working in a New Mexico café and the owner took up coffee roasting as a side project. She became fascinated by the roasting process, by “how coffee happened.” She saw first-hand that “It’s just the pit of a cherry, picked green, and roasted. Terroir matters. How you handle it matters” and, importantly, “The same way you wouldn’t want to use a 10 month-old tomato, it’s not a good idea to use super old coffee.”
Stockdale has a flair for accurately depicting the romantic nature of her magic beans. “A coffee plant doesn’t even produce any beans for the first five years,” she says. “That means that somebody spends five years watering it, keeping the bugs off of it, keeping it perfect, pristine and beautiful. All that work goes in up front and then the beans are picked, put on a truck and shipped over an ocean. They get roasted for 10 or 15 minutes before they end up in the hands of a barista who gives them a 30 second bloom… then you drink your coffee.” When I spoke to Stockdale, she couldn’t restrain a broad smile as she added, “When you think about it, it’s a great example of the telescopic nature of time. It’s pretty wild.”
When Stockdale moved to New Orleans in 2005, she claims “It was the first time I ever set foot on soil that felt like home.” She was temporarily displaced by Hurricane Katrina before gaining any professional traction in the city, but the time away proved to be a critical incubation period for her future endeavors. She relocated to Seattle and steeped herself in the coffee culture of the Pacific Northwest. She recalls, “Seattle had already been a great coffee city forever, especially since the 1980s. Seeing how they developed was, in my mind, pretty epic.”
Stockdale recalls, “When I came back down to New Orleans in 2009, I very luckily got into bartending, but that coffee thing was always nagging at me.” She found an opportunity to bridge her bartending skills with her coffee expertise when she met Cole Newton of Twelve Mile Limit. She claims “Cole has always been supportive of beverage ideas as a whole, including making badass coffee.” Stockdale was one of the original three bartenders at Twelve Mile Limit and from the beginning, Newton supported her efforts to develop a recipe for iced coffee served on the bar’s draft lines.
The iced coffee-on-draft project was one of her first opportunities to get geeky. “We used a twelve-hour brew (coarse grind) and we hit it with hot water bloom for 60 seconds, but the remaining 80% was ice-cold water. Hot coffee allows for a lot of acidity and aromatics that you don’t get in traditional cold brew. We wanted to capture those really nice aromatics, acidity and sweetness, but we also wanted that longer cold-brew time to get that body and that traditional cold brew flavor that people really love.” Stockdale’s coffee on draft has been a staple at Twelve Mile since the first cups were served, and it remains available at the bar today.
Stockdale has since been involved in a plethora of coffee-related projects, including serving as the inspiration for Bittermens’ New Orleans Coffee liqueur. Her endeavors keep getting bigger as she cultivates the New Orleans coffee scene with the loving attention of a start-up coffee grower. She recently established Scout Roasters, which will supply coffee retailers such as Spitfire and HiVolt with beans that are responsibly sourced and locally roasted. Nobody but Scout Roasters is currently filling that high- end local roasting niche, but Stockdale is confident that the demand is waiting in the shadows.
Stockdale also works part-time at Belloq and Cane & Table and she credits her boss, Neil Bodenheimer, for inspiring her to follow her entrepreneurial instincts. “Nobody knew before Neil bought a weird-ass building in a weird-ass neighborhood that they would pay $12 or $14 for a cocktail. Nobody knew people wanted that until it happened, and now people are so excited for it… I think the coffee movement here is akin to the craft cocktail movement that you see thriving these days. Having HiVolt doing really well, having a lot of really small popups like Solo Espresso in the Bywater, having Cherry in Stein’s serving these really amazing products and keeping their doors open shows to me that there is a need and a desire for that kind of product.
“New Orleans is definitely where I want to be working, where I want to be playing,” Stockdale says. “I love that baristas are face to face with their neighbors every single day. I love that they’re out there connecting somebody in East Africa or Central America to New Orleans.” Pondering the virtues of the old “Think Global, Act Local” mantra, our local coffee goddess smiles and adds, “I think that’s pretty badass.”
