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“We just bought electricity three years ago,” Leiva said. “We use a state-of-the-art Diedrich roaster and I’ve been roasting for close to 4,000 hours,” he said. Leiva taught himself to roast coffee by watching instructional videos. “So I was like, ‘Why can’t I do this back home?’ ” “I was broken out of poverty because of capitalization and education,” he said. Leiva said that is exactly what happened to him.

#Onyx coffee lab downtown fayetteville how to#

He came up with idea for Leiva’s Coffee on one of those trips after reading a Chinese proverb that said, “If you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you will feed him for a lifetime.” All along, he kept going back home to Guatemala to visit his family. He became a computer programmer, which he did for 14 years. He spoke no English, but became fluent in eight months and graduated from UA Pulaski Technical College in about 18 months. on a college scholarship with his parents’ life savings of $20, a shoebox of belongings and the clothes on his back. Leiva’s family has been growing coffee in Guatemala for more than 60 years. Roasters that sell online and will ship beans to your door include Brave New Restaurant, Fidel & Co., Doomsday Coffee (Fayetteville), Stirling Roastery (Booneville), Guillermo’s Gourmet Coffee, RoZark Hills Coffee Roastery (Rose Bud) and Big Cuppa Roasting (Morrilton). There’s no shortage of locally roasted, delicious coffee in Arkansas.

As coffee shops close for lack of in-person customers, the Arkansas roasters who send their beans through the mail are going strong. Roasters are exploring the avenues of e-commerce by offering online merchandise, coffee shipping and subscription services. Many industries have had to pivot and coffee is no different. And I didn’t even have a drip brewer before the pandemic. Personally, I’ve been brewing large pots of drip coffee and not leaving the house for days at a time. If you look around your Zoom meeting, most of the coffee you’ll see is home-brewed. People haven’t stopped drinking coffee, but the way people consume it is changing. Zeteo Coffee and Blue Sail Coffee’s Conway locations both remain open. Blue Sail Coffee recently announced it will no longer operate out of the Little Rock Technology Park on Main Street. Zeteo Coffee’s River Market location closed in July. We’re a year in on masks and social distancing, but walking into a popular coffee shop at peak hours and finding only a few customers still feels like “The Twilight Zone.” The pandemic hit the downtown Little Rock coffee scene particularly hard.

The coronavirus pandemic changed all that.

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It used to be, back in the pre-pandemic days, that Arkansas’s coffee shops buzzed with long lines and full tables.