Roaster of the Year: Micro Category Winner 2022—Little Waves Coffee Roasters
By Ever Meister
One of the many reasons it’s hard not to fall in love with Durham’s Little Waves Coffee, Roast magazine’s 2022 Micro Roaster of the Year, is that the company’s creation itself is a love story—Areli Barrera Grodski and Leon Grodski Barrera’s love story, in fact. The couple met in Areli’s hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, where Leon was the co-owner of a coffee shop—a place where Areli began to realize that coffee was more than just a drink.
“I think what drew me to coffee was it being a place for community. Having grown up in Cherokee since I was 10, and not having a coffee shop there, I didn’t even know that we needed one,” she says. “When it was there, it was this beautiful moment of realization for me. I was really struck by how important the coffee shop was for the community. I wanted to be a part of it: I wanted to work there.”
Leon came to North Carolina on an artist’s residency at Western Carolina University and decided to stay and open a coffee business with a partner who was a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. “It fulfilled, over time, this important role in the community, and we still have a lot of close connections and loved ones in Cherokee,” he says. The cafe also fulfilled an important role in the burgeoning relationship between Areli and Leon and was the catalyst for a lifetime of building and nurturing their business together. Areli describes it as having an emotional urgency. “If you’re not creating something all the time, you would die— that kind of a thing. I think that’s kind of the root of how we’ve approached a lot of things, even our marriage. It happened really quickly, and yet it has just felt right. That’s kind of the current that we’ve been on since day one, of both getting married and starting our business because those two things are very intertwined.”
Those two momentous occasions took place in 2010, a year the partners say was very challenging for them, despite their ambition, love of community and devotion to each other. In order to feel connected to the history and stories of the various global cultures that impacted and affected their life trajectories, they developed a fantastic appetite for books that offered a deeper look into the context of the incredible and awe-inspiring products that, for many people, now seem simply “everyday.”
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