Featured image: Try Me Coffee
Fresh-roasted coffee is best by far.
Once roasted, coffee beans deteriorate quickly in quality, vacuum-packed or not. But who wants to hop in their car and head down to a local roaster to pick up freshly roasted beans every other day or so?
That dilemma is easily answered in New Orleans this year, where Try-Me Coffee is celebrating its centennial by offering free delivery of roasted-to-order beans to residents throughout the Crescent City metro area. Call ’em up, ask for a pound of their Guatemalan Antigua, say, and a truck will bring it by. Perhaps that same day.
“We have wholesale delivery drivers covering most of the metro area on a daily basis,” co-owner Lauren McCabe explains of Try-Me’s largely wholesale business. “So, thinking about the company’s centennial and how to commemorate it, we thought, this is part of our origin story. It’s a no-brainer. Let’s do it. We believe people in our community should have access to delicious coffee every day.”
McCabe, aka “Mermaid” in the Crescent City hospitality community, is a lifelong New Orleanian who bought Try-Me in partnership with her husband Abby King in 2023, taking over from Bob Lutz and his mother, Carol Stogner, who had operated the company for decades. McCabe and King were (and are) residents of Bywater, the company’s neighborhood east of the French Quarter, and Lutz wanted to pass the business along to local owners who would honor and enhance the company’s long tradition.
New Orleans is where I myself long ago became a coffee zealot, and I’ve spent a lifetime not only practicing that affection every day but covering it as a journalist and editor. To this day I begin every morning with a few cups of chicory coffee, the New Orleans signature brew whose nutty, intense flavor is an acquired taste just as much as coffee itself. That’s how NOLA teenagers would end a night of carousing in the French Quarter back in the Sixties, at midnight at Café du Monde, and while I’ve been to coffee’s birthplace in Ethiopia, and savored it in the cafes of Vienna, and picked it on the hillsides of Hawai’i, and roasted it myself in clunky toaster ovens in my kitchen, my loyalty to that Crescent City mainstay stays strong.
But in that lifetime of steadfast coffee devotion, I’ve never heard of free delivery of fresh-roasted beans—anywhere. This does not give McCabe or King pause; they have set out as owners to preserve and promote the traditions with which bank teller Henry Kepler launched his business in 1925. He went door-to-door back then, offering his coffee. “So we’re honoring that legacy now,” McCabe says.
Try-Me still operates in the same building as a century ago. Roasting is done in antique roasters that are as strong and enduring as cast iron—one of which is the original 30-pound roaster Try-Me began its operations with, as well as the original chicory mixer. The company’s master roaster, Jerico Cyres, has worked for Try-Me 35 years. Beans and ground coffee are still sold in full pounds, not the 12-ounce faux pounds that have become common lately. “Full pounds at a fair price,” Try-Me vows; most blends are $14 a pound.
“Innovation” need not knock on Try-Me’s door, and I mean that as a compliment. Coffee roasting and preparation is a craft more than 500 years old, and anyone who has tasted Turkish coffee (or, better yet, a similar preparation in Harrar, Ethiopia) will be inclined to resist changing it much. Having spread from Vienna throughout Europe, and from there to New Orleans under its original French governors, coffee was vital in a city devoted to the good life. Chicory, a roasted root, was a traditional French amendment added to the mix when war blockades crimped supply of coffee, and wedded itself to the New Orleans lifestyle.
“Who really knows how chicory came to be so intrinsic to our coffee—no doubt there’s some truth in old stories like Civil War blockades—but I think it was also because chicory cuts the caffeine somewhat, so you could drink chicory coffee day and night in a city devoted to a 24-hour lifestyle,” McCabe says.
“And it pairs well with sweet treats like beignets,” King adds. “Whatever the case, it’s definitely distinct to New Orleans.”
While chicory coffee is a mainstay of the Try-Me catalog (and has been since the beginning), the company offers many single-origin and blended varieties, ranging from Costa Rican to, yes, Ethiopian Harrar. There is no in-store café, though, and King and McCabe plan none, preferring to provide their beans to many famous New Orleans dining establishments such as Court of Two Sisters and Café Degas; and to continue selling online and by order.
Though Seattle, where I also spent many years, is usually considered the American coffee capital (supposedly more caffeine consumption per capita than any other US city), and it’s incorrectly considered the birthplace of modern artisan coffee roasting, its coffee roots are puny compared to New Orleans, where culinary hospitality goes back 300 years. And that’s part of the visceral appeal that McCabe and King discovered in Try-Me.
“We were seeking a business we could operate together that would allow us to pursue our principles with personal passion,” King declares. “And coffee is something that can easily be a lifelong journey.”
I’ll drink to that. French roast Colombian with chicory, please.
Lifelong journalist and editor Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on an island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, garlic, apples, beans and corn—but not coffee, alas. He grew up in New Orleans, and still considers an oyster po’boy the best sandwich in the United States, and NOLA the only place one can find a beignet worth eating… with chicory coffee.
