(gentle music) Coffee, for me, it was always a communal thing.

I would see where my grandmother would have the community come to the house, have their coffee, and they'd sit and gossip as they did.

I see coffee in this way where it bridges so many gaps.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) COFFEE, The Universal Language is made possible in part by.

Hollander Chocolate, premium chocolate for your daily rituals.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Houston has always been a major coffee port.

One of the four coffee exchange ports in the United States.

A lot of coffee go through Houston to come to your doorstep.

We've always been in coffee, and the coffee culture is multifaceted.

The way it very diverse, so everybody kind of find a comfortable place for creating their own culture, and people give it the space to grow.

Born and raised here in Houston, growing up in this city was unique and different in the times that I grew up.

In 1980, I was bused from an all black school to an all white school to create some diversity.

(upbeat music) The experience itself was obviously a culture shock.

Grown people at that time, screaming at your bus like, "Hey, we don't want you here."

But then when we got into the school to have people to kind of ask questions of us, and we ask questions of them?

Like, "Hey, how do you comb your hair, right?

Where do you sleep?"

We would assume that they were something that people would just know.

It also opened the doors for people to kind of get to know us, as well as us to get to know other cultures.

Graduated high school, my mom was immediately like, "Hey, you need to either go get a job or go to the military."

(gentle music) Graduated in June and went straight to the military in August and joined the army.

Then just kind of traveled the world.

And it became my life and I grew up fast.

The first time I went to Simply Coffie, it blew my mind.

I had a cup of coffee and I thought to myself, "What's this?"

I know the beans, I order that beans.

Like, I chose it from the menu, but it came to me in a very different representation.

It has something different than what we drink.

I've always been interested in finding out what flavors can be offered as a plain brewed coffee.

That encompasses all aspects of coffee preparation that we do here.

To be in one spot where you guys are able to have anything that you want in one sitting.

From Asia and Pacific Ocean, travel across the sea, land at Central America, across the sea again, you get to Africa.

Have all these amazing coffees in a few hours or in one hour if you are a really heavy drinker.

When he served a coffee, he didn't call my name.

He came to the table and he sat the coffee down and told me about this coffee.

It's very different.

These two is totally different.

This one is like, like a college girl that just finished college.

- Okay.

This is like elegant, like lady in her 30s.

That's got knowledge, more composure, depth.

That is the specialty coffee experience we are looking for.

Then I know what I'm drinking.

I know the intention behind it.

He also roasted it, he took care of it the entire time.

All throughout the journey of this bean for me.

Coffee means the dedication, time spent, and the care that the coffee growers give into taking care of the land, the environment, and the crop itself.

Coffee means all these things to me.

I am tasting all the hard work that goes behind what you are seeing in front of you.

It goes through hundreds of pairs of hands to be able to get to where we are now.

There's so much story behind each and every cup.

When we first opened, we were prepared to not have any business for a whole year.

The community is showing amazing response.

We see one person come in for the first time.

Next time, there is two people that comes in.

The third time, it would be this one person that came in for the first time that brought a whole bunch of friends in.

To me, I'm happy.

My first memory of coffee was probably after the military when I was introduced to a good friend of mine.

(gentle music) He was like, "Hey, there's this company "that's hiring for coffee sales reps." I was like, "Dude, I don't drink coffee.

"Let home, like, what am I gonna do?"

I like the culture, I like the people.

I enjoy talking to people.

For the first time, really just trying to get my feet wet.

So I said, "Let me try a specialty coffee shop."

I walked into this space and I looked around and I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

But I also knew that if I was gonna challenge myself to grow, I had to walk into a space that was unfamiliar with me.

One of the braces was waiting to take my order and I couldn't think of the proper name, so I just said, "Hey, can I get a coffee with milk?"

He's like, "Do you mean a latte?"

When I got that latte, I was like, "Ah, this is a little bitter."

And I'm sitting at the table by myself.

I was trying to pretend like I'm blending in.

And one of the gentlemen that was sitting next to me, and I was still friends to this day, he looked at me and he says, "Man, you got that look on your face like you don't like it."

What does coffee do in a space where it creates these type of conversations that makes us go, "Man, where are you from and who are you?"

So specialty coffee, while it was out there, it wasn't something that I sought to attain.

I was comfortable in the space that I was in.

I was comfortable with the office coffee, service of things.

But when I got introduced to specialty coffee, it was in that moment that I realized, specialty coffee is an opportunity for me, and I'm gonna chase it.

Houston is one of the biggest city, but everybody knows each other in specialty coffee.

There's some sharing of knowledge there.

I think diversity and the excitement of experiencing different culture, it requires open-mindedness.

A good example is boba tea, right?

Like you're going into that, like some coffee shops are serving boba now.

It's something that is not historically made available.

It's a new thing.

And that is acceptance of differences between us.

Going into a coffee shop, having that Korean style coffee, going to Simply Coffie, having a Taiwanese style coffee.

But they brew it in different ways.

And you learn to open your eyes and say like, "Oh, that could taste delicious as well.

This works."

The more that we experience this, the more that we're opening eyes through their coffees to the world, to global coffee culture.

Third Gen is nested in this suburb area like called Grogan's Mill.

It's in a glass box.

There are people sitting at the window watching other people.

We love being a part of the Houston area.

We've grown more than we realized we could ever grow.

I met Marlon at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

Our relationship kind of took off.

We went to Honduras.

We moved there.

In his hometown, Siguatepeque, had our kids there.

Marlon's family comes from coffee farming.

Started with his grandfather.

He was the first gen. Marlon, his third generation.

We've been taught by his uncle, who's very generous with his knowledge and love for the family and wanting everyone to be successful.

So many different things when you come from a different country, you open a shop, there's a lot of challenges that you didn't go through.

There were no specialty coffees before they opened up their first shop.

So that was a very interesting moment when you drive there and then you see, oh, there's not only specialty coffees, but specialty coffees from the farm.

We opened Third Gen in 2017.

Your community is really important.

You get to be a part of their families.

You get to know all of your customers.

It's cool being coffee because everyone's coming to you and everyone has this common interest of the love of coffee.

Something very special to be a part of everybody's lives like that, and that they trust us.

Specialty coffee in Houston has literally blown up.

Houston has changed tremendously as a result of multiple nationalities moving here.

It's introduced the city in the same way when I was in elementary.

It allowed for open conversation.

In 2021, it really was this outcry.

We want to support the black community.

It was even more important to see what that support looked like and where was it going.

It became clear to me to make it my mission to start looking at things from a perspective of what else can we do?

I began the organization Color of Coffee Collective as a way of saying, let's create something that allows for people to come share their experiences, in specialty coffee.

What they were experiencing, then more importantly, share your experiences, but then how do we fix them?

How do we move forward?

I think the number one thing for me is probably to see our kids that we have been training in our coffee camps walk into a space and be able to order coffee for the first time in a specialty coffee shop and feel comfortable and confident.

The reality is that I think for people of color, kids of color, to walk into a space and have that type of confidence, they have to first see somebody that represents them.

We try to create that education not just for specialty coffee, but give them the confidence to be able to walk into any space just because they exist.

(crowd chattering) Catalina Coffee embodies that intention.

It belongs to Amaya Roasting.

It is a staple in Houston's specialty coffee world because of the intention that's been put in there.

Max puts such thoughts into all the things that he does.

When you walk into Catalina, you can immediately feel it.

You can see everything is being planned.

The flow is being planned.

You can see the employees interacting with each other and the customer with such intention.

Catalina Coffee is named after my mother, and Amaya is her maiden name.

Clearly, I think my mom has been a big influence on me.

When I opened the shop, I wanted to honor what she meant to me.

Catalina Coffee is something I started when I was in my early 20s.

I was working in the food service industry in Houston, kind of just an intersection of my life at the time.

I set out to build a coffee shop, which I literally did myself.

I didn't know construction, but I bought all the construction books from a professional bookstore here in Houston called the Brown Bookstore.

That's kind of been my approach to business in general.

I didn't know what I was doing.

I had some fundamental understanding of food service, but I never worked in the coffee industry in general.

When I started Catalina, it was a learning curve from day one.

April of 2007, Houston doesn't have anything similar to what we have now or what was happening in other major markets, and I wasn't aware of what the coffee scene was or could be.

I would learn a lot more after about a year of being in business when I went to my first coffee fest in Seattle, a city that already had a developed specialty market, had a lot going on, and I saw all these things in Seattle.

I thought, "Wow, this is different, and this is much bigger than I knew."

Roasters were putting coffee farmers' names, they were putting the varieties.

I decided, well, I need to start doing this.

I need to connect the product to the consumer in a different manner.

So I bought a roaster from Oklahoma City, and I bought two plane tickets, one to Portland, went to Stumptown's Operations on Division Street, got to see how they roasted coffee, got to do a cupping with them, and it was just mind-opening.

Got a plane ticket to Nicaragua to go visit farms and learn something very, very important, that you have to communicate, and that coffee is all about people.

[music] Incredible people live in this city, and they come through.

It doesn't seem to matter who it is, what status they have in our community.

At Catalina, everyone's just treated the same.

I would like everyone to leave that shop, having a great customer service experience, feeling treated with respect as an individual, and having great coffee.

[music] The space that you interact with that is created by a person has the personality of who prepared it.

That is a form of hospitality.

Creating that space for other people to enjoy coffee is connecting not only people, but also connecting experience.

Not for the present moment, but for all the past moments that you have experienced.

What you like, how you taste, what you hear and how you perceive is a collection of the past moments.

The past moments merge together, and it creates the present moment.

It's deeper than what we think sometimes.

A cup of tea, a cup of coffee that you enjoy, is a collection of many, many people's past moments.

So when you sip it, you can be self-fulfilling, you can satisfy yourself.

But in some ways, you also consume other people's past moment efforts.

Specialty coffee is not beans, it's the preparation process.

The preparation for the land, the growth of the plants, the processes, how they import, export, how they roast it.

Many other people in between too.

All these past moments, they come together for that 30 seconds of you sipping that 100ml of espresso.

So it's a lot of merging of history.

We won't be here if there wasn't a pass.

For this moment and this moment forward, after you drink the coffee, you changed because of the connection of all this big group of people that made that coffee possible for you.

So especially coffee is not bean, it's a moment for you.

The cherry on the top for us would be, Houston.

Having new coffee shops, always constantly doing different things.

We have few Yemenis coffee shops that are coming up, we have Colombian coffee shops coming up, which is very exciting.

A lot of different ways of how we can create coffee.

The owner here, Mr. Tom, he gave us a chance.

We were able to open up, really become a part of the neighborhood, a part of the community, and we've been serving coffee since then.

Houston is known as an international city that has a coffee scene that spans who we are as a city, who we are as individuals, and who we are as a multicultural city.

I think we have an extremely mature coffee scene, an extremely diverse coffee scene.

I think the coffee industry in Houston, we had a blank slate to work off of.

It's just incredible to see it come from really not much to a full-blown, respectable coffee scene.

It's really amazing to see this fourth largest city in the U.S. with such a strong coffee culture, with stepping up into a new world of specialty coffee, where all these minds are coming in to Houston, bringing readily available skill set to Houston because of the availability of places that they can open a shop, the people's open-mindedness, hardworking people.

and, very down to earth culture.

My Why is simple.

My experiences obviously has created this drive and this passion in me, but My Why is simple.

It's simply because I've been mandated to leave this world a little bit better than I found it.

I want to work myself out of a job.

They can say, "You're no longer needed, Keith.

This is not an issue anymore."

But I also recognize that these things, didn't happen overnight So, they're going to take time.

I want to be able to pass this on so that legacy will continue So those who are coming behind me will be able to see that, man..

There's somebody who really cared about creating opportunities for us in this space.

and this space is... it's better, right?

Becasue, I was able to kind of look and go I left it a little bit better than I found it.