Sweet Science Coffee opens its first standalone shop today in NoMa, differentiating itself from corporate coffee giants that already saturate the fast-changing neighborhood by slow-brewing craft coffee in eight distinctive devices.
The former pop-up cafe drew the notice of Washington Post columnist Tim Carman when it occupied the basement bar underneath Lapis in Adams Morgan (now Lapop). At its new home, Sweet Science (35 N Street NE) uses an array of old-school and modern tools: AeroPress, Karlsbad brewer, V60, Chemex, French press, syphon, Kalita Wave dripper, and a Beehive dripper.
Customers select the coffee they want, and baristas use recipes that founding partner Sandra Wolter tailored to each brewing device in order to showcase characteristics of different beans. Wait time is typically in the neighborhood of seven minutes.
“You can actually watch a barista make a V60, make a Chemex, everything you can do at home, and ask questions … and get like, basically exposed to different coffees from all over the world,” Wolter says.
Wolter hired Jenny Shutan, a former sous chef at Chef Geoff’s in Tyson’s Corner, to run a pastry program that includes buttermilk biscuits, elderflower pear muffins, scones, cookies, banana streusel muffins, and more treats baked on-site.
Wolter is a former television reporter from Germany who was born into a family with five generations of cafe owners. Her shop stocks five different coffees that she’ll rotate every three months.
The current lineup brings coffee from Kenya, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia. Two coffees are from Five Elephant out of Berlin. Two more come from Heart Coffee Roasters out of Portland, and one’s from Brooklyn-based Forty Weight Coffee Roasters.
Customers can always select a device outside of Wolter’s recommendation, but she cautions that they’ll have to “live with whatever coffee is in there.”
The cafe’s three-seat “slow bar” is the heart of the operation, Wolter says. For more conventional coffee drinkers, there’s also espresso-based drinks and cold brew. Both are made with coffee from Open Seas, based out of Stevensville, Maryland. A large Kyoto dripper takes eight hours to produce a single gallon of cold brew.
The 1,100 square-foot, 25-seat cafe sits at the base of the Belgard luxury apartment building, which will also eventually welcome an outpost of Brookland’s popular Menomale pizzeria. Wolter started Sweet Science in 2015 to test her slow bar idea, then entered a partnership with Lapis in 2017.
Wolter eventually teamed up with Jad Bouchebel — a partner at Provision No. 14 and Wilson Hardware in Arlington — and Ricardo Iglesias, a Virginia retail developer. Together, they refined the Sweet Science brand and opened the D.C. cafe.
“This is the first standalone location where you can walk in from the street,” Wolter says. “It’s not stairs up or stairs down, it says Sweet Science on the door — not featured by anybody or anyone.”
D.C. and Brooklyn-based Places Studio are behind the cafe’s minimalist, industrial design. The molecule for caffeine appears on the floor in black, and about a dozen large gray hexagons on the walls channel the molecule’s shapes.
“At the end of the day, you’re working with a temperamental product that changes every day,” Wolter says. “It changes when the humidity changes, the coffee changes, when it ages it changes, and it keeps you on your toes.”
Tim Lord’s large illustration of a goat wearing a crown of coffee tools alludes to the ancient legend of Ethiopian goat farmer Kaldi, whose goat herd discovered coffee. An illustrated placard under the animal says, “In Goat We Trust.”
The shop plans to hold a grand opening in the next six to eight weeks. It will eventually add wine and craft beer to the menu. The partners expect to open a second location inside the former Java Shack Coffeehouse in Arlington by the spring. If all goes well, Sweet Science aims to have four locations total within the next five years.
“I would like to stay in D.C., but we really have to see,” Wolter says, citing the cost of rent and overhead costs in the city.
“There’re some areas where I can still see it happening but we have to see … what’s possible,” she says.