Photo via Discourse Coffee - discourse.coffee
Discourse Motorhead espresso
Discourse Coffee's "Motorhead" espresso
Since opening Discourse Coffee in 2017, founder Ryan Castelaz has become well versed in using liquid as a medium for telling stories with coffee or tea. He shares his unique talents with a future generation of baristas that pour creativity into every cup served at Discourse’s locations downtown (1020 N. Broadway) and at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Discourse will also open a new café at Radio Milwaukee, expected to open in February.
Starting this month, their Downtown café takes on a new identity every Friday through Sunday evening as Agency, a hybrid cocktail bar with a welcoming, inclusive space for consumers of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
Castelaz remarks that he had actually hated coffee while growing up. That all changed during his sophomore year of college when he studied opera abroad in Florence, Italy, where he first tried espresso and “fell in love with it.” When he returned home, he bought a steam espresso machine and made espresso for friends. “It was an incredible sharing moment. I realized that I loved not just espresso, but coffee’s ability to create community. Coffee became a deep obsession of mine.”
After college, Castelaz, who’s from New Berlin, moved with his then-girlfriend to Door County, where they worked in hospitality jobs throughout Sister Bay. Though his work, he had an encounter with a person who offered him a storefront to open a coffee shop, which he says was in the “worst location possible!”
Telling Stories
As Castelaz pondered ways to draw people to his out-of-the-way store, he thought about how the great restaurants and bars worldwide in remote spots attract guests. “And it’s storytelling. All these restaurants draw people by telling their own stories, stories of the land they are on, stories of the ingredients and the producers—we started looking at how to we tell stories of today.”
That sparked his creativity to craft extraordinary coffee and tea drinks that incorporated “crazy-cool ingredients” that Castelaz and his team could explore and play with, such as cattails (shoots can be eaten both raw and cooked), crabapples and native grains given to them by customers that were baristas, farmers and foragers.
When the COVID pandemic hit, Castelaz had to rethink Discourse. The social distancing safety measures required dampened the ambiance he strove to create. “We named shop Discourse because we wanted to create conversations about coffee, and we weren’t able to do that.”
Castelaz moved Discourse to Milwaukee and established the brand here through pop-ups that were wildly successful. He met Olivia Molter, who would serve as his business partner for a while, and Sean Liu, who today is an operating partner in Discourse. Discourse had two concepts at Crossroads Collective, Discourse Coffee, and The Counter Day Bar, which closed this past summer.
Inspired Ingredients
When asked what inspires his creations, some of which contain ingredients unusual to lattes, generating questions from guests, Castelaz replies without hesitation. “Storytelling, 100% storytelling.”
One of the drinks, The Don, was inspired by what the character Vito “Don” Corleone from The Godfather would drink if he came into Discourse. Because the character had owned a Sicilian olive oil plantation and smoked big cigars, Castelaz says he “took those parameters and put together something that most people would see as completely nonsensical.” The drink featured olive oil, notes of tobacco and a frozen bullet in lieu of an ice cube, which would have diluted the drink.
“Every element is intentional and speaks to a narrative element of the story,” Castelaz explains. “I train my baristas and give them the framework that has propelled this company to where it is today.”
Agency, the weekend evening hybrid cocktail bar, opens at 6 p.m. each Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Each cocktail on the menu is available in an alcoholic or non-alcoholic version. Whether one wants a boozy drink or sans spirits, they’re served in the same glasses, with the same garnishes. A coaster system indicates to servers whether guests want an alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink.
Castelaz notes advantages to first working with beverages in the non-alcoholic space. “Alcohol is really defined by tannins,” he notes, and cocktails like margaritas or daquiris start with the basics and branch off. “A lot of innovation in the cocktail space ties to a tree, and they all link back. A huge advantage in the coffee space is that there’s no family tree, no offshoots of a vanilla latte or a caramel latte. For us, there’s no precedent, so we might as well create and explore without that reference.”
A disadvantage, he notes, is establishing value around non-alcoholic products. A $9 latte takes time to develop and requires quality ingredients and the same labor that goes into making some cocktails. But because it doesn’t contain alcohol, some people scoff at the price. Yet Castelaz feels that Discourse has made huge strides in creating that same sense of value in the coffee-adjacent space.
Castelaz is grateful for the people he’s met and the help he’s had along the way. “People are coming from Chicago and Madison to work on our team, so combined, there’s over 100 years of experience in coffee. It’s dream team of baristas,” he enthuses.
For more information about Discourse Coffee, visit discourse.coffee.
