Coffee roaster calls 905 home
Here’s a fun fact about 416 Coffee Co.: It’s comfortably located within the 905.
So comfortably that, despite its minimalist label adorned with the company’s name and the CN Tower, 416 Coffee Co. can be claimed as St. Catharines’ own.
It’s a clarification Christopher Battagli, who co-owns the business with his father, Carmine, has had to make every day since the father-son entrepreneurs opened a storefront in Port Dalhousie earlier this month.
“I probably recite the story in a condensed version 10 times a day in Port,” Christopher said with a rueful smile.
The story goes like this: It’s not that Christopher, who came up with the moniker, didn’t want people to know where he and his father roasted their transparently sourced coffees that can also be sipped at Mirepoix and Dispatch restaurants in St. Catharines, among others.
Nor did he think 416, Toronto’s area code, had more cachet than our 905 (though it certainly has more of a ring to it than 289).
Running with 416 Coffee Co. was a nod to Carmine’s start in the java scene of 1980s Toronto.
Born and raised in the big city, Carmine spent part of his youth in Italy, where he was exposed to la dolce vita and its caffeinated cornerstones, espresso and cappuccino. When he returned to Toronto, he started working with a cousin repairing espresso machines.
He took his talents further in 1998, acquiring a shuttered roaster for the cost of back-rent. It was equipped with a 40-year-old, two-batch roasting machine, a contraption that would cost $250,000 if he were to buy one new today, Christopher said.
Carmine’s coffee roasting business was born. In the meantime, the elder Battagli had moved to St. Catharines in 1995, the same year his son and future business partner was born.
Carmine did the commute to Toronto to roast beans until 2000 when the drive became a grind. He moved the business to Hannover Drive in St. Catharines’ west end, roasting single origin beans as Caffe Opera at a time flavoured coffees were de rigueur.
“He was kind of paddling too early for the wave,” Christopher said. “He was doing single origin when people had no idea what that was.”
But along came the Great Recession of 2008. Coffee, it turned out, wasn’t immune to the economic downturn. Carmine’s commercial clients, many of them in the U.S., couldn’t pay their invoices and Caffe Opera folded.
He put his old two-batch roaster in storage and tried his hand at other food businesses, including a panini shop downtown. All the while, he instilled that entrepreneurial spirit in Christopher while immersing him in the coffee culture synonymous with being Italian, giving him his first espresso when he was 12.
“I probably put a bunch of sugar in it,” Christopher recalled with a laugh. “I probably liked it but probably because I made it an Italian Coca-Cola. It definitely took a long time for me to develop a palate for coffee.”
By 2015, Christopher was picking up on the nuances in his joe. He started to discern the chocolate notes in a medium roast from Brazil and the hints of citrus in beans from Kenya.
He was also working on his marketing degree from Brock University and noticing caffeine fiends taking greater interest in what was in their cup.
The single-origin, fair and direct-trade, small-batch movement was catching on, including in St. Catharines, which is now home to a handful of independent coffee roasters.
Carmine pulled his old roasting machine out of storage, found space in an industrial mall on Wright Street, and he and Christopher set to work on 416 Coffee Co.
“I saw what other companies were doing with a move toward single origin coffee… which is what he was doing in 2000 but he was way too early,” Christopher said. “There was definitely room for a third or fourth (local roaster).”
But no one was doing it on the scale of the Battaglis, who took their signature Yonge Street and College Street blended roasts into the big city, knocking on doors in earnest to convince restaurants and cafés to brew their coffee.
Christopher worked the social media channels to find coffee farmers, co-operatives and estates from which to source beans, including from Costa Rica, Tanzania and Papua New Guinea. His focus is on traceable and ethically produced coffee, which 416 Coffee Co. sells as blends or single-origin brews.
Over the next four years, 416 Coffee Co. morphed into a business that roasts three times a week, and now has its own storefront selling pour-overs, espresso, cappuccino and cold brew daily.
There was a lot of rejection in those early days of pavement pounding, bags of beans in hand. These days, though, when anyone says no, it’s Christopher as he explains 416 Coffee Co. isn’t really from Toronto.
“It was just supposed to be a nod to the origin story,” Christopher said. “But we’re totally local.”