Coffee treat for health care workers
Carbonated cold brew company in Redondo Beach donates canned drink to 3 hospitals
When a nascent Redondo Beach company was stifled by the coronavirus pandemic, its owner decided to at least use his product for good — by donating it to local health care workers.
Those health care workers, exhausted from long hours and overflowing hospitals, were likely grateful.
That product, after all, is carbonated coffee in a can.
Sofee, a carbonated coffee company that makes its cold brew batches at King Harbor Brewing, has donated about $15,000 worth of drinks to frontline workers at three hospitals — Little Company of Mary in Torrance, Torrance Memorial Medical Center and Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach — since the pandemic began, its owner, Chad Hazen.
“The hospital staff working crazy hours could use the caffeine,” Hazen said. “It made sense as a great use of the resource.”
Hazen is not a coffee maker by trade.
He actually began as a home beer brewer nearly 10 years ago, Hazen said. But then he began training for his first marathon and decided to pivot from beer to something better for his body.
Hazen thought about craft soda, but that wasn’t the healthiest idea, either, he said. So he settled on coffee.
But even then, Sofee was a
long ways off.
“I made it, I forgot about it for a few years and then,” Hazen said, “cold brew became real popular (along with) hard seltzers.”
He knew he was onto something. The intersection of cold brew coffee and carbonation.
And that’s what his company creates. Sofee is brewed like beer, except it doesn’t go through fermentation. Rather, Hazen brews up a batch of cold brew that then goes through carbonating vessels before being put into cans and kegs. Hazen is an investor at King Harbor Brewing in Redondo Beach, so he uses that facility to make the product on a larger scale, he said.
Sofee — which stands for “SoCal coffee,” Hazen said — launched early last year.
But that turned out to be a problem.
“The timing of COVID could not have been worse,” Hazen said. “I was supposed to be hitting Gelson’s’ shelves the week the shutdown occurred,”
The store put that rollout on hold, however.
That left Hazen with hundreds of cans of the perishable beverage at risk of going to waste.
But then, Hazen had what he described as an “aha” moment: He’d give the cans to hospital workers battling the coronavirus.
And even though Sofee is now available at natural food stores — such as Erewhon Market — and on tap at some breweries, including King Harbor, Hazen still sends cans to hospitals when the workers need a boost. He even set up a keg of Sofee for St. Mary’s employees during hospital workers appreciation week earlier this month.
For Hazen, it’s all about helping out the best he can.
“We’re all one community,” he said, “in my mind.”