The coffee was always robust. The economy was not.
So explained Mark Orintas, the ever-optimistic proprietor of Bare Beans, as loyal customers raised their cups at the cozy coffee shop just off the Grand Avenue Bridge in Fair Haven.
On Tuesday night more than two dozen people showed up to inhale, taste and enjoy the aromas of Orintas’ rich Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and the El Salvador peaberry dark. They were also there to thank Orintas, who kept Bare Beans in business for eight months.
Orintas announced that the store will be closing for good in two weeks.
Click here and here to read previous stories about Orintas’s roasting machines and his business profile.
Bare Beans’ last cupping, the coffee drinker’s equivalent of a wine tasting, was, well, bittersweet Tuesday evening. Sweet because people like Jill Fitzgerald, of Bristol, (pictured at the top of the story) was new to cupping, and loved it. And Annie Imbornoni (pictured below taking in the aroma of a Nicaraguan Selva Negre) and her partner Jeff Schier had been to Orintas’s monthly cuppings before. They had also bought some of his five pound bags of free trade, organic brew at green markets.
Bitter, because there were not enough like them,. “January was our worst month,” Orintas said. When the times are tough economically, he observed, “people tend to linger at home and drink their coffee there instead of outside.”
Another aspect of Orintas’s business model, selling wholesale via the Internet, also tanked due to the economy.
Orintas said that every month he had been losing more than he was making. He wisely kept his day job, as a marketer of perfumes.
He also didn’t have a properly functioning bathroom for several months, he said.
He kept hours to weekdays only from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. or so. He decided not to invest in staff to keep the place open longer and on weekends. “I was just using up my own money,” he said, in a spirit not of complaint, but of fact. “I simply had no backing.”
“The Ferry Street Bridge’s reopening,” he said, “also contributed to a decline in sales. People who had driven past no longer did.”
Tuesday’s cupping took place a day before Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz announced that a record number of small businesses, 13,456, closed in Connecticut in 2008.
Orintas, who lives in Westville, last month came close to relocating his operation to a building at 869 Whalley Ave., but concluded the space was too small.
Given the dire straits of the economy, he’s decided to close this chapter and for now not open another.
“I want to make clear, however,” he was at pains to add, “that I really love Fair Haven. It’s like the mirror image of Westville, with a great community spirit. A core of people really supported me here.”
“I’d do it again,” he said, but the economic world, he indicated would have to be a lot different.
A wise marketer, Orintas said that if he re-opened in Fair Haven, the challenge would be how to market to the many people who live in the condos, and the number is growing, who dot the river’s banks. “I have people from the houses and the apartments come in here, but not the condos. They travel or have a different orientation, but that would be the way to go.”
He said he’ll be selling the earthy Dominican Barahona and the intense Idido Misti Valley of Ethiopia, with its pronounced notes of raspberry, and his own personal favorite, the Gayo Mountain Dark from Sumatra and his other blends via the Bare Beans web site through the end of March. However, February 13th will be his last day on the premises.
“I’ve no regrets,” he said, as he sold several pounds of a Bolivian blend to Steven Michels of New Haven in photo). “I learned a lot.”
And with that, Orintas implied he would be back for a refill.
Heartbreaking...people should really consider local businesses with good products prior to settgin foot in a Starbucks or a Walmart.