Blip Roasters puts great coffee on the West Bottoms’ radar
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Ian Davis, the 25-year-old coffee roaster who has set up shop in the West Bottoms, is a motorcycle enthusiast. He owns a 1976 Honda CB 554. So when he wanted the right name for his business, he thought about his bike.
“A throttle blip,” he says, “is a rev-matching technique where a rider blips the throttle to match the engine rpm to road speed when downshifting.”
There hasn’t been much downshifting for Davis since he opened Blip Roasters, though. With the roasting operation now a year old, he has recently added counter service to his space at 1331 St. Louis Avenue. The coffee here is good — and cheap.
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Behind his 18-foot counter — which Davis built himself, using the subflooring of an old trolley car — he serves a cup of house coffee for $2, a daily special roast for $3, and a latte or a cappuccino for $3.
“There aren’t a lot of places for coffee in the West Bottoms,” Davis says. “And the people who do live and work down here are artists. I just want to give them great coffee for a reasonable price.”
On a late weekday morning last week, as if to prove Davis’ point, artist Bruce Burstert ambled across the street from his new studios in the Bottoms for a much-needed cup of coffee. “I don’t know what Ian does to create the perfect cup of drip coffee,” he told me, “but it’s brilliant.”
“It’s just about roasting it well,” Davis says. He offers eight kinds of freshly roasted coffee beans — two espresso blends and six single-origin coffees. They’re sold in paper boxes (“All my packaging is manufactured in the West Bottoms,” he says), encasing bags made from 100-percent biodegradable plastic.
The coffee venue was created, like the adjacent roasting facility, on a tight budget. Davis sold his Toyota truck to finance the roaster, which he bought new for around $12,000. He picked up the three-compartment sink and the ice machine from Martha Morgan, owner of the former Oak Street Coffee Shop, where David honed his craft as a barista. Davis refurbished a 10-year-old espresso machine and did most of the interior construction himself.
Blip’s coffee shop, which sells Star bars by local baker Chelsea Williams as the sole culinary offering, is open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The shop serves coffee from 8 a.m. to noon Sunday. Blip beans are available there and at the Sundry as well as by the cup at Voltaire and One More Cup.
