No Sugar, No Cream.

In the Heights, Cxffeeblack is brewing something beautiful. The entrepreneurial experiment with a “consumable curriculum” looks beyond challenges and toward community.

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A wind advisory is in effect on a cool early-spring day when I visit the Anti-Gentrification Coffee Club, nestled on a quiet stretch of National Street in Memphis’ Highland Heights neighborhood. Leaves skitter down the sidewalk and daffodils shiver, bowing their heads in the bluster. Inside the Coffee Club — the storefront for social-entrepreneurial venture Cxffeeblack — the round, rich aroma of freshly roasted beans greets me first, accompanied by a mellow hip-hop soundtrack and the spark of conversation. Someone I’ve never met before greets me: “Welcome home.” I’m early, so I settle in to wait a spell for Bartholomew Jones while he catches up with a delivery guy dropping off several boxes of new merch; Jones is co-founder and co-owner, along with his wife, head roaster Renata Henderson.

On your inaugural visit to the AGCC, your money’s no good; the spirit of hospitality means the first cup’s free. This isn’t any old coffeeshop, remember: It’s a coffee club, designed to be welcoming and inclusive, educational but unpretentious. Jones has called typical, hyper-photogenic coffeeshops one of the “four horsemen of the gentrification apocalypse.” (The others: craft breweries, “small ladies walking tinier dogs,” and Whole Foods.)

I ask for a pour-over preparation of Cxffeeblack’s Ubadasa, a Burundian coffee fermented anaerobically: It’s fruity and bright, with a tang and sweetness that evokes the spritz of just-peeled winter citrus or the smooth pucker of a watermelon Jolly Rancher. (As Jones reminded the audience at last year’s local TEDx talks, a coffee “bean” is the seed of an African fruit — not a legume at all.)

As the name suggests, this coffee is meant to be drunk black: “No sugar, no cream; don’t cover God’s dream,” Jones says. Or, in other words: “God don’t make junk.”

As he warms the water to just the right temperature and swirls it over freshly ground … not-beans, Omarion Champion tells me he’s been hanging around the Cxffeeblack family since he was just 10 years old. Squeezing the grinds through an unbleached filter, Champion educates me about why lighter roasts benefit from higher temperature water (212 degrees), while darker roasts do better with lower temperature water — so as not to accentuate any burnt flavors. (I had no idea.)

Once he finishes transferring the coffee from cup to carafe and back to cup (a process designed to maintain the ideal temperature), Champion delivers the coffee to my hand with a traditional blessing, as the baristas here do for each first-time visitor: Buna fo nagaa hin dhabiinaa. May you never lack coffee nor peace.

If you visit the Cooper-Young Farmers Market regularly, chances are you’ve strolled past the Cxffeeblack tent, chatted with one of the folks behind the table (most likely Omarion Champion, who’s there most Saturdays), or exchanged a tap of your phone for a bag of coffee or three. I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of Cxffeeblack — whether it was in-person, at the market, or online — but their presence, both locally and nationally, is growing rapidly.

The coffee company’s ascendance has plenty to do with their innovative, equitable supply-chain model, as well as with their branding and marketing prowess: They’ve attracted more than 36,000 followers on Instagram via posts that feel organic and real because they are. They’ve produced their own documentary, Cxffeeblack to Africa, about a first trip to Ethiopia to spend time with coffee growers at the source. Last year, they won an international award for the quality of their roasting — a love labor undertaken by Henderson, the first Black woman coffee roaster in Memphis.

But beyond the robust publicity and the bold approach to their supply chain, beyond headlines and social posts, Cxffeeblack is selling the most absolutely delicious coffee I’ve ever sipped. At the shop, they’ll make you a latte or a cortado if you choose, but these beans are so pure, so clean, so complex, that a pour-over is the ideal way to brew them.

Their most famous and popular roast is the Guji Mane: an Ethiopian coffee sourced from Uraga in the Guji Zone of Oromia, Ethiopia, and brought to your kitchen through an all-Black supply chain. Guji Mane’s promised tasting notes — coffee can be tasted in much the same way as wine, except, according to Jones, coffee’s actually more complex — include papaya, passion fruit, nougat, and dark chocolate.

The wild revelation about tasting Guji Mane, Ubadasa, or their other coffees (I love the Despertar Negro and the Dulcey Rosada, both from the Dulcey family in Colombia) is that these flavors open themselves so freely. It’s not like tasting wine, when most folks, I suspect, feel like all that verbiage on the bottle is poetic garbage. Jones recalls that, when he was learning about more carefully processed coffees like those he now sells, he once tried a brew that he almost sent back because he thought the barista had snuck strawberry flavoring into his cup. The “flavoring” turned out to be the pure essence of the coffee fruit itself.

And, as the name suggests, this coffee is meant to be drunk black: “No sugar, no cream; don’t cover God’s dream,” Jones says. Or, in other words: “God don’t make junk.”

The global coffee industry is valued at roughly $450 billion; depending on whom you ask, the total figure might be lower or higher. Exact numbers vary widely from source to source — perhaps because the industry is not only so vast and diffuse, but also so exploitative. Most coffee is grown in economically under-resourced countries, and — no surprise — the lion’s share of the profits ends up far from the hands of the mostly Black and brown people cultivating the plants. That’s part of what Cxffeeblack is engineered to address, and why they have built a proudly all-Black supply chain.

For all his coffee proselytism now, growing up, Bartholomew Jones wasn’t very into coffee. Actually, he hated it. That was his dad’s drink, and no amount of sugar and cream could mask the bitter taste that put him off. “My dad would try to serve [coffee] to me every morning. He went to LeMoyne-Owen, and during that time they took a trip to Kenya. He came back hyped about everything Kenyan. He would try to serve us Kenyan coffee, and I was like, ‘Dad, this is gross. Ugh.’” Today, one of Cxffeeblack’s supplier partners in their all-Black supply chain is a Kenyan family who run a vertically integrated farm.

Jones attended Gateway Christian Academy in Memphis before heading to Wheaton College (“Billy Graham went there”) to study education and sociology. He says he found his own relationship with coffee once he was in college. When he moved back to Memphis from the Chicago area, he worked as an educator for a decade — at New Hope Christian Academy, Sherwood Middle School, and then a performing-arts-focused college prep school that closed early in the pandemic. When one cup emptied, another began to fill, and Jones turned to coffee as a full-time venture.

The entrepreneur is a well-regarded and thoughtful rapper, too; his musical tracks have been streamed over a million times. He jokes that the coffee company started as a way to sell merch around his music — then the side hustle got big. “It’s a very Memphis story,” he says. “How many businesses came from someone having a juke joint where they were doing music, but they started serving food, and the food was really good. Then that’s making more money than the music is, so now we got a family restaurant. We just happen to have a family roastery.”

But, he says, both music and education remain central — merely in different forms. “Education was big for our family,” he tells me. “It was our way to make it out of the hood, our way to have a better life. I don’t teach in classrooms anymore — but we’re an educational company with a consumable curriculum. You know what I’m saying?” Yes, I say, I do — thinking back to the science lessons about grind texture and water temperature I’ve already absorbed this morning, the sociology seminar about coffee and community, and the economics class about reimagining the supply chain.

They run a “barista exchange program” to fly African-American “coffee nerds” to Africa, to learn about pre-colonial coffee practices there — and to bring African baristas to Memphis, to train at and share traditions with the Coffee Club. And they documented the exchange in a film, Cxffeeblack to Africa, released at the Indie Memphis festival in 2022.

Recently, the company announced a partnership with a textile company, COMOCO Cotton, to release a T-shirt together created using the world’s first all-Black cotton supply chain. Both coffee and cotton were — and are — crops harvested through oppression and enslavement, so the collaboration between the two operations is both natural and deeply meaningful. “This collaboration is about more than a product,” according to the press release about the collaboration. “It’s about shifting the narrative — reclaiming what was once stolen and turning it into a tool for our collective liberation.” In a wonderful detail, the cotton used to construct the shirts is dyed using Cxffeeblack’s Guji Mane.

The differences between this enterprise and others aren’t just aesthetic or theoretical; Cxffeeblack is in the midst of practicing what it preaches. When we meet, Jones is wrapping up a capital campaign to help solidify Cxffeeblack’s future home. As with everything else the group does, the effort to raise capital is a community-centered one: Instead of relying on, say, venture funds, they’re looking to their neighbors, partners, customers, and friends to be tangibly involved in a shared future. As of this writing, Cxffeeblack has raised nearly $437,413 from 513 individual investors. The plans are to pay investors back — with 1.75x dividends — once the business reaches certain revenue benchmarks. That’s another way of sharing a coffee blessing.

Just a few doors down from the present-day Anti-Gentrification Coffee Club sits a larger, darker, bolder building — black brick with goldenrod accents. This is the new home of Cxffeeblack, and it’s a beauty, with exposed beams and cathedral ceilings; noted Memphis interior designer and TV personality Carmeon Hamilton is lead designer on the space. Still a work in progress, the new building already has hosted events too large for the Club space; soon (date to be announced), it will become the permanent home for the enterprise. As Cxffeeblack has grown and evolved, from its start in Jones’ and Henderson’s home kitchen to its current location, the team has kept sight of their mission, and a big, defining part of that mission is this neighborhood, this vibrant and well-loved but not-so-gentrified stretch of National Street.

Part of the reason Jones is a bit hazy on the opening date for the new space: Back in December, around the holidays, a series of break-ins cost the business time and money. In two separate incidents, the new building was breached, and thieves removed brand-new packaging and pricy equipment. Anyone who’s so much as coveted a nice espresso machine for their kitchen knows that this stuff runs high, and industrial-grade equipment many orders of magnitude more so. Factor into that the fact that Cxffeeblack isn’t just brewing coffee, but also roasting it … the break-ins were more than a mere inconvenience.

In the aftermath, Jones and Henderson thought about whether planting their business in this neighborhood, in this city, was truly the right choice. Would it be more sensible to go someplace a little softer and easier? In the end, they chose to stay where they’re rooted. As Henderson told another news outlet in the aftermath, “Resilience is inward work, but I think it’s also community work. … You got to stick it out. Resilience starts with that faith.”

Or, as Jones says: “If we plant different kinds of roots, we can harvest different kinds of fruits. We’re a creative city. We don’t get the reputation and the credit for it all the time, but it’s in our DNA. I think that’s why we’ve always been innovators: We create things. And we create things out of nothing: food, music, innovation. I think the future of this city is in leaning into that heritage, not just as people who labor and work in a factory — although logistics are important to my supply chain, so that’s dope — but there’s an embarrassment of riches in ideas. If we can connect the youth in this city to a future where they can see their ideas having wings, that’s where we really are going to see a change.“