This April, we’ve got a bonus blog because the coffee situation at Soma Café and Rumsy’s is too good to keep in.
We stopped by South Main to hear from Café Lead, Mason, what’s new, what’s fresh, and what we can expect from The Front’s cafés over the summertime. Read on for all your answers on what’s going on up there, and how they’re producing everything in house — from soymilk to syrups.
Meet: Mason
Mason is our Subject Matter Expert on all things coffee and tea, and how this blog came to be! They need a quick intro before we dive into the goodness.
Mason has been making your drinks and crafting up cafe specials for the last few years. As café lead across both locations, they’re the person behind the syrups, the sourcing decisions, the seasonal experiments that either become cult favorites (peanut butter!) or disappear when the weather changes. Before landing at The Front, they spent years in specialty coffee, including a stretch building a quality control lab for Black Rifle Coffee.
New Beans at Rumsy’s and Soma
Kings Peak Coffee is a local SLC roastery that’s been operating out of a historic 1904 building near 700 West since 2018. It’s a little off the beaten path, tucked into an industrial part of the city, but they’ve built a serious following. Mason first reached out to them years ago while setting up that QC lab at Black Rifle, just to pick their brains about what they’d do with an ideal setup. The relationship stuck.
Rumsy’s and Soma Café have officially swapped their coffee beans over to this local roastery, and we’re pouring Kings Peak’s Mount Timpanogos, a medium roast that Mason picked because of how it sits in the cup. A little bitterness, little acidity, chocolaty and citrusy at the same time, but not heavy and not lingering. “A lot of flavor, but it’s not too intense” is how they put it.
Mount Timpanogos works as a straight shot for caffeine fiends, and provides a gentle base for seasonal beverages that let fresh syrups shine.
In-House…Milks?
In an effort to get as close to homemade everything as they could, Mason and the entire café team have ventured into fresh milks, with no cows required. How do you even create fresh soy milk? It’s not as difficult as it sounds.
Mason soaks dried soybeans, blends them, boils them, strains them, and finishes with a little maple syrup, vanilla, and a small amount of baking soda to keep it from separating. It steams well, it has a similar protein content to regular milk, and it tastes like something just sweet enough. We even use it as the default milk in our smoothies!
While oat, almond, and cashew milks are still under R&D, soy is ready to go and available at both cafés.
Making the Syrups with the Seasons
Now the best part: seasonal drinks. Mason and their team take coffee and tea very seriously, and the monthly flavors are always made in house. Most of what goes into the seasonal drinks starts as a simple syrup, just 1:1 sugar to hot water. From there you add flavorings and you taste it until it’s right. Sounds simple, but the tasting process to get it right can be extensive.
The banana syrup for the upcoming banana bread latte, for example, starts with a fresh banana getting mashed and boiled in sugar and water for fifteen minutes before any flavorings go in. The process for each is a little different, and Mason’s approach to landing on a final version is basically: make it, get as many people as possible to try it, look for the common thread. If you’re lingering at either café, you might get an invitation to try what they’ve been concocting.
The peanut butter mocha that’s on the menu right now traces back to a peanut butter latte that ran a while back and ended up being unexpectedly popular. Mason keeps that kind of thing in mind, what has worked here, what the regulars have responded to, and builds forward from it.
We’ve always got an eye on what’s next. This May, expect that Banana Bread Latte Mason has been working towards, a Mango Ceylon Arnold Palmer made with tea from Tea Zaanti, and even a floral, rosy latte that’s still under development. With a fresh menu to boot, there’s no better time to make the cafés part of your routine.
Stop by our South Main or Salt Lake locations to get a taste of all the new beverages we’ve got.
