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From Jonathan Rubinstein, Founder & CEO Released Friday, March 13 (updated as of Saturday, March 14) Dear Friends,At Joe Coffee, the health and safety of our customers and our team members is of utmost importance to us. To this end, I want to share the precautions we are taking to ensure we are doing everything we can to protect the well-being of our community.Since the onset of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, our dedicated task force has been meeting daily to monitor the rapidly developing situation and respond in accordance with guidance issued by the CDC and local authorities. These are the precautions we've put in place: We are committed to offering our customers and team members a clean, safe, and hygienic space 365 days a year. However, in light of this situation, we’re taking heightened precautions including implementing increased sanitizing and more rigorous hand-washing procedures. We have temporarily suspended to-stay ware as well as the practice of accepting personal cups. However, we will still honor the discount to anyone who brings in a reusable cup. We have removed condiments, milks, lids, straws, napkins, etc. from our condiment bars in an effort to minimize potential contamination. Our baristas will be happy to complete your order with the milk or sweetener of your choice, and provide these additional items at your request. We have suspended all cuppings for the public and staff until further notice. Any cuppings that are essential for Quality Control and business purposes will follow the SCA Modified Cupping Protocols. While our public classes will continue as scheduled for the foreseeable future, if any registrant wishes to postpone attending a class, we will be more than happy to reschedule their ticket to a future date. Please email classes@joecoffeecompany.mom to reschedule. While we are currently operating our cafes as usual, we have modified our hours in certain locations, including our three Columbia University campus locations in response to school closures. For up-to-date hours, please visit our locations page. (Updated: March 14) In an effort to support social distancing and reduce risk for our customers and staff, we have temporarily removed seating where possible, offering to-go only service. In the spirit of transparency, we are committed to keeping you informed about any further changes and will share updates in this space.On behalf of the Joe Coffee team, I want to thank you for your patience, understanding, and trust as we navigate this uncertain—and certainly unprecedented—time together. We will strive to continue offering the welcoming spaces and warm hospitality you have come to expect from us—a safe haven for those who seek it. In this difficult time, we offer our entire community our sincerest wishes of good health.Jonathan RubinsteinFounder & CEO

Sourcing great coffee around the world is a constant voyage of discovery—and self-discovery. Last year, in the process of updating our brand identity, we spent many hours examining the values behind how we select the coffees we do. We're now proud to introduce The Atlas Collection, a line of limited-release coffees intended to highlight those values: quality, ethics, collaboration, and integrity—our tools for exploring the complex world of coffee.Through a rotating selection of unique, exemplary coffees, the Atlas Collection will serve as a tastable guide to how we explore the world of coffee—a journey we hope will inspire your palate and curiosity as much as it has our own. Beyond our own strict criteria for coffee scoring and deliciousness, we've designed each release to celebrate one of our specific sourcing values.And to showcase these special coffees, naturally, we designed a special bag! Each 8oz bag is a luminous coral, chosen to perfectly complement the palette of blues we selected for our traditional blend and single origin offerings. It also looks lovely with our special Atlas Collection labels: each of these coffees will feature a custom gold-foil contour map that depicts the topography of the very farm from which the coffee inside is sourced. Pretty neat, right?The first offering we've rolled out under this new program is from Huila, Colombia, where Yimi Guarnizo's beautiful microlot shines through with notes of mango, elderflower, and golden raisin—all a result of Don Yimi's care and attention to his high-altitude, 7.3-hectare farm.Yimi is one of the many siblings who make up La Familia Guarnizo, with whom we've proudly partnered since 2013, a relationship forged by our colleagues at Caravela Coffee, and deepened over years of visits and a mutual respect that grows with each new season. We especially love this coffee for the spirit of collaboration our relationship with Yimi and his family continues to inspire!We hope you'll get a chance to try this special and beautiful coffee while it lasts, and we look forward to bringing you along to discover future Atlas Collection coffees throughout the coming months.

Bestselling author A.J. Jacobs is no stranger to ambitious projects. In his 2008 book The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs sought to live as closely to the rules of the bible as he could. This month he releases his sixth title, Thanks a Thousand, which chronicles his gratitude journey for a single cup of coffee—which we're happy to say, he purchased at Joe Coffee. We sat down with A.J. to learn how his project shaped how he thinks about both coffee and gratitude. A.J. at Joe Waverly Place. Photo by Christopher Lane Joe: What surprised you most about your coffee's journey to you, or what seemed the most incredible thing about it? A.J.: Before I answer, let me just say a huge, overflowing thanks to the folks at Joe. They were so helpful and open, I couldn’t have asked for a better partner on this journey. The most surprising part was just how many people it takes for me to produce my morning cup of coffee at Joe. I knew about the farmer and the barista, of course. But there are hundreds of people in between. The tasters, the the roasters, the inspectors, the importing company, the trucker—and the trucker couldn’t do his job without the road, so I felt I should thank the folks who pave the road. And the folks who paint yellow lines on the road so the trucker doesn’t veer into oncoming traffic. As I say in the book: It doesn’t take a village to make a cup of coffee. It takes the world. A.J. with some of the Guarnizo brothers. Were you aware of any difference between specialty coffee’s supply chain and that of, say, everyday diner coffee? Not nearly enough. I was delighted by the amount of thought and passion that goes into every step of Joe Coffee. For instance, visiting the roastery in Brooklyn was an eye-opener. I love that there are gadgets to measure the moisture level of the beans, and another to measure the bean’s stability. And of course, I loved visiting the small Colombian family farm where some of my beans are grown. I like that it wasn’t a big mega-corporate farm. It was eight brothers and one sister. Do you think you would have had this same experience if you’d written about shoelaces instead of coffee? I could have done a gratitude journey about shoelaces, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as delicious. My kids wanted me to thank everyone involved in making their s’mores, because they figured it would increase the number of s’mores around the house. But I chose coffee because it’s my version of s’mores: A huge treat. A.J. Jacobs and Joe's Director of Sourcing Ed Kaufmann You talked in your book a lot about how far to take the journey—and why you had to limit it to only 1000 thank-yous. Were there any people you felt were a stretch? My wife told me that thanking Beyonce was a stretch (I thanked her because her music kept the truck drivers awake as they drove the beans to the store). And maybe it was. But the point of the book is to embrace six degrees of gratitude. I wanted to show that thousands of people are involved in every little item in our lives, and we take those people for granted. Does it still feel like there are people you’ve omitted? Absolutely. I could have spent 50 years thanking all the people involved in the coffee chain. Plus, I sometimes put almond milk in my coffee (sorry Ed! I know you prefer it when I drink it straight up). So I could thank all the people on that chain too. I did get to thank the founder Jonathan Rubinstein, but I wish I’d had room to write a whole section on him. I love his passion for his customers and his coffee—not to mention all things Disney. Joe Coffee barista Chung Lee Was there any one moment of thanking somebody on this journey that you felt made the most impact or had the most meaning in the other party’s life? I don’t know if it had the most impact on her life, but I loved talking with barista Chung Lee. She said Joe Coffee clients are almost always friendly. But there are the occasional clients who place their orders without even looking up from their phones. They just hand over their credit card. They treat baristas like vending machines, not a humans. I realized I’ve been that jerk sometimes. So I’ve made a vow to always look people in the eye when dealing with them. It’s such a small thing, but it has such a huge impact on both parties. Humans were meant to connect face to face. I also remember calling the woman who does pest control for the warehouse where the coffee is stored. I said, "I know this sounds strange, but I want to thank you for keeping the bugs out of my coffee." She said, "That is strange, but thank YOU. We don't get a lot of appreciation around here." I felt like it was an anti-crank phone call. I felt like I was doing penance for my obnoxious calls in high school. If you get a bad coffee somewhere—are you still just as grateful? Ha! Well, it depends. If I haven’t had any coffee that day, I try to be grateful for, say, airplane coffee. But it’s a much milder gratitude. It’s like a decaf version of gratitude, to use a coffee metaphor. Has your gratitude journey rubbed off on the people around you? I’ve gotten wonderful feedback from readers. I spend much of my day thanking readers who send me thank you notes for writing the book. The danger is that they will thank me for thanking them for thanking me. It could be an infinite loop. A.J.'s book Thanks a Thousand is out now on TED Books.

Fifteen years ago, Joe was just a twinkle in the eye of our founder, Jonathan Rubinstein. We asked him to share some of his memories. Jonathan Rubinstein at Cadillac House. Back in early 2003, as I was wandering the streets and dreaming of opening a coffee shop, I passed by a storefront on Waverly Place that seemed like the perfect first location for a yet-unnamed coffee shop idea—the top contenders were LatteLand and Two Cups!. It had a front patio, exposed brick, lots of windows and a banjo player strumming out front. I quickly called the number on the window and made an offer. 24 hours later, I was told the space, recently a dry cleaner, was mine and I set off on the adventure of a lifetime. Joe opened with the help of my immediate family, who became my partners. My mother played barista, my sister helped to manage, and my father did the books. We knew almost nothing about coffee, but knew that it was near impossible to find a great cup in NY, even with its sophisticated residents and great culinary scene. We found a great roaster in Massachussets, threw ourselves into learning both how to make great coffee and how to run a business. We decided our competitive edge, which spoke to us as people, would be not just to serve delicious coffee but to make people feel good when they came in to our shop. I worked as a barista right up until my daughter was born at the beginning of 2009. Jonathan and Gabrielle Rubinstein visiting coffee farms in Costa Rica, 2003. We learned most of what we know about coffee from Amanda Byron, who worked with Joe for the first dozen years of the business before moving back to the West coast. Amanda was the only person for probably the first six weeks we were open who could pour latte art. For the first year, because nobody else was pouring latte art in the city, people thought it was the rainbow bagel or something that no one had ever seen. There were a lot of people with actual cameras (because there were no cell phone cameras), asking if there was "definitely a toothpick" involved etc. Our latte art was beginner latte art back then but everybody thought it was amazing. For the first few weeks we only opened our store when Amanda could work, because nobody else could pour latte art, including ourselves. And because there was nobody else to train us, except Amanda! Another one of our earliest employees was Miles Seaton, who went on to be successful with the band Akron/Family. Amanda Byron and Miles Seaton at Waverly Place. I think the first phenomenon of people talking about us was because Amy Sedaris used to bake our cupcakes. The week that we opened, Sarah Jessica Parker came into the store—I had known her a little bit in a previous life because I worked with Cynthia Nixon, and she was a neighbor, she lived in the Village. She said, "I have a friend, Amy Sedaris"—I had never heard of her—"Would you ever consider selling her cupcakes? Here's her home number, tell her you're a friend of mine. She likes to keep busy when she's not filming." So I called her, she came in, she lived a block or two away, and so she would basically bring in a tray of cupcakes, we'd hand her $12 cash, they always had some crazy decorative trinket that she used to collect. You'd never know if she'd come in seven days a week or if she'd disappear for three weeks, you didn't know. She had such a huge cult following that people would hang around the store just to catch a glimpse of her, and then the phone would start ringing from all over the country. Eventually she got super busy and realized she neither needed the $12 nor was it a profitable business. A typical Amy Sedaris cupcake purchased at Joe Coffee. Photo by k10_ on Flickr. I remember in the great power outage in August of 2003, we were only four weeks old. We didn't have power, so all of our food was expiring and we didn't know what to do. We were out in the streets handing out food, giving away gallons of milk, lending money to regulars because ATMs were out and you couldn't get money, taking money out of the cash register. This was a pretty risky thing to be doing on only day 25 of being in business, but like all of New York City, we survived it. Old school Joe shingle. Photo by Andrew Schecter. It's New York, so famous people have always come into the store—from David Schwimmer to Nancy Pelosi—and of course, Philip Seymour Hoffman was a longtime fixture at our Waverly Place location. Bill Hader's character Stefon on Saturday Night Live is based on one of our baristas at 23rd Street. And the only time Rachael Ray came in, I was on bar at 13th street and she ordered a bagel. I was so nervous that while I was using one of those bagel-slicing guillotines, I pressed down too hard and the guillotine went flying and landed on her table, and her. Gabrielle Rubinstein, Danny Meyer, Doug Satzman, and Jonathan Rubinstein There's validation when admirable chefs come in, food people, it always gives us reason to feel good about what we're doing. Danny Meyer is a good example because that's how he first found us—by coming in for a coffee at Waverly Place. Ed Kaufmann sample roasting coffee at Pulley Collective. Our biggest successes were starting to roast, of course, and bringing Ed Kaufmann on board when the whole idea of roasting came bout. Ed was a friend and one of the very few coffee professionals living in the city at the time and he said "I want to join your family." Now, when we take stock, we have 260 people whose jobs are Joe, which feels really good. If we look at our alumni of probably the couple thousand people who've worked here, so many have stayed in coffee, that feels really good too. Meister, Will Gross, Brendan Mullally—I could list a ton of really important industry people who've gone on to great careers in coffee or who won their own shops. To foster their beginnings in coffee, and to pioneer great coffee in new neighborhoods, that feels really good. That—and looking forward to everything yet to come.

The friendship between coffee and beer is well known, whether they're being enjoyed one after the other—or in delicious combination. This fall, we're excited to announce a special collaboration with a groundbreaking brewery from our neighbo(u)rs to the north in Canada, Collective Arts Brewing. Founded in Ontario, the visual artists and brewing artisans at Collective Arts crossed the border to NYC this September with the launch a new beer featuring—you guessed it—our very own coffee. It's called the Percolated Haze IPA, and it stars La Familia Guarnizo, one of our very favorite relationship coffees from Colombia. Joe Coffee Head Roaster Andrew Oberholzer tells the story: "We knew we wanted to do something non-traditional for a coffee beer, so the team from Collective Arts came down to our NYC roastery with their entire portfolio. We tasted all of the beers with many different coffees in many different ratios. Once we settled on a coffee, we paid particular attention to its tasting notes to select hops that would pair well with and accentuate those notes. The citrus, brown sugar, and herbal notes of La Familia Guarnizo basically begged for an IPA pairing. Then I spent time perfecting roast profiles to find the perfect harmony of hops and coffee. I've never had a coffee IPA quite like this. Oftentimes in coffee beers you'll get a big rush of coffee flavor and then the beer, but they never really feel very put together. This one is very balanced, I'm very happy with the integration of the coffee and beer—it feels very cohesive." Collective Arts Brewing focuses on creativity both in their beers and their presentation. The brewer features limited-edition works of art on their beer cans and labels, part of a commitment to celebrating emerging artists and musicians that extends all the way into hosting art and music shows at their brewery. The artwork for Percolated Haze comes from Massachussetts graphic artist Jeff Bartel, and features just the kind of livey—and mindblowing—imagery this beer brings to mind. Here at Joe, we think all the pieces fit together perfectly. "Our first mission is to make creative, quality beer," says Collective Arts brewmaster Ryan Morrow. "Our second is to support the creative class and team up with business, artists, restaurants, or any like-minded people, for that matter. It's our way of exploring new opportunities and pushing the limits of what we can do. Joe Coffee does an incredible job of making quality coffee with a focus on innovation." Check out Collective Arts Brewing's NYC debut at the following launch events this week: 09.13.18 Greenwood Park | 6 – 9 PM 555 7th Ave, Brooklyn09.14.18 Gowanus Pub Crawl | 4PM – 8PM (Five bars, starting at The Gate, then moving on to Fourth Avenue Pub, St. Gambrinus, Lavender Lake, and BierWax.)