• Eric England

There are several reasons to stop by the just-opened fancy-pants coffee shop Barista Parlor (including but not limited to Mast Brothers chocolate, mugs that are the exact perfect size and weight, fantastic light fixtures, and of course, really great coffee), but if you're anything like me, you'll probably make a bee-line to the mural on the shop's back wall, inspect it from close up, gawk at the craftmanship, then back up and gawk at the artfulness of its presentation. It's the latest creation of Nashville printmaker Bryce McCloud, who runs Isle of Printing (for more on that, read this).

Roast Inc., the family-owned coffee roasting company on Trousdale Lane in the Crieve Hall neighborhood, has closed the retail coffeehouse side of the operation to concentrate on catering and wholesale. At the same time, the company is introducing a unique new local product: cold-brewed coffee in a bottle, which will be sold at Whole Foods and three local farmers’ markets.

Lesa and Brad Wood opened the cafe in 2010 to showcase their beans, which Brad purchases from “microlots” produced by single small estates in Central and South America, Indonesia and Africa. Lesa handles the craft of roasting, and she’s the one who ran the coffeehouse, specializing in brewing by the cup using artisan methods. (The coffeehouse celebrated its one-year anniversary with a renovation that made it an even nicer spot to sip a well-sourced, well-roasted coffee brewed by the cup.)

But the success of the wholesale and catering side of the business far outpaced the retail, Lesa told me. For one thing, Roast Inc. secured a deal in late 2011 to supply coffee beans to both local Whole Foods stores. To accommodate the demand, Lesa opened a separate roasting facility in February, a few doors down from the cafe in the same strip on Trousdale.

A couple weeks ago, Wood simply shut down the coffeehouse so she could concentrate on the other aspects of the business, working out of the roastery alone. The lease on the store space was up, she says, and the neighborhood is a bit too isolated to generate the retail traffic to support a coffeehouse.

“But we didn’t want to leave the Crieve Hall customers high and dry,” she says. So every Friday from noon to 5 p.m. she and a barista open up the roasting facility to customers so people can sip free samples of the different coffees and buy beans.

And now, customers can also pick up chilled bottles of Roast Inc. Cold-Filtered Coffee. She said it comes in two varieties: black coffee and a Vietnamese-style version made with sweetened milk. The bottled coffee will soon be sold at Whole Foods, too.

The roastery is at 4825 Trousdale Drive, suite 218. Roast Inc. also sells at the 12South Farmers Market (3:30-6:30 p.m. Tuesdays), the East Nashville Farmers’ Market (3:30-6:30 p.m. Wednesdays) and the Franklin Farmers Market (8 to 1 p.m. Saturdays).

For updates, follow Roast Inc. on Facebook or Twitter, or email lesa(at)roastinc.com to sign up for the weekly newsletter.

Perhaps some explanation is in order, from founder Rob Touchstone's blog, Between the Trees:

We want to take the money you spend on coffee and give that money to feeding and providing clean drinking water to the poorest people in the world. This is about sharing “Living Water” in the name of Jesus? Will we eliminate world poverty? No. But we WILL make a difference. One cup of coffee and one individual at a time.

We will be a business that exists for one purpose. Kingdom business. As a non-profit we will exist for the sole purpose of giving money away in order to change the world.

Sure. You could fill your cup down the road and help turn millionaires into billionaires. Or you can fill your cup at The Well and give people an opportunity to live today because you helped fill theirs.

In brief, The Well will sell coffee to buy water for some of the hundreds of millions of people who don't have access to clean water.

They have selected a coffee with a virtuous profile (but I was secretly hoping for Humphreys Street coffee, and their missions to do good would mesh so nicely). OK, I'm on board with an indie coffeehouse in Green Hills.

• dosecoffeeandtea.com

I ordered a soy cappuccino which, I swear, tasted actually like it was made with the highest-quality actual milk. (Bravo!) Starbucks, which has only vanilla-flavored soy milk, always makes my coffee taste like tofu. One of my companions ordered an iced coffee that was beyond excellent, a strong concentrated beverage that wasn’t watered down with ice but had enough body to stand on its own as a well-crafted drink.

My other companion ordered what I have only seen offered in Florence, Italy, and have been searching for ever since: a Shakerato. Although a traditional caffe shakerato does not have dairy in it, as Dose’s version did, the full-bodied flavor of high-quality espresso shaken over ice was well-executed. I almost thought I was back in Firenze. The only thing missing was the martini glass it is usually served in.

If you're a coffee enthusiast, but not a Portlandia-level java snob, Crema has a new program that might just be right up your alley. Within the space of their newly-expanded shop, they have created the CREMA {Slow Bar} (that's the typography they use). It's "a place to honor and explore coffee, a venue to curate and share our passion for coffee’s abundant nuances and varieties."

They seek to offer the opportunity to explore the nuances of coffee in a deeper fashion, and with the input of some of their master baristas to help guide the investigation.

As I wrote before its opening last year, the retail shop was created to brew and serve the exotic coffees Brad had been acquiring and roasting in small batches, first as a hobby and then to sell at farmers’ markets. Roast Inc. focuses exclusively on single-cup brewing. (No lukewarm coffee urns allowed.) Every cup is brewed individually, using a variety of gourmet methods, like the siphon pot.

The coffeehouse has a low profile compared to many java joints in town, but it has built a loyal following. Customers are so loyal, in fact, that they chipped in with elbow grease when the Woods decided it was time to renovate the space to make it more convivial. Brad called it the "28-Hour Makeover" — it started at 3 p.m. on a recent Saturday and ended at 6 p.m. Sunday. Then everybody shared a family-style barbecue.

To celebrate, Roast Inc. will hold a grand reopening 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. this Saturday, Oct. 29. Brad is bringing out a very special lot from Hawaii, the only U.S. coffee honored by the Specialty Coffee Association of America as one of its 10 international Cups of the Year.

• crema-coffee.com/blog

Next up is the Aeropress brewing process, which they recommend for making the perfect cuppa at home. This little plunger-operated coffeemaker may look like a glorified turkey injector, but the science behind it comes from the same people who invented the Aerobie, the flying disc that holds the Guinness World Record for "longest throw of an object without any velocity-aiding feature." If they can invent something that a human can fling a quarter mile, then mixing water and beans shouldn't be rocket science.

The class is 2-4 p.m. Sunday, March 27. From the official class syllabus:

The CREMA \\ Beve Brew Methods classes are an ongoing series of classes designed to help you achieve great coffee at home. We’ll cut through the confusion and provide you with the tools and the know-how to replicate what we’re doing in the shop. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is! View class schedule here and register today.

Classes are $25 and include a bag of coffee. Gear for the featured method will also be available for purchase. Class sizes are limited so register today!

Just don't try to see how far you can chuck your favorite coffee mug.

• Cole Carter/Gowalla

And harder still for The Jam Coffee House, which has everything but a biblical plague going against it as a location. Situated in a nondescript strip mall right off one of the city's busiest intersections, 12th Avenue South and Wedgewood, it's invisible from one direction and unreachable from the other in heavy traffic. It has little signage to speak of, and its turn-off comes almost immediately once you've passed the shop on the corner selling discount smokes and Hunt Brothers Pizza.

But the place rewards the extra effort that patrons are already making. In fact, it's a measure of how cozy this family-run coffee and tea shop is that you quickly forget the world outside its barred windows — a feature perhaps no other Nashville coffee house can claim.

Brad and Lesa Wood live with their two children in the Crieve Hall neighborhood of Nashville. A few years ago, Brad developed a fascination with coffee roasting. In September, the Woods launched Roast, Inc., with a website where people can sign up to have his carefully selected and roasted beans delivered to their home or office. Roast, Inc., also frequents farmers' markets in East Nashville and west Nashville.

"We've slowly but surely built up this big customer base with delivery," Brad Wood says. "Actually doing a cafe just came out of sheer demand. After about the hundredth person asked, we decided to set up shop."

Roast, Inc., specializes in single-origin coffees, not blends. One of his favorites is Finca Genesis from Costa Rica, which he says has unique brown sugar flavors. "From bean selection to roasting methods, it's a craft thing," he says. "It's not fast."

The cafe will have no coffee urns or air pots. Every cup will be brewed to order, Wood says, using one of four methods: French press, pour-over coffee made using the Clever Coffee Dripper (a nifty gadget that uses a stopper under the cone to regulate brewing time), a dual-siphon apparatus heated by butane, and the old dependable Chemex filter cone system.