http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/travel/a-hot-coffee-culture-in-salt-lake-city.html 2014-11-11 22:59:39 A Hot Coffee Culture in Salt Lake City Small-batch roasters, siphon-brewed coffees and nitro-poured cups in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. === In a place known more for proximity to powdery ski slopes than perfect espresso pulls, it’s easy to assume Salt Lake City couldn’t breed advanced coffee geek culture. Yet the high-desert city has become the kind of town where some cafes sell 12 ounces of roasted coffee beans for $50 and teach customers about the benefits of drinking coffee without cream or sugar. The current coffee pioneers, who overwhelmingly prefer small-batch, direct-sourced light roasts, are working their trade everywhere from unassuming warehouses in South Salt Lake to one new spacious shrine to modern coffee drinking in downtown’s Central Ninth neighborhood. Some fire up drum roasters — forcing raw, green coffee beans to adopt hues of toffee, caramel and rich earth — while others operate lab-like coffee makers that seem capable of extracting a nuanced flavor from sand. Coffee roasting isn’t new in this city of more than 191,000 residents; Salt Lake Roasting Company and Millcreek Coffee Roasters have been doing it for decades. But the emerging coffee craze is more closely intertwined with the farm-to-table movement, said Joseph Evans, the tattooed founder of Squeeze into Nobrow’s compact, minimalist west-side coffee shop in the Central Ninth neighborhood or spread out on its concrete patio, where customers sip cups of brewed-to-order coffee and play chess in the afternoon sunshine. The cafe carries a rotation of coffees from well-known national roasters, including Intelligentsia Coffee and Ritual Coffee Roasters, as well as locally based One large Salt Lake City block from Nobrow, the long-anticipated Both Publik and Nobrow brew on On the University of Utah campus, The husband-and-wife owners John and Yiching Piquet are still the only people who work at Housed in a 1918 meatpacking plant that later became a creamery, the