Macondo, Stonington
By Dan Pearson
Grown in a remote area of Colombia. Swiftly transported to be roasted in Brooklyn. Brewed in Stonington. Devocion coffee is both a rich gustatory experience and humanitarian effort to provide a future to growers struggling in an area of Colombia riven by internal conflict. Devoción works exclusively with about 400 micro-growers and pays fair trade for beans that are dry-milled in Bogota and shipped by Fed-Ex, so they arrive in New York about ten days later. As the local outpost of Devoción, Macondo in Stonington has developed a devout following of coffee drinkers seeking a jolt of robust flavor with a compelling story behind it. A chalkboard in the store tracks the day a coffee was picked and the day it was roasted. Yet Macondo is more than a coffee shop. It also serves juices, life-affirming detox and rejuvenators, and smoothies in a sleek minimalist space just off Route 1 in the same shopping plaza as the locally-beloved Stonington Pizza Palace. Best of all, if you time it right, you might be greeted at the door by the owners’ Burmese Mountain Dog, Copernico, who rightly so cannot wait for the weather to turn from autumn to a more comfortable sub-arctic. Macondo: Brooklyn cool without the prices and the L train.
