Photograph courtesy of Dope Coffee
Coffee and hip-hop are a match made in heaven at Dope Coffee. “Coffee and hip-hop, they’re one and the same,” says co-owner and chief marketing officer Stace Loyd. “It’s notes, it’s flavor wheels, the same as you have a note scale. You punch in an MPC pad, it’s the same as dialing a roast in, EQing, it’s the exact same thing.” And now the brand has literally brought them together in its recently opened roasting facility.
Dope Coffee was founded by Michael and Michelle Loyd in 2020 as a direct to consumer brand. The couple previously owned coffee shops in Wilmington, North Carolina, but when they moved to Atlanta, they wanted to handle the roasting themselves and began fulfilling orders out of their garage. Eventually, they brought family members on board and expanded their offerings. Dope sources its beans mainly from Ethiopia and Guatemala and also sells coffee pods and other coffee-adjacent products like body scrub, syrup, and candles.
Now the community can experience Dope Coffee at their 6,000-square-foot roasting facility, located at 5360 Snapfinger Woods Drive near Stonecrest. “We felt like [this area] was a coffee desert,” Loyd says. “So we wanted to bring premium coffee to the community out here.”
Photograph courtesy of Dope Coffee
The space, which hosted its grand opening on February 18, is part roastery, part event facility, and part venue. There’s a tasting room where Dope will host classes and tastings of their micro batches, and there’s a lounge where they’ll host listening sessions. Artwork by Atlanta artist Chad Livsey hangs on the walls throughout the facility.
One of the most unique features is the recording studio. The brand has already put out an album, Spinach, with Michael rapping on it and which Loyd produced. The album can be streamed by scanning a QR code on Dope’s bag of “Ethiopia Dripp.”
“That’s how we as independent artists support ourselves, grow our company and stay free from the label, so to say,” Loyd says. “We’re working on a joint project right now, Started out of Poverty, where we’ll both be doing both recording and producing.” Loyd also works with rising artists from Atlanta and North Carolina (where he’s from) and hopes to break them of the “starving artist” mentality by shaping them into entrepreneurs as well.
“This is a company of creatives. We built it for us and we built it to help other people like us. So, we want the community to come do anything in the space,” says Loyd. “If you want to just come and have a book club, want to come do a play.” You can even host a town hall here if you wanted to, he says.
You can keep up with their events on Instagram.
