Blake Burell, store manager of Revelator Coffee Company. Photo by Surabhi RaoSurabhi Rao - Features Editorfeatures@insideuab.com
Revelator Coffee Company is the kind of place that I truly wish I liked, because of the unique atmosphere and interesting conversation. In one word, my initial impression of the place was confusion.
I was confused by the sheer volume of people, particularly UAB students, walking in and out to spend a minimum of three dollars to buy good-looking coffee. I was confused by the menu, which looked like a short-answer exam because it provided so little information.
Current store manager Blake Burell helped explain the menu.
“Let’s say that coffee in general equates to shoes,” Burell said. “What we offer as a shoe store is a really nice selection of leather boots. It’s like a leather boot shop, so it’s really nice. If you come in looking for sneakers, that’s not really what we do.”
Still, I sat in this “high-quality” coffee shop for a mere two hours and saw a wide variety of people walk through, many of whom definitely did not qualify as the coffee fanatics that the barista believed could benefit from being here.
I spent $4.95 on a mocha that looked as if it came straight off of a Pinterest board, but tasted bitter and lacking in chocolate. I love coffee, but the coffee itself was not up to par with the description provided by Burell. Revelator rotates its coffee beans and uses beans only from a single origin.
For the next few months, the coffee company will be using Lafila from a farm in Costa Rica. Last month, it was from a place in Guatemala. I could say that I got a slight sense of the taste he described with precision, but I am not sure that I got the high-end experience described.
“I understand that this specific shop is not for everyone,” Burell said. “What we specialize in here is a higher-quality product, when it comes to just pure coffee, and that’s because we put a lot of our resources toward developing it.”
In addition to the mocha, I received a sample espresso that tasted like typical black coffee and did not offer the alluring smell that someone would expect in a coffee shop. In fact, the whole place smelled as sterile as it looked.
Walker Blackston, who has worked as a barista at Revelator three months, believes in the expressed goals of the coffee shop.
“Depending on what you’re going for, the Starbucks market is for quantity,” Blackston said. “And we focus more on details and quality.”
The Birmingham branch is one of seven coffee shops now, and the franchise is still expanding in the Southeast region. The machines they use include the Chem-Ex brewer, which is primitive and dates back to the 1930s, but offers flexibility in usage. My espresso was made with this, and it was impressive in comparison to the machines that are used at mainstream stores, but the taste was so mediocre in comparison to the description that I could not get myself to like it.
Burell apparently had the same idea as me about the store.
“I’m tired of the pretentious side of the coffee industry,” Burell said. “This shop lends itself to people that are pretentious. The menu is very accurate. [It] is kind of off-putting, and I want coffee to be as approachable as we make it. There’s this thing about coffee where the hardest challenge we face is education... Coffee is moving so fast that you have to be a fanatic to keep up with it, and people are fanatics.”
Other customers had quite positive reviews, such as Yona Andrews, a junior in international studies.
“I heard about this place two weeks ago and have been coming here every Sunday,” Andrews said. “My friend created a bucket list for all the cool coffee shops she wanted to visit in Birmingham. It’s really relaxing. I like the environment. Places like Starbucks are a little bit crowded, but a place like this I can get lost in my studies when I just want to get off campus. Being at UAB, everything is on the Southside, and sometimes students want to experience the Northside but things other than the nightlife don’t bring you over here, and that’s what Revelator does.“
Despite the disappointing coffee, I would say that this place is definitely one to visit during your stay in Birmingham, as you will surely be intrigued.
