Aalim Rattansi

Coffee is a stimulant. The same way sugar is a stimulant, cocaine is a stimulant, and someone trying to open your bathroom stall while you’re on the toilet, is a stimulant. A stimulant makes you alert and gives you a jolt of energy. Where coffee differs, however, is that its history until very recently has been inextricably linked to bringing people together. Whether it was Sufi mystics in Yemen drinking coffee to stay up through the night to participate in congregational prayer, or natural philosophers planting the seeds of the Royal Academy of Science in the coffeehouses of London, coffee has been the nectar of life for communities and the exchange of ideas 

Our project aimed to revitalize the communal through line of coffee culture in the face of the isolating and transactional experience of the modern-day coffee shop. The CoffeeHouse puts the brewer at the center of that revitalization for their community.