Good Buzz: Rise Up Coffee
Sauntering through his café and coffee roastery in Easton, Maryland, Tim Cureton looks like he might just be the unofficial mayor of the Eastern Shore. With a cup of black house roast in hand, he’s greeted with smiles, peace signs, and pats on the back from an endless stream of customers, all of whom have gathered here to be a part of his growing empire—Rise Up Coffee—which over the last 14 years has arguably become one of the coolest companies in Delmarva.
But even as he becomes a busier man by the minute, Cureton remains both humble and generous with his time, casually stopping to chat with the baristas or talk shop with a group of government employees who huddle around a communal table. It’s clear that, after all these years, he sees these folks as the ones who made this whole thing possible.
“We are the Eastern Shore’s local coffee shop, and we’re quite proud of that,” says Cureton. “We build these cafes for the people and the communities, and we would be nothing without them.”
If you live near Route 50, chances are you’re a part of this loyal Rise Up following, with the company’s hip coffee houses now peppered up and down the peninsula, their bags of beans found in a growing number of grocery stores and restaurants, and their brand embraced as a household name. But the local chain wasn’t always a sprawling archipelago between brackish counties and the beach. In fact, the company has pretty humble beginnings, which seems to have only added to the allure.
In 2005, Rise Up started as a tiny drive-through coffee trailer in small-town St. Michaels, Maryland, posted up in the parking lot of the local grocer Graul’s Market, where it still sits today, often causing minor traffic jams along the edge of Talbot Street. Cureton got the idea to start his own brew business while traveling home from the Peace Corps, stopping in multiple coffee-growing countries along the way and learning the rituals that come with drinking it. More than anything, though, he was inspired by the source itself.
“If there’s any superhero in the coffee world, it’s those who grow the coffee,” says Cureton, just back from a recent trip to Costa Rica, where he sources some of his beans. “Our company credo is ‘Grown by friends, roasted by friends, enjoyed by friends.’ Our farmers are legitimately our friends, as are the people that work here, and we’ve never shied away from the fact that our customers absolutely are, too. In St. Michaels, we’ve seen the same folks on a daily basis—sometimes multiple times a day—for 14 years.”
So when he got back to the states, Cureton took out a $16,000 business loan and began importing organic, fair trade coffees from a number of Central American countries through the pioneering Seattle’s Best coffee roastery in Washington, well before “organic” and “fair trade” were even mainstream buzz words, especially on the Eastern Shore.
And yet if you build it, they will come, and they did—so much so that within only a few years, Rise Up needed to open their own roastery. Today, the Easton headquarters, located in a former gas station on Dover Road since 2012, is still where all of the company’s coffee— from the beans brewed in every café to each bag sold in Whole Foods or MOM’s Organic Markets—is roasted and packaged on site. Two large San Franciscan roasters steam away in the back under the red neon C-O-F-F-E-E sign, and all around sit giant sacks of raw green coffee beans, 150 pounds apiece, stacked to the chest as if waiting for a flood.
And in a way, there will be one, as each day a line of patrons wraps around the inside of the coffee shop and oftentimes out the door. Mosey into any location at any hour— like the two Salisbury hubs that opened in 2007 and 2015, just a stone's throw from Salisbury University, the alma mater of Cureton and head roaster Noah Kegley— and you’re bound to bump into a crowd of caffeine fiends, cut from every cloth. Artists mingle with farmers, who rub elbows with teachers, who wait for lattes with police officers, who share a table with lap-top toting students and hipsters covered in tattoos.
“If coffee is anything, it’s about connections,” says Cureton, seeing the cafés as a sort of “third place” for people between home and work. “We try to serve as hubs for our communities…and the Eastern Shore roots for Rise Up. As we grow, there’s this incredible [shared] sense of ownership.”
Of course, adding their Mad Eggs alter-egos to the mix in 2013 didn’t hurt, either, with many Rise Uppers arriving just for the playful riffs on comfort food classics like egg and chorizo burritos, banana splat yogurt bowls, and smoked salmon grilled cheese bagel sandwiches. Keeping with their core values, Cureton tries to use local and organic ingredients whenever possible. All of the company’s milk, for instance, comes from the grass-fed cows of Nice Farms Creamery in nearby Federalsburg.
His 125-person team undoubtedly helps as well, with an eclectic, cheerful crew that treats each customer like a long-lost pal. “These guys are local celebrities!” exclaims Cureton with a laugh, and they’ve rightfully played a part in drawing younger generations to come to or stay in a place where life is slow and job opportunities are few and far between.
“Customers recognize the sense of family that follows us behind the bar every morning,” says Jess Hensley, assistant manager in Cambridge, whose fiancée, Alli Ensmenger, manages the Easton café. “Without fail, Rise Up reminds me of how important it is to spread a little love whenever possible.”
And over this last year or so, Cureton has continued to do just that with an impressive expansion. “We didn’t go seeking out such rapid growth, but we found these gots-to-do locations that we just couldn’t pass up,” he says. “We always wanted to be down in Ocean City, and Cambridge one day, and now Rehoboth. I just didn’t foresee it all happening within one calendar year.”
That’s right—the company has opened five new locations in the last 15 months, even hopping across the Chesapeake Bay for the first time to set up shop in Annapolis and Edgewater. And they don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. “When you have a team like ours, the idea of treading water or standing still is an impossibility,” says Cureton. “We have such momentum, such great energy, and yes, also, thankfully, the demand.”
In March, the company will open its first location in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where there will also be an expanded Mad Eggs food menu and—in other firsts—a liquor license. Think coffee cocktails, coffee-liqueur smoothies, and their own takes on classic Bloody Marys and mimosas. Later in the year, they will also break ground again in Easton, moving the current café and retail space across the street to expand the roasting operation and increase capacity in the original digs. “I don’t want to taunt the coffee gods,” says Cureton when asked by how much, but already, Rise Up has gone from roasting 700 pounds of coffee a week to now cranking out up to 6,000.
One of the most important things for Cureton in the midst of all this growth is to maintain the same Rise Up ethos he established in that tiny trailer all those years ago. “It’s about that quality of life,” he says. “We’ll continue to grow, but truly, nothing will change. We’re always going to be the same Rise Up Coffee.”
That being said, there’s a lot on the horizon and Cureton must get back to work, finalizing the menu for Rehoboth and pouring over the new renderings for Easton. “We accomplished quite a bit in 2018, but we’ve got our goals set for 2019,” he says. “It’s going to be really fun to see what happens next - I think we’re just getting started.”
Learn more at riseupcoffee.com and follow on Instagram @riseupcoffee
