Not Just Coffee
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
My name is Josh Allen. I'm the manager of Not Just Coffee at the 7th Street Market. I've been managing here for about a year and a half and have been a part of the company for three years now. Since I moved to Charlotte a few years ago, I've been very happy to be a part of this company.
I’d say that Not Just Coffee is the highlight of the Charlotte coffee scene for me. Even before I started working here, the environment of all the shops—and Not Just Coffee specifically—was always inviting. The baristas were always nice. The coffee is top notch no matter what. Even three years later, I brew it at home. When it comes down to quality, I’d say that Not Just Coffee is probably the leader of Charlotte in my opinion.
There’s one specific memory that comes to mind from when I was six years old, staying at my grandparents’ house. I woke up whenever they did, and the first thing they would always do was put on the coffee. I remember asking my grandma, “Yo, gotta try that real quick.” And I did—and I hated it at the time. I hated it. For so long I never tried it again.
But I started working at a café in my hometown of Forest City, and I got reintroduced to coffee that way because we made coffee drinks there. That’s what ignited my love for it. Now that I had an older palate, I knew instantly that working in coffee is what I wanted to do with the better part of my life. I have my hobbies, but I make coffee all the time. I love trying new methods, new beans, new shops. It’s a big part of my personality. I love trying new things and meeting new people. A lot of my friends that I have now in Charlotte are because I work in the coffee scene. It’s perfect for me, honestly.
For SHOUT! 2026, we’re doing a Cheerwine espresso soda. I was introduced to the concept of espresso sodas a few years ago, and me and my brother have had fun trying different sodas with espresso just for fun. Some of them turn out actually pretty good. Some things you think would be off‑putting—like espresso and Coke—are actually very good. Sundrop and espresso was actually very good. But Cheerwine—for me—we tried that one, and that was the one that stuck out to us personally. Cheerwine was founded in Salisbury. We have a lot of tied memories to it, and it combines my childhood memories and my adulthood memories: Cheerwine when I was younger and then drinking coffee now. Bringing the two things together has been very special to me.
We did it a couple years ago at another shop that I worked at for Not Just Coffee, but I hadn’t had it since then. We had it a couple weeks ago trying to figure out a good Shout drink, and I was like, “Oh, this is the one. This is the one we need to bring back,” because of all those memories it brings back.
For me, the reason I’ve stuck around coffee for this long is… I can’t give a one‑word answer. Consistency is one thing. Trying new things is one thing. And I also don’t drink alcohol or anything, so it’s kind of funny when we talk about coffee versus my friends talking about beer. They can get all these certain notes out of lagers and other stuff, and I can spin it around and talk about coffee the exact same way—trying new roasting methods, single‑origin, co‑fermented beans. There are so many different options.
The thing that’s kept me sticking around is that I love the consistency of it—not sticking to a schedule, but being able to wake up and come to a shop every single day and make coffee for people. It’s been the better part of my life for the last few years. I’ve met a lot of my friends because of it. We have coffee group chats. We send beans that we try. If we’re traveling out of state, we send new shops to go to. We have a Google Map list of places all over the world so if we’re in a certain place, we can try a new shop. It’s good for my soul and my heart that I get to make coffee every day and stick to that.
Overall, the best piece of advice I can give for someone trying to get into coffee or training as a barista is one word: patience. If you’re not patient, your coffee isn’t going to be as good as you want it to be. When you’re pulling a shot, you dial it in at a certain gram, a certain yield, a certain time. If it goes even two seconds over—over‑extracted—or a couple grams under, you’re going to get a way different shot than you got a few minutes ago because you’re not paying attention.
Same thing with a V60. When you’re brewing it, you want to make sure, for example, at a minute and 50 seconds, you’re pouring to 350. If you pour to 360 or even 340, it’s going to taste way under‑extracted or over‑extracted depending on how you did it.
So overall, when I’m training people, patience is always important. And it leads back to where you got the beans from—learning about the farmer, learning about the country it was planted in. Those things are key for me. If you waste beans, you’re going to feel bad about it because someone did this specifically for you, and it got all the way from Colombia to Charlotte, North Carolina.
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