A green coffee buyer’s guide to Brooklyn, New York 🇺🇸

Partners Coffee is something of an institution in the Brooklyn coffee scene, and as green coffee buyer, Sam Klein is responsible for sourcing coffees from producers around the globe. Sam’s guide to Brooklyn is full of gems from across the city—from parks to theater to his favorite Tex-Mex outside of Texas.

*Sam Klein is green coffee buyer for Partners Coffee in Brooklyn, New York. Photos courtesy of Partners*

Filter: What do you do for fun around Brooklyn?

On a good day I'm spending time in Prospect Park with my dog, having a really good lunch, reading or meeting friends at a brewery, then putting on music and cooking at home. In the months when the weather is tolerable I like running. I used to take a lot more advantage of being in the city, but lately fewer and fewer things are on my radar.

Filter: If a good friend came to visit, where would you be sure to take them?

Something I really appreciate about hosting people here is there's usually no pressure to spend the whole weekend together—often people visit with a semblance of an agenda already in mind.

I have a few favorite spots to take people drinks depending on the neighborhood we're going to be in for dinner. In my neighborhood St. Eves and Barbès both have great cocktails (in a little more upscale and cozy setting, respectively) and a little further away in Carroll Gardens, Clover Club and Leyenda are both amazing—with Bar Great Harry nearby for beers if there is a wait. In North Brooklyn, Tørst is my favorite bar in the city for beers, and basically next door is a speakeasy-esque cocktail bar called Hidden Pearl that I think is the best and most tasteful execution of a tiki bar ever—it's in the back of a ramen restaurant and it captures the escapism of tiki without being excessively caricaturesque. If we're in the city it will really depend on the neighborhood, but I love Amor y Amargo for bitters and amaro-focused drinks.

I have a rotation of favorite spots I like to take visitors to for dinner. I love spicy food, so near me, that means Masalawawa & Sons—Indian cuisine specific to Kolkata in a really beautifully designed dining room—or Ugly Baby, which is an amalgamation of regional Thai dishes.

In the city, my favorite restaurant, I think of any cuisine, is Cosme, which is upscale Mexican. (Don't sleep on the desserts here, especially the tamales.) I also really love Yellow Rose—my wife is from West Texas, and this is the closest thing I've found to proper Tex-Mex outside of Texas, by a mile.

If we're having lunch, my favorite places are actually Mexican too. For All Things Good has an incredible menu of really fresh, vegetable focused dishes centered around fresh masa—tlayocos, tlayudas, and so on. Some dishes have cheese but it's a really great place to take people who are vegetarian. Lastly, Taqueria Ramirez, in Greenpoint, has some really amazing tacos, including what I think are the best tacos al pastor I've ever had. Don't let anyone tell you New York doesn't have amazing Mexican food—I could easily go on.

Filter: What do you like to do to get out of town?

While it's still part of New York City, there are beaches in Far Rockaway you can get to via subway. They're crowded in the summer and the water is cold, but it's relatively clean and it's usually safe to swim. There's also a ferry that will take you there from near downtown Brooklyn, and it's a much more pleasant trip—you start to feel like you're out of the city pretty quickly.

North of the city, the Hudson River Valley is really lovely, and a reasonable day trip with good destinations for hiking, food, and art. You can get to Beacon by train with these really lovely views of the Hudson, and there you can hike, get a decent lunch, and visit Dia, the contemporary art museum, all without really needing a car. If you're a little more mobile there's a huge contemporary sculpture collection in Storm King and some really great farm breweries like Plan Bee or Arrowood Farms.

Filter: What touristy things around Brooklyn are worth the hype?

Food, for sure. You can absolutely find mediocre pizza or bagels here—don't let anybody tell you otherwise—but the best places in any category really are stellar. Otherwise most of the really touristy stuff is mostly in Manhattan. There are excellent museums and performance venues in Brooklyn, but I don't know if they're hyped, per se. You can walk any of the three bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn—the Brooklyn Bridge is the most famous, but the views are really nice from the Williamsburg Bridge, which is far less crowded.

I moved here 7 years ago and still haven't been to the Statue of Liberty, but you can take the Staten Island Ferry to see it up close without actually having to stop. For whatever reason you're actually allowed to buy or take beer on the ferry. I like to stop for beers at a bodega and a sandwich at Pisillo Panini on Nassau Street and have lunch on the ferry. It takes a little while to make the round trip, but it's a good way to see the statue and the skyline.

Obviously performing arts here are unparalleled. There's always interesting or classic shows on Broadway, and lately I've gotten to see some really cool dance and choral performances at Lincoln Center. In Brooklyn itself, Kings Theater is pretty incredible.

Filter: Where are your favorite quiet corners there?

Williamsburg and Greenpoint share an East River waterfront that has undergone a lot of cleanup and beautification where there were previously brownfields. There's a tiny stretch of sandy beach at Marsha P. Johnson Park, just a few blocks from Partners, which is a bit surreal. I'll take lunch there sometimes. At night there's a really stunning view of Manhattan. Transmitter Park in Greenpoint has a similar view. It's really tranquil in a very strange way.

There are some forested parts of Prospect Park that have a little bit of elevation gain—it isn't much, but it's enough to feel like you're in nature.

Filter: What's another coffee shop around there that you really admire, and what about them stands out to you?

Recently I've been really enjoying Principles, which is on 9th Street in Gowanus, close to where I live. It feels more like a community space than a coffee shop, which I'm certain is by design. I also really like Drip, which has a few locations between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Both shops have an excellent rotation of coffees from other roasters, and I can often find coffees on their menus where I know the roaster or producer personally. That's really fun for me. I like being able to support people I know and admire.

Filter: What makes Brooklyn feel most like home to you?

I'm fortunate to have an apartment that's close to Prospect Park—Brooklyn's second largest park and the closest thing we have to intact forest. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the architects of Central Park, but it lacks the crowds of tourists. I grew up in a rural area and have always had immediate access to forest and greenspace, so it makes living in a small apartment feel a lot more comfortable and familiar. I'm spoiled, too—I have a backyard.

Filter: How did you end up in the Brooklyn coffee scene?

I grew up outside of Columbia, South Carolina, and more recently I was living in Greenville, South Carolina. When I was in college I became really interested in food and beverage production, especially beer and coffee. I was studying philosophy and I was lucky to have a professor who taught a very popular class on the philosophy of food, which got me thinking critically about food systems and their design. I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to do after graduating so I started looking for work in coffee or in a brewery. Quickly I found a local coffee roasting company who had crude automation on their equipment—they needed somebody with a basic appreciation of coffee to operate the machine and didn't require any prior work experience. (Hi, it's me.)

I did that for a few years and eventually wanted to move states to work for a company that was more focused on sourcing. For a while nobody wanted to take a chance on me—and I get it, there's probably well qualified people already living in Seattle or Portland who want to roast coffee out there. I saw a job posting for Partners—then it was called Toby's Estate Brooklyn—and actually lied on my application materials and said I lived in Brooklyn already. I flew up for an interview, flew home the same day, and when I was pulling into my driveway I got a call with a job offer for production roasting. I actually packed my car and moved the next day with no plan for where I was going to live. (It's been 7 years, am I going to get in trouble for this?)

Filter: What’s your role at Partners?

My title is green coffee buyer, but we're a small team so my responsibilities are all over the place. I manage our green coffee position and supplier relationships and I also oversee roasting and roasted coffee quality control. My favorite part of the job, by far, is getting to travel regularly within Latin America and Africa and grow our relationships with exporters and producers.

Filter: If you could move to any place in the world just for the coffee scene, where would you move?

I think it would be really rewarding just to be in a smaller city with a less mature specialty coffee scene. I think it's easier to connect with people, and that's something that is really important to me. It's an ugly specialty coffee trope that coffee should strive to change people's minds—I think that's a bit aggressive—but I do think it can be a vector for thinking about value, and values, differently. I love seeing someone connect with a particular coffee and have a new, more positive idea about the place in the world it came from (or a more clear and perhaps sobering understanding of how it arrived in their cup).

Filter: Anything you’d like to add?

Variety is a noun, varietal is an adjective. Castillo is a variety; a lot made of 100% castillo is a castillo-varietal lot.

Fermentation is anaerobic by definition; when you remove the oxygen from an environment it's an anoxic environment.

Elevation refers to points on earth's surface; no coffee farms are at altitude.

Tell your friends.

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Based in Brooklyn, Partners Coffee operates 4 cafes and 1 roastery across New York City.

Partners - Williamsburg

Partners - West Village

Partners - LIC

Partners - West 52nd

Food & Beverage