We Make Tasty Things.

We’re a company built out of boots-on-the-ground knowledge. Our team is made up of people who are, first and foremost, baristas, with nearly two decades of experience working in cafes and bars. We are dedicated to making and serving tasty things—it’s what we’re best at, and it’s what we get most excited about. Every drink we make, every coffee we brew, is treated as a dish; deliberately thought through, built, and served.

The Origin.

Hopper & Burr began to take shape in 2014 with a refractometer, an EK-43 sitting on a living room floor, and a desire for creative control. Our founder, Truman, cut his teeth in the burgeoning LA coffee scene and the competitive barista circuit in the mid aughts before deciding to open a cafe.

To get to know the neighborhood and to ease into the whole building-out-an-entire-cafe thing, Hopper & Burr launched in February 2015 as a pop-up inside a small French restaurant. We served coffees there to a small number of locals, many of whom still frequent the Burr today. We also used that time as an incubator to test and try out different coffees, styles of service, and bar flow. All the while, still looking for our permanent space. We got the keys to 202 W 4th St. on our first birthday of the pop-up and began building out what would later become the cafe as it stands today. Which opened in December of 2016.

Robots & Hospitality.

We believe in letting machines do what they do best, so we can do what people do best.

We use precision batch brewers and volumetric espresso machines to handle the tedious, repetitive tasks of coffee making. Machines are great at things like dispensing precise volumes of water at the correct temperature and time.

However, machines can't taste, nor can they ask you about that work thing you were so worried about or about that chess tournament you kid was in last week. By letting our equipment handle the monotonous duties, our team is freed up to focus their technical and sensory parts of our work and providing genuine hospitality.

As a multi-roaster cafe, we curate a rotating lineup of bright, fruit-forward coffees from our favorite roasters the world around. Instead of being locked into roasting our own coffees, we have the freedom to hunt down exactly what we want to serve, allowing you to try something new every time you visit.

Si Potes, Meliora.

If we ever need a coat of arms or a flag or something, it will bear our Latin motto: Si Potes, Meliora. It simply means, “If you can, improve it”.

We know full well we’re not done, not perfect, not infallible. We know there’s always room for improvement. We also know, sometimes before we can make something better, we have to learn something new, or break old habits, or get better data, or new tools, or any number of other things we might experience as limitations.

We believe that slow growth is healthy growth and we’re hoping to be constantly trending toward Meliora.