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Paul:

We all have our rituals, those daily rhythms that bookend our days mark transitions and give us permission to slow down or gear up. For a lot of us, those rituals involve a beverage, something we reach for, not just out of habit, but because of how it makes us feel.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the city with Soul shine. On today's show, we're talking about two of those daily rituals with two people who've built their businesses around them. Matt Flinn is the co-owner of Native Coffee Company in Belhaven. He launched the shop during the first week of the pandemic shutdown in 2020 and has built it into a beloved neighborhood gathering spot. And Brandi Carter, she's the sommelier at Elvie's Restaurant and the owner of Luvere Wine Shop at Banner Hall. She moved to Jackson from Meridian in 2016, switched from engineering to the service industry and found her calling in natural wine. One helps you wind up the other helps you wind down, but both are about so much more than what's in the cup or the glass. They're about discovery, about sensory experience, about creating space for people to find what speaks to them and Matt and Brandi, while they're both working to make something that can feel intimidating or exclusive, actually feel welcoming and personal. Let's start with that morning ritual and Matt Flinn at Native Coffee.

I'll tell you that I am a massive lover of coffee. I really, really appreciate the craft that goes into the production of coffee all the way to the final cup. And so coffee means a lot to me, but I know that those of us who really love coffee culture, it might can feel a little insidery sometimes. You know what I mean? So how do you think about making people feel that what you do is accessible when they walk into native coffee?

Matt:

That actually is kind of the premise on why we started Native Coffee in the first place. I had the opportunity to work for Black & White for a bit while I was in North Carolina. Originally, the coffee shop that I worked for and roastery was called Back Alley Coffee and Kyle with Black and White, he and Li joined together after his world Barista Championship run. So Kyle and I, both being from Mississippi, really hit it off and got to learn a ton from him. One of the things that they really try to push home there at Black and White is that if it tastes good, it is good. We really kind of built that into our model here in Jackson and Native is that one of the things that we always say is quality coffee for quality people. We really believe that the people of Jackson are quality people, and we do that with serving just incredibly sourced coffees.

So one of the things that we wanted to do really was to be very knowledgeable coffee, but present it in a way that shows our passion for it rather than, I don't know, to kind of have some sort of special knowledge about something because in the end, it's coffee. We love coffee, but in the end it's a beverage and it's not some sort of special knowledge and revelation that we all have or whatever, but it's something to share instead. And so that's the way that we see it is we want to know a lot about coffee. We want to make it really well, but we really want to share that with other people.

Paul:

What is your coffee routine? I mean, has it changed how you drink coffee and how you enjoy coffee by owning a coffee shop?

Matt:

Owning a business does change everything in so many ways. You have constant access to stuff. I think a lot of people would think, ‘Hey, the guys over at Fertile Ground probably just drink beer all the time,’ but that isn't really the case. I've talked to several of them and have a beer here and there now, but you end up having constant access to something and so you don't drink it as much. With me, I have access to really awesome coffees all the time. So typically my routine is I go in in the morning. A lot of times I have a cappuccino and then I may cup through some coffees, but for the most part, my day looks like coming into work, sitting down, having a cappuccino or a drip coffee, and that's kind of what I use to get into my work. And then I typically am not drinking coffee in the afternoon as much and trying to really chug a lot of water throughout the day. So that's really kind of my thing. I do taste a lot of coffee. I'll taste a lot of espresso on bar, but my sit down routine is really to go in and have a pour over, have a cappuccino, and kind of limit it there, honestly.

Paul:

Yeah, I know the coffee terminology can be a little heady sometimes, and you really have to dig in to understand. So how do you talk to people about what they're tasting without it feeling like a homework assignment? What makes a coffee worth coming back to for you?

Matt:

Have you ever seen the documentary Som in the Bottle? I haven't. So it's incredible. It's a great documentary, but it is about the kind of journey of a sommelier, and it was really interesting because there's one scene where a guy opens up a bottle and he's tasting through all these things, and he's like, so I get a freshly cut garden hose, I get it a freshly opened tube of tennis balls, that kind of thing. And it's just very, very heady. I choose not to go in that direction with a lot of stuff. It's more of what are common experiences that someone has because that's what your brain's trying to connect to anyways. When someone tastes something, they're not going into this catalog that's just been downloaded into their mind. What they're going into is a set of experiences that they've had. And so it may be that one person in the shop as they're tasting that they're like, oh man, I am really experiencing a blueberry going on here.


The next person's going to take a sip of this and go, wow. I mean, maybe it is kind of in that same blueberry vein, but what that really reminds me of is my grandma's pies when we were growing up and it was a blueberry pie and they're getting a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and wow, that's the connection that they have is my goodness, that takes me back to my grandmother's kitchen table. Wow. That coffee takes me back to when I was in college and I went to my first specialty coffee shop and they had whichever coffee, and that kind of goes into my coffee story as well, is when I was in college, didn't have any money, and I had a card that was loaded from the school that had points on it. And the way that I got into drinking coffee was I had just enough I needed to make it through my classes, and I had just enough to get a black coffee at the Starbucks on campus every morning for free with my points.

That's how I got into coffee, didn't like it at all, really moved to North Carolina, meet this guy named Tracy, who's roasting coffee. He introduces me to an Ethiopian called Adida, and Counterculture actually carries this coffee quite often, but one of the signature notes for it was blueberry, and as I went to his place and we're roasting coffee, I remember the day that it hit me where I opened up the container of roasted coffee and I could smell like a fruit note to it. It's like, wow. Especially in comparison to other coffees. And we had a Kenyan and a Rwandan at that time too, and they're very opposite of what this Ethiopian was. And then we brewed it up and sure enough there was blueberry within that coffee, like a very distinct note of blueberry. And that's when I fell in love with coffee is that there could be something, all I had ever experienced was something very bitter, dark charred, that kind of thing. But believe it or not, coffee has the coffee bean, or it's actually a seed has more distinct taste notes that can be recognized within it than the entire wine industry.

Paul:

Well, you have to know a little bit about coffee with what you're working on now, brand new project for you, you're actually roasting coffee in your shop in Jackson, Mississippi.

Matt:

Yeah, we started a roasting program. We're actually sourcing our green coffee through black and white and able to get a lot of the access to coffees that they have as well. Our first blend that we're doing is called Starting Line, and that kind gets to a little bit of the business aspect of it is that our coffee roasting program actually isn't native. It's a whole other company called Soapbox, as in a soapbox racer like a car. That's the new brand that we're building out. And so our first blend is an Ethiopian. It's a washed Ethiopian and also a Colombian coffee that is a coferment.


Paul:

I love a good coferment.

Matt:

Oh yeah, it's a lot of fun. So this coferment is from Sebastian Ramirez, it's called Red Fruits. They fermented it anaerobically for 120 hours with freeze dried strawberries, wine yeast and fruit pectin. And so it has some awesome intense flavors of straw and cherry and chocolate, and depending on how you roast it, you can get a lot of brightness out of it and really push that fruit or you can get into more of the baker's chocolate that's going on with that. It's really cool.

Paul:

I've got to get a bag for myself.

Everybody's got a story to tell. And you're telling a story in Jackson with coffee. What is that story, Matt?

Matt:

Really from the beginning we wanted to establish a shop that was a third place for folks, place where people wanted to come and hang out and enjoy a cup of coffee with a friend to meet up to catch up, but also to have a really great product that they got to enjoy at the same time. And so I mean, at first it was kind of scary. We launched the first week of the shutdown, but with a little bit of ingenuity and hard work, we were able to make it happen and then people came and pulled up to spots and over the years, we just grew even out of the pandemic. Yeah, it's been a success so far. One of the things I think has been integral in the success of Native and how we've interacted with the neighborhood of Belhaven and just Jackson in general is our staff.


We have very little turnover at Native. A lot of folks that come and work there and just want to stay and have really developed their skills in coffee. One of the things that our employees love even more than coffee is people. And so that I think has really contributed to our success and is just the amount of folks that we have working there who love talking with people every morning, love making people's coffee, love serving them, and love doing it day in and day out. We've constantly been trying to learn, develop our skills, use really high quality ingredients, and I honestly, I think that embodies just what we've done here in the south all along in the first place is that you grew up having vegetables in the garden and mom cooking stuff and dad grilling things and all that kind of very food oriented, and that's one thing that I've always loved is taste. And so I really wanted to, my wife and I got together and talked about what we wanted in a shop and it was, Hey, let's have some local milk that we can use and let's source some of the best coffee the world and really bring that to our hometown because that's what we would want to have ourselves.

Paul:

Matt Flinn at Native Coffee Company helping Jackson discover that coffee can taste like a blueberry pie at grandma's table, roasting his own blends now through his new company Soap Box and building a third place where quality people can enjoy quality coffee. There's something about what Matt does that's rooted in energy and starting the day in that first sip, that signals possibility, coffee asks you to engage, to wake up, to get moving.

But after that day of meetings and deadlines and everything else, we pack into our waking hours. Most of us need the opposite. We need that thing that helps us transition, that signals the start of evening, that gives us permission to unwind. And for a lot of people in Jackson, that ritual involves wine and increasingly it involves Brandi Carter. Brandi's story actually mirrors Matt’s in some interesting ways. She didn't start out in wine after four and a half years working for her grandfather's engineering firm in Meridian. She moved to Jackson to wait tables, but once she found wine and really found wine, diving deep into natural wine specifically, she fell hard. And like Matt, she's built a business around sharing that passion around helping people understand that wine, like coffee can be about more than function. It can be about flavor, about origin, about the people who grow and make it.

I am more of a bourbon drinker. I love a good craft beer, and I love a great cup of coffee, so I'm not much of a wine drinker. I hate to admit that. So when I walk into Levure at Banner Hall in Jackson, how do you help me? What's your move? Because I'm going to be a little overwhelmed with all the great product that you have in your store.

Brandi:

So you are my favorite kind of customer, honestly. I set up the shop for a customer like you, because wine is so intimidating, and especially in our market where we're in a closed state, so we don't have as many options. We get used to drinking the same thing. I set up the shop with these discovery walls, so it's like there are little signs in every cup. If you like a Pinot noir, you might like this. If you're a cab soft drinker, you'll like this, that kind of thing. So many grapes out there and they are intimidating. But yeah, it's kind of the job of sommelier to make that less intimidating. One little misconception about the shop is that with it being a rather aesthetic shop, some people come in thinking everything is really expensive, but everything for the most part falls between $14 and $40. We have a few outliers, but we're not on the super pricey side.

Paul:

Hey, well, that's good to know because I think some people think that wine is just too expensive to enjoy. Speaking of enjoying wine, are you a wine drinker, Brandi, do you enjoy wine at home and has having a shop impacted your own wine drinking routine?

Brandi:

I'm actually not much of a wine drinker at home. I have a glass at night. Sometimes. I love a good non-alcoholic cocktail because balance is also really great.

Paul:

Yes, it is, yes it is.

Brandi:

But yeah, no, I try to leave work at work and home at home, and so even if I am having a glass of wine, it's usually not a thinker. It's usually my go-to bottle of a liter of aromatic white wine from Slovenia. That kind of crispy easy kind of thing.

Paul:

Yeah. Tell me more about that. When you say crispy and easy, so that's wine, speak for me, but how do you describe wine to somebody without falling into that kind of typical language? And so what makes wine feel like something to you?

Brandi:

So crispy, easy. Think about that when you're thinking about a beer or a coffee or a bourbon. So a crispy, easy beer, think like a crispy, like Miller Lite or a fertile ground pilsner or something like that, A crispy coffee. Think about your cold brew that has maybe a smidge of a syrup that softens it up kind of thing, but it's cold and easy and crisp. Think about the textural feeling. So it's more so not being intimidated by those words being associated with wine. And I help people associate them with things in their everyday life that they do resonate with and finding that bridge there.

Paul:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. When I think about Levure as a wine shop, there are other wine shops in Jackson, but they don't do exactly what you do. What do you think that you do best?

Brandi:

I think it's helping people find their favorite, whether you like a Pinot noir and you don't know it yet, you've just had some really big bold reds and you're like, I hate it. And you're like, I hate when the mouth feels bitter. That's the kind of thing we love. We love to help people find a wine that is the antithesis of what they hate essentially.

Paul:

I've learned a term in the last year that you'll be very familiar with terroir, and so people ask a grapes, a grape, a bottle of wines, a bottle of wine, not really. What does terroir mean to what you do? And I guess I should back up. Terroir is kind of that taste of where the wine comes from.

Brandi:

That terroir is the most important thing for a shop like this because the bottles are great forward with natural wine. There's not a lot of oak inclusion, and oak kind of masks the flavor of the grapes. So you have a Pinot noir and it's like red cherries and strawberries and really bright, right? Sometimes you'll have a Pinot noir and there's these baking spices that overpower that natural fruit flavor. So the fruit is not at the peak if it's not the tippy top fruit, you don't have a natural wine, that kind of thing.

Paul:

Do you look at the producers that you're working with? Does that help you decide where your wines are going to come from?

Brandi:

Yeah, so we're very producer focused. Oftentimes I'll get really excited about a producer and we'll have eight other wines in the shop. I go to work harvest every year in Oregon for my favorite producer, Limited Edition. I've spent three harvests with them. So yeah, the people behind the wines are just as important to me as the wines themselves that we're selling.

Paul:

We have to back up. You buried the lead there. You go to Oregon and you harvest grapes from your favorite producer every summer. Tell me more about that.

Brandi:

Yeah. When I started getting into natural wine in 2020, I had a bottle that I just couldn't get out of my head, and I went to a sommelier conference in Texas and met that producer and just gush, and I was like, I love everything you do, and she invited me to Oregon to help out whenever, and I was like, okay, cool, cool, cool. So I went out in 2021 and just kind of peeked around and saw Oregon and then, yeah, 23, 24 and 25. I spend some time in Oregon and I get to work harvest and really learn about wine making and every intricacy about wine because the winemaker I work for is a master of wine, which is one of the highest certifications you can get, and she's brilliant and shares all of her knowledge with me.

Paul:

That is fascinating.

Brandi:

I mean, getting that boots on the ground experience and really digging your heels in, it's just, I don't know. It's an immersive hobby sitch that is awesome.

Paul:

Has anything really surprised you about how Jackson drinks wine, the things that they like and the things that they want and the things that they need to really enjoy it?

Brandi:

Yeah, so I've been really surprised with how open Jackson has been to finding new wines. So whenever I switched the program at Elvie’s within the first year from conventional wine to natural wine, we had a good bit of pushback that first year, first couple of years, and so I kind of thought we'd have the same thing with the shop, but people are really excited about knowing more about where their wine comes from, what is going in the bottle that the bottles we have, that's just the native yeast, the grapes themselves, and maybe a smidge of salt for it bottling, but that's it. Versus a lot of wines out there, they're more like a Coca-Cola, a formula. They're adding oak powder and tannin powder. Those are not bad. They're not going to hurt you. They're histamines. They may stuff up your nose a little bit. But it's really cool to see people in Jackson being open to something new like this that I'm so passionate about.

Paul:

Matt Flinn at Native Coffee Company and Brandi Carter at Levure Wine Shop. Two different beverages, two different moments in the day, but the same underlying philosophy. Quality matters. Origin matters, and making people feel welcome matters. Most of all coffee lovers and wine lovers, JXN Food & Wine is March 20th through 22nd, and we'd love to see you there. The event will feature chefs from around the city, state, region, and country showcasing the best in food and beverage over three days. You can get your tickets now. We'll have links in our show notes to this, and Brandi and Matt's work visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

This podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's Capital City. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Rickey Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You can learn more about all of the great things happening in Jackson at our website. It's visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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