Keeping Calm at Jittery Joe’s

By Al Levine / STAFF

You never know when fate will tap you on the shoulder and announce: This is your destiny.

For Kim and Ben Collins it happened at a bicycle race in Athens a few years ago. Ben competes on an amateur cycling team and follows the pro sport. There was an endearing team in Athens that day, sporting the logo of Jittery Joe’s Coffee. The cyclists even sold coffee out of their cars after events.

Yeah, the Collins’ even liked the home brew.

So there it was on the website last year: Franchises available. The couple had moved to Georgia from California. Kim was studying law at Mercer. Ben was working for a software firm in Norcross. And little Mason arrived six months ago to pull his mom from academia for awhile.

The staff at Jittery Joe's Coffee in Alpharetta includes, from left, Stachella Craig, franchise owner Kim Collins, Karen Carr and Carissa Williams. (AL Levine / STAFF)

The coffee franchise seemed like a brilliant move.

It seems to be getting smarter all the time. The Collins family opened their Jittery Joe’s Coffee franchise Aug. 20 in the new Crabapple Station shopping center and the rest will be java-sipping history.

Their location, surrounded by new homes and townhomes in a corner of Milton a half-mile from Milton High School, seems destined for success even though there’s a national chain just to their south.

“Now law school may be put on hold indefinitely,” Ben said.

“The biggest appeal, I think, is that it is going to be the community coffee house,” Kim said. “It’s going to be the café that all these people can walk to on Saturday and Sunday morning, sit down and read a free paper, instead of having to spend $5 on a New York Times, and be able to walk home.

“We already have several people who will stand and order drinks and say ‘See that house right there, that’s where I live.’ Or another woman said ‘I’m moving into that house in September.’ So we already have a lot of people excited about being able to walk to the gym, being able to walk to the coffee house, being able to walk to dinner. I think the vision for the Crabapple area is that it is pedestrian friendly and community oriented.”

Jittery Joe’s has been open two weeks and already it has the local art guild meeting there and a youth ministry meeting every Tuesday morning.

It’s not just the atmosphere the Collins’ have created. This coffee, it turns out, has a faithful following rivaled only by that other Athens favorite, the Georgia Bulldogs.

Jittery Joe’s Coffee started in Athens in 1994 as a night-time coffee shop to serve the underage crowd that was going to the 40-Watt nightclub, where REM and the B-52s got their start. Eventually, it went 24 hours.

The name was inspired by a Simpsons episode that spoofed the movie Thelma and Louise, which had a diner in it called Jittery Joe’s. The guy who started the coffee shop found that the name wasn’t registered as a federal trademark and he pounced on it.

What Jittery Joe’s followers believe sets it apart from the plethora of coffee shops on nearly every corner of America is what’s in the cup.

“Our coffee is clearly the best coffee that’s out there,” Bob Googe, the chain’s franchisor, said. “We’ve never lost a blind taste test. We only roast the top one percent of beans in the world. It’s actually roasted in Athens, Ga. We roast it on Tuesday and Kim and Ben have it on Thursday. It is never more than two weeks old in the store. It’s about as fresh as you can get it. It never shows up pre-ground. It shows up as whole beans so it keeps its freshness longer. They’ll grind it 60 seconds before they put it in the brewer.”

Oh, yeah, you should understand that Jittery Joe’s approaches its coffee as seriously as the folks in the Napa Valley produce wine. Listen to its description of a cup of Wake n’ Bake: “Smokey, medium bodied, heavy aroma, lively finish.”

“The less amount of time between grinding and getting water on it, the more flavor you get in a cup,” Googe said. “Once coffee is ground, a lot of the aromatics that are in the coffee begin to escape and evaporate. If you can get water on top of it quickly you really capture that flavor in the cup itself.

“Making coffee is actually very close to wine making. We cuff our coffees, which is you get a bunch of different coffees and you spoon the coffee with a lot of grounds into your mouth cold and spit it out, just like you’d do if you were a vintner.”

Want espresso? It’s hand-crafted.

“The espresso bean is ground, just as you order it,” Kim said. “There’s a science to making sure the grind is fine or too coarse and we time all of our espresso shots to make sure that they’re pulled at an optimal time frame for the best flavor profile of that and when your milk is steamed. We spend a lot of time training.”

Ben and Kim plan to open a second location next spring on North Point Parkway near Haynes Bridge Road.

Kim is sold on the product. “The coffee, I think, is better [than anywhere else],” she said. “Not you’re average joe.”