The South Side's Innovative Experimental Station Could Get A New Coffee Shop

By Stephen Gossett in Food on Aug 12, 2016 4:23PM

Build Coffee cold brew / Photo: Alex Jung

For ten years, the Experimental Station has been hatching ambitious plans from their South Side home base, nestled down a small Woodlawn side street. The building acts as incubator for three progressive journalism enterprises plus a community bike shop with youth mentoring—not to mention the Station’s own extensive food outreach programs. But it may the building’s future tenant—much more modest at first blush—that ties everything together: a coffee shop.

Build Coffee is the project of Hannah Nyhart and Bea Malsky. Both are news veterans of the South Side Weekly, which along with Invisible Institute and City Bureau make up the aforementioned trio of community-empowered journalistic initiatives. Build Coffee, the new shop for which they’re fundraising through Kickstarter, aims to provide a sense of place and community to anchor the foot traffic of those organizations, and the neighborhood at large.

“There’s an ambition to be, in a sense, more than a coffee shop, but still be all the things a café should be,” Nyhart told Chicagoist. The Experimental Station, “has been around for more than a decade, but it has really shifted over that time. You now also have three really exciting non-profits. Looking at that set of organizations and the work coming out of them, it seemed really clear that there should be a gathering space and a public area within the building.”

Some of the planned comforts intended to create that environment include a curated library of used and regional, independent-press books, plus film screenings throughout the year. As for the coffee itself, Build settled on fair-sourced roaster HalfWit after traversing an overflowing market.

“It’s an embarrassment of riches when you’re looking for a roaster in Chicago,” Nyhart said. “There’s such a proliferation of really cool, small roasters now.”

There is a history of such third-space culture at the site. The late, lamented Backstory Café once shared Experimental Station’s address, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave.; and it still resonates in the neighborhood. Build sells cold-brewed coffee at the weekly 61st Street Farmers Market, at 61st and Dorchester, and Nyhart notes that visitors still occasionally bring up Backstory at their booth—a good indicator that demand for such a café never really dissipated.

To that end, Nyhart says she’s “totally overwhelmed” with the fundraising response from supporters. “It’s been incredible. The first pledge was my little sister because I told her to. But some of the early givers were people I only know from the Farmers Market. The point of the Kickstarter is to spread the base feeling of ownership as far as possible.” It’s an impulse that would be right at home in Experimental Station.

Here's a video detailing the project: