Cat & Cloud Coffee

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Our 10-year anniversary was last week, and over the next few weeks we're wrapping up our history series.This week is all...
10/06/2026

Our 10-year anniversary was last week, and over the next few weeks we're wrapping up our history series.

This week is all about the Best Friends Club: the heart of our coffee sourcing and a core expression of our value of connection. It started about a year after we opened our first café on Portola in Santa Cruz.

The Best Friends Club had always been an idea, but it really began on our first trip to Honduras in 2017. We wanted to work with farmers who were young in specialty, partners who could grow alongside us.

Our first new partners were Damien Chavez & Wilson Morales. Visiting Damien, Chris & Jared saw he was using his brother's depulper (the machine that removes the fruit from the coffee seed), and it wasn't in great shape.

They both had the same thought: "How much is a depulper?" Benjamin Paz, our friend and connector to partners in Honduras, said around $500. A new one would make a huge difference for Damien over a year, at a cost our café could make back quickly. So we went into town and bought him one. (This photo is that moment with Damian).

From the start, we felt connected to Honduras. What we were doing was about far more than coffee, and the impact on the people and families there was palpable.

Fast forward to 2020: the pandemic hit, and Honduras was struck by two hurricanes back to back. We'd grown to five partners, most of the world had stopped buying coffee, and two of our partners lost their homes.

Jared wanted to raise both awareness and support. He proposed a fund where $1 from every lb of coffee sold would go to our partners in Honduras. Charles and Chris loved the idea.

Our hope is that people get to know partners like Damien & Wilson: put a face to a name, look forward to tasting their coffee, and recognize that at the heart of everything we do, there are people. It takes many, many hands just to have coffee to drink, and so much intention and care for it to taste good.

We're proud of the Best Friends Club. When you buy a bag with its logo, you've helped support infrastructure, quality, literal emergency surgery, home rebuilds, labor offset, and more.

Thank you to everyone who came by the cafes and partied with us yesterday 🎉 and to our entire team for making the celebr...
10/01/2026

Thank you to everyone who came by the cafes and partied with us yesterday 🎉 and to our entire team for making the celebration happen from open to close, to the ten year birthday bash yesterday evening. We'll be sharing a full recap within the next week.

We're beyond grateful for the love, support, the fun photos, 1&1s, doodles, and stories you all have been sharing with us to celebrate.

Looking forward to what the next ten years has in store!

Tomorrow, on our ten year birthday, come get a free 1&1 (or espresso), on us.Never had a 1&1? It's a shot of espresso an...
09/29/2026

Tomorrow, on our ten year birthday, come get a free 1&1 (or espresso), on us.

Never had a 1&1? It's a shot of espresso and a macchiato made with the same shot (split), served side by side. This drink has a special place in Cat & Cloud history.

Back in Chris & Jared’s barista competition days, their coffee had to score high both as straight espresso and as a cappuccino. A single macchiato is a pretty close stand-in for a double cappuccino, so that's how they tasted their espresso as they dialed: shot, then macchiato, until they landed on that perfect sweet spot between exciting and balanced. (It worked. Jared and Chris both went on to reign as best baristas in the Western US and make national finals.)

Fast forward slightly to a packed event Chris & Jared were working circa 2000’s-ish. Chris & Jared had ran out of individual saucers from how busy it was, so Jared started balancing an espresso and a macchiato on a single cappuccino saucer. A guest asked: “what is that called?” and Jared and Chris came up with the name on the spot, pulling a term they had only been playing around with at the time: "it’s a one & one."

Many other guests kept ordering the 1&1 that day. Shortly after, when they posted a video about the drink on their blog, it hit nearly 2,000 views overnight, and the next day someone in England asked to put it on their menu. It’s now a global beverage.

Sip the shot first, then see what milk does to it. Same coffee, two ways. If you haven’t had a chance to try it, tomorrow is a great chance to do it! Come by and hang with us.

Our birthday week is here 🎉 Here's how we're celebrating.Tomorrow, Monday 9/28, we're kicking things off with a special ...
09/27/2026

Our birthday week is here 🎉 Here's how we're celebrating.

Tomorrow, Monday 9/28, we're kicking things off with a special birthday episode of the Cat & Cloud podcast featuring Chris, Jared, and Charles as they reflect on the entire Cat & Cloud journey. We have an important announcement from Chris in this episode for podcast listeners, so you won't want to miss this one!

From Wednesday, 9/30 to Friday, 10/2 we're pulling our very limited release TruBaca blend as espresso. Stop by on our birthday-day, 9/30 to try it for free — we're serving free espresso and 1&1's all day at all cafes!

Finally, a reminder about our free birthday party is this Wednesday, Sept. 30th, at 5:30pm. Spots for this filled up quickly — if you are on the waitlist, we do encourage you to swing by! We have an occupancy limit, but won't turn anyone away at the door as long as we're not over capacity.

Link in bio to snag a spot on the waitlist for our birthday bash. Hope to see you around this week!

September 30th, 2016. Nine team members, our first cafe location built at Portola, and high energy. We opened our doors ...
09/25/2026

September 30th, 2016. Nine team members, our first cafe location built at Portola, and high energy. We opened our doors for the first time. 
 
For our 10-year anniversary, we’re continuing our buildout series. Part 2 is all about opening: opening day, our opening team, and opening vision & culture. All of which has carried us to where we are today. 
 
One of the most intimidating things we’ve ever done was give our first orientation: speaking about a way of doing business, a mission, values, and standing in front of people who are receiving parts of your soul for the first time. We launched with nine team members knowing that in order to survive in Santa Cruz, we would need to pursue growth pretty aggressively. 
 
This set the bar and need for trust, people development, and alignment from the beginning. We have always believed in external education, pursuing better, and never assuming that we know it all (nobody can). This is where our foundational culture of sending our leaders to the Disney Institute (see our recent podcast episode about this!) and our team members (yes, every OG team member) to origin to meet our coffee producing partners and learn about coffee process from the source. 
 
We’ve grown too big to send every team member to origin now, but our leaders still go annually, and the culture lives on to this day. 
 
All of these values spawn from our mission to inspire connection by creating memorable experiences. There’s no better way to set a culture than to lead through physical experiences. Is it more expensive? Heck yeah. Has it been hard to maintain at times? Absolutely. And we still wholeheartedly believe that it’s been 100% worth it every time, which is why we commit to having these trips every year. 
 
Our mission still lives on from these roots, and we can’t wait to create more memories with y’all.

As part of our 10-year anniversary, we’re continuing our history series with a several-part buildout series — all of bri...
09/23/2026

As part of our 10-year anniversary, we’re continuing our history series with a several-part buildout series — all of brick and mortar cafes, to people and culture.
 
Today we’re covering Portola, our first location, and the buildout that turned an old tire shop into our first roastery and cafe. 
 
Years of building coffee community in Santa Cruz paid off here. We met Nico, our general contractor, and the Fridays, our first landlords, while serving them coffee behind the bar at Verve in our early barista days. 
 
The Fridays had bought the building on Portola. It was funky and small: an old tire shop that had been rebuilt many times over and was sitting empty as run-down offices. The ceilings were low, the square footage was tight, and it was split level. But it was zoned for roasting, and it was a standalone building with its own small parking lot, which is rare around here. 
 
Jared drew 4-5 different blueprints, and we worked with Nico to figure out how to turn the space into what Portola became. This required us to completely demolish and rebuild from the studs up. We did the demolishing ourselves and helped out in whatever ways we could to save money. 
 
Ultimately it took 16 months to get through permitting (Santa Cruz is known for slow processing). That’s part the reason we ran out of money and turned to a Kickstarter to fund our first roaster, Franky. Our community came through, and you can still find some of our backers’ signatures on the espresso machines at Portola and Abbott Square. 
 
If you’re a barista or work in hospitality, know that almost all of our connections came from those small moments of care and connection. We realized our mission “Inspire connection by creating memorable experiences” was a living and breathing proof of our existence.

Part 3 of our 10 year history series: the podcast and popup days, before the brick and mortar, and the many, many hands ...
09/19/2026

Part 3 of our 10 year history series: the podcast and popup days, before the brick and mortar, and the many, many hands that got us moving. 
 
2014/2015(ish). Chris and Jared were working at Dune Coffee in Santa Barbara, sitting in Jared’s car with a cheap recorder, trying to start a coffee podcast. Their friends (and bosses) Julia and Todd at Dune Coffee had encouraged them to go for it. 
 
This is when their friend Patrick Melroy knocked on the window and insisted they come see his podcast studio. He showed them everything it took to get on iTunes and SoundCloud (a move that eventually got them #1 in New & Noteworthy). 
 
Shortly after launch, they took a camping trip with Charles and decided to pursue a real business plan. Todd and Julia were so supportive that they let Chris and Jared keep their jobs and start roasting after shifts. 
 
With the podcast out and the webstore live, they roasted and filled orders after their shifts at Dune, on Dune’s Giesen, with sample roasts on an SF-1 from San Franciscan Roasters. The first coffees were an Ethiopian from Limu and a Costa Rican from the Aguilera Brothers, both sourced through Cafe Imports. Next came a Honduran from Pedro Moreno, thanks to a long-standing relationship with Benjamin Paz. Jared helped connect Dune to Benjamin along the way, too. 
 
Charles would drive down to Santa Barbara to help roast, pack, and ship. Tanner Roark (our first team member) made the same drive from Santa Cruz to volunteer. Once the SBA loan came through, they started work on our first Portola location in Santa Cruz. When they needed to be there full time, their friends at Vertigo let them roast in their space, which cut the drive to 1.5 hours instead of 4 hours down and back. 
 
It was people like Patrick, Julia, Todd, Benjamin, Tanner, and companies like Cafe Imports, La Marzocco, San Franciscan, San Vicente, and Dune, who got us moving and we are so grateful.

In case you missed some of our most recent history posts — TruBaca is the "ship name" of two of Cat & Cloud's founders, ...
09/17/2026

In case you missed some of our most recent history posts — TruBaca is the "ship name" of two of Cat & Cloud's founders, Jared Truby and Chris Baca.

As part of our ten year anniversary celebration, we're blending their passion for the Honduran coffee community as well as bright, complex fruitiness in this (very limited) Best Friends Club blend — 60% from Best Friends Club member Nelin Guzman, and 40% from Ethiopia's Mulish washing station.

This one really won't be around for very long, and is exclusively available to our cafe and webstore guests. This is our thank-you letter to the growers and guests that have made coffees like these possible.

Stop by our cafe or snag a bag online. We'll also be pulling this one as (free) espresso in the cafes on our birthday-day, September 30th!

Hand drawn doodles and notes have always been deeply ingrained in our culture, beyond just brand imagery. From those sur...
09/15/2026

Hand drawn doodles and notes have always been deeply ingrained in our culture, beyond just brand imagery. From those surprise "good morning! 🐱"'s underneath the cup on saucers, to silly little scenes on burrito bags, to sharpied cats + clouds on every (yes, every) online order invoice (guests and coffee partners alike). Human connection goes beyond just the eye-to-eye moments.

We can't help but owe a huge part of this culture to our long-time friend and the artist our OG logo: Julia Mayer of Dune Coffee. Her delightfully wonky little characters make us laugh and give us permission to pay it forward in ballpoint pen and sharpie with our own original scribbles. You'll still see Julia's cat + cloud characters floating around on our coffee bags, cafe signs, and website.

Julia whipped up some extra little drawings for us to enjoy for our ten year anniversary, and it only made sense to work it into our celebratory merch. Swing by our cafes to check it out, or snag a piece online!

Every second Sunday of the month, we open up the Cat & Cloud Training Lab to taste a new lineup of coffees at our Coffee...
09/12/2026

Every second Sunday of the month, we open up the Cat & Cloud Training Lab to taste a new lineup of coffees at our Coffee Tasting Event. It's different every time!

This Sunday, Sept 13: we're tasting four Natural Processed coffees. Whether you're already a coffee enthusiast or don't know what "process" even means yet, this class is for you.

We'll taste through the lineup together and talk through it as a group with the Cat & Cloud team, where you'll have ample time to ask questions and take a swing at identifying what flavor notes you're picking up.

We sandwich this discussion with a high-level overview of coffee terroir and process, how we approach identifying flavor notes at Cat & Cloud, and a Roastery tour. A lot of people come away from these excited to finally be able to read coffee bag labels, or with a more developed understanding of their coffee palate.

We still have spots open for this Sunday! Link in bio to grab one.

Address

725 Front Street
Santa Cruz, CA
95060

Opening Hours

Monday 7am - 6pm
Tuesday 7am - 6pm
Wednesday 7am - 6pm
Thursday 7am - 6pm
Friday 7am - 7pm
Saturday 7am - 7pm
Sunday 8am - 6pm

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