Cruzio Stories: Santa Cruz at Work
Cruzio Stories is a bi-weekly podcast from Cruzio Internet, sharing short conversations with the people who make Santa Cruz tick — entrepreneurs, artists, community leaders, and creatives working out of the Cruzio coworking space. It’s not just tech talk — it’s real stories from the heart of a vibrant local community.
Cruzio Stories: Santa Cruz at Work
Episode 2: Hidden Fortress Coffee with Amelia Loftus
Behind every cup of coffee is a story waiting to be told. For Amelia Loftus of Hidden Fortress Coffee, that story begins in a Vermont hippie commune and weaves through fashion design school, Greenpeace activism, and a transformative 10-month journey around the world.
"It was on a veranda in Bali, looking over rice fields," Amelia recalls about her coffee awakening moment. "Just some fresh coffee...sitting there and enjoying that cup for like an hour." This simple yet profound experience, coupled with witnessing coffee roasting at an organic farm in Australia, planted the seeds for what would eventually become Hidden Fortress Coffee - a small, all-organic roasting company now celebrating its 13th season at Santa Cruz farmers markets.
The path wasn't straightforward. Amelia's journey included running an organic homebrew supply company where she first introduced coffee roasting, before eventually establishing Hidden Fortress at her North Monterey County farm. The pandemic dealt a devastating blow - a 70% loss in business when their Watsonville café's nearby office park emptied out. Yet that challenge led to their current downtown Santa Cruz location, where they continue to uphold extraordinary standards despite facing doubled coffee prices from tariffs and the challenges of a hidden storefront. What truly distinguishes Hidden Fortress is their commitment to organic processes and traditional methods - like their signature chai that takes three days to make from whole organic spices, using techniques passed down from Amelia's mother.
Discover the difference that passion, global perspective, and organic principles make in every cup. Follow Hidden Fortress on Instagram @farmfreshcoffee or visit their downtown Santa Cruz location to experience coffee with a story as rich as its flavor.
Welcome to Cruzeo Stories, Great Hidden Fortress. Who do I have the privilege of sitting with? Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2:I'm Amelia Loftus and Hidden Fortress is a small, locally-based all-organic coffee roasting and we are part of the community of farmers markets. We started our business as a pop-up at the Santa Cruz Scotts Valley Farmers Market. We've been there for a 13th season now and we've been a part of the downtown market. So when the market moved up here we had a slightly different role, being a cafe brick and mortar. But we're still a part of the market in that way and I come from a background of really homesteading hippie commune kind of background. There's actually a book about it, wait your story no more.
Speaker 2:My parents and the people who founded the commune that I grew up in no, this was in Vermont, okay, so I grew up there. Then, you know, as a teenager decided I had to rebel against that, become a fashion designer, move to Boston and go to design school. So I did that for a while, realized I hated that industry. I loved creation.
Speaker 2:I was going to say, like designing, hating the infrastructure industry, oh yeah, especially how exploit of it was of young artists and how little protection there was. Yeah, so I found myself working for Greenpeace as a, and that just kind of brought me back to my roots. Isn't it funny how we become like our parents and we try to avoid it at all costs. And there I was, and working for Greenpeace gave me a free myself to travel around the world, which I did do in the late well, it was early 90s.
Speaker 1:Takes us around a little bit.
Speaker 2:Did around the world ticket and started in the Pacific Islands, hawaii, cook Islands, fiji ended up in New Zealand. Overstayed the visa there. Ended up in Australia definitely overstayed the visa there. Kind of bummed around Australia for three months with them.
Speaker 1:But those got skilled on how one would get a around the world ticket. What does that even mean?
Speaker 2:I don't even know if you can do it the same way anymore.
Speaker 1:It was a ticket you're talking about if you can do it the same way anymore. It was a ticket you're talking about. It wasn't like you. Just, I think you take off into the continuation of one-way tickets, but you singularly bought.
Speaker 2:Actually, me and my travel partner bought tickets from San Francisco and they ended in Indonesia because you didn't have to have a ticket out at that point, okay, and we heard that you could buy tickets really cheap in Malaysia. So that's what we did. We went overland through Indonesia, then, in Malaysia, bought our tickets home, so to speak, but you know, via Thailand and Nepal, and is this in your 20s, 30s kind of like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, mid-20s yeah.
Speaker 2:Then flew to England, where my travel partner had roots because they'd gone to school there. I flew to England, where my travel partner had roots because they'd gone to school there and at that point completely broke living on credit cards, got back to the East Coast and did a driveway to get back to the West Coast, but, you know, traveled for 10 months and it was a real eye opener. I think everybody should.
Speaker 1:I totally agree. Not to put you on the spot, but to put you on the spot, um, loosely best memory and gnarliest memory maybe of that Did you get in a tight spot on those 10 months or you know, like a singular, was there singular memory? I know it's hard, but that you kind of remember from that trip was like this is what it's all about. And then maybe a secondary what am I doing? Part of the trip.
Speaker 2:Um, probably the gnarliest memory was hiking this mountain in the in the pre-dawn hours in in indonesia. Um, it was a pretty famous traveler spot, yeah, um, some of the you know more daring travelers would like hike up to the pinnacle before dawn to catch dawn at the very top, and it was a volcanic caldera, and I was going on a little low, you know more leisurely pace. But as we're hiking up, these two guys were running down the mountain at top speed because their friend had fallen on the last bit of the hike and they were trying to get help. And you know this was before cell phones and everything, so they were running it. But you know, for their lives and we heard later that person died, oh, wow, yeah, so it's like wow real consequences yeah of adventure yeah, there's real consequences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, best memory um.
Speaker 2:Best memory, I think, is where we spent a month just camping on North Island or North kind of the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was pretty wild. I mean there's like crops around and snakes and everything else. But we kind of had this little community. It was almost like a little hippie commune and we built little shelters and we'd have to make expeditions to town once a week to get supplies, but otherwise we were pretty self-sufficient and it was just incredible.
Speaker 1:Do you have some images from all this? Are there some rainy images? It feels like this would be such a.
Speaker 2:There are some old photos in the box. Yeah, would be such a nostalgic. There are some old photos in the shoe box.
Speaker 1:yeah, It'd be fun to kind of gather around for eventually, because, you know, associated with some of the these are the Cruiseio stories, which, theoretically, what this is about is exactly what we're talking about. It's like there's a human behind the business and the business is trying really hard and sometimes we can't connect, you know, like down here at Cruiseio for the first time with the Vides platform. Narrative-based Vides is very much about this, like you know. Could you possibly maybe sell a few more cups of coffee and get somebody to stop in if they know that maybe there's a world adventure in there, that might be a story. Or, you know, for me it's not so much you being there as much as that ethos sometimes blends down through the people that are pouring your coffee, things like that. But no, I think you know for me that travel makes me feel like, you know, there's probably unlimited amount of sunsets and sunrises and where are we going next. But I think so you came out of that fundamentally changed, do you think? Or was it just 10 months?
Speaker 2:I would say enhanced.
Speaker 1:Enhanced.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think a lot of people would come out fundamentally changed. But having grown up in a hippie commune, spending all those years with Greenpeace, my ethos was already a global perspective, you know, caring about the earth, and just that being a core part of my identity. Yeah, it's kind of where I got the coffee bug too, because—.
Speaker 1:Perfect transition. So I was going to kind of lead into it and I don't want to skip any parts about it. So, um, we kind of have the childhood, we kind of have the school, we kind of have you know where you were designer travel, um, and that's kind of like I don't want to skip much because we do have time, but like sort of like transition from that to the coffee bug somewhere. Is that a good time to kind of go there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sounds good, I mean you know a couple moments where it was just you know people who love coffee. Often you'll talk to them and they'll have that one coffee they had at that one place. That was just amazing For me. It was on a veranda in Bali, looking over rice fields. And just some fresh coffee, yeah, and just sitting there and enjoying that cup for like an hour.
Speaker 2:And you know, sometimes life is so hectic we don't have time for that, and to be able to have that experience is just amazing. I totally agree, and we also would have to travel through this organic farm on our when we were camping in Australia and they were growing coffee and so I saw how they roasted it. I was like, oh cool, it was like an eye-opening moment. I could do that. So when I got back to the States, I spent a little more time working for Greenpeace.
Speaker 2:I actually got hired to manage the office that was here in Santa Cruz, but sadly, a couple years later they closed it down. That was the point. I became a small business owner. We started a homebrew supply company and pretty good run there. I think it was 97 to 20. 2015 or so, but it was the organic home brew supply company on River Street in Santa Cruz, and early in that business I decided to bring in home coffee roasting, so I was able to pursue my passion of coffee along with I was also very into beer, of course and bring that to a local community home roasting and teaching people how to roast, which meant I had to up my game early.
Speaker 1:It's just like friends, family, like like, literally like you know, because you have your probably your own um sort of like palette and then what you were inspired by. But then how is it the early ones, just tiny little like drug, deal, like little bags of beans to friends and say, grind that up and tell me what you think.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd say, when we had the home roasting, because it was a home hobby, you know it wasn't really a business for profit, like roasting beans and selling them, but it was more like oh, because I'm a home roaster, I'll give little gifts and get feedback. I left that. I left Southern Bridges, the homebrew supply in 2011. Okay, I was just getting to the point where my job had turned more into a desk job and everybody we were a collective and everybody was kind of pushing me in that direction and I didn't want to be there. I wanted it to be. You know, boots on the ground Right, um. So I pulled out and started.
Speaker 2:Um, my husband and I had just bought a property in North Monterey County three and a half acres. We tried it as a farm, realized there was no way we were going to make a living farming, not with the high cost of the mortgage and everything. So we needed value added and I'm like well, coffee, yeah. So I invested in a coffee roaster. Back then. It was small scale enough. I got a cottage food license and just started roasting and selling at farmers markets. That was the birth of Hidden Fortress.
Speaker 1:And so are you still moving forward to this brick and mortar location a year ago now, right, yeah, a year ago here, and just talk about sort of like the lead into it, the anticipation of it, the. You know, like any other startup business, they get the same feeling of vibes. There's that. There's sort of that you want everybody to love you right from the beginning, but then there's this long runway of being found, finding your audience kind of kind of like getting a sense of permanence. How's that been going?
Speaker 2:So it wasn't like as raw a startup as like starting our business initially, because we already had a base customer base and we had already had brick and mortar experience. We had a grocery cafe in Watsonville for eight years. However, the pandemic has turned a lot of businesses sideways, and it did to us too. We lost 70% of our business post-pandemic. The pandemic shut it down and it never came back.
Speaker 1:For a lot of people.
Speaker 2:We were in an office park and people just stopped coming to work and they didn't change those patterns. And then the biggest workplace near us moved out of state, so it was just like everything that could go wrong.
Speaker 1:No, this is true, and it's just now, like this quarter, going into the end of this fiscal quarter my wife works for Sutter that there's a real push only right now, the beginning steps of return to office now. So it's not like it happened and it's now been. It's been six years. It's not just a little thing that happened. There was a deep sense of apartment. A lot of these places sold their brick and mortar buildings. They'll never come back, and even the ones that were are just now returning to the office, and so the decision for this building in this time was just the workspace, I'm assuming downtown, centralized, kind of, you know, playing a flag in the middle of it.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it kind of came through word of mouth. It was actually six months before we came in. I met James and a few other people here and, you know, expressed my interest. I had a friend who had a co-working space here for many years. He's a graphic designer and so he made the introduction and it turned out that somebody who was involved with the previous cafe decided to come in and keep trying to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so okay, we didn't get the spot. Six months later I got a message that he didn't work out and they wanted to see if I was still interested. I was definitely interested in finding a brick and mortar that wasn't a huge overhead that could help us have a fixed spot for all of our business. You know, customers, that we've built up for 12, 13 years A spot where they can come and see us, because when we closed the roastery cafe we moved our operations back to our farm and we now have a commercial kitchen and a trailer so we can operate that way. But yeah, it was. You know that's not an easy place for any customers to come and check us out Exactly.
Speaker 1:And just like the. It's just like, almost like. In a weird way, business sometimes can be just like your trip around the world. There's sort of the anticipation of it, the dopamine, the optimism bias of how great it's going to be. The practical reality of it. You're in now and we're all down here. So right now, as far as you know, going forward with Hidden Fortress is, you know, there's the you've been here the challenges and the optimism, like, what do you feel about being downtown right now? And you know, as far as, what do you see for the future of Hidden Fortress right now, after year one? And you know it's the reality of being down here right now.
Speaker 2:It was definitely more of a challenge than I expected. I think it's just downtown Santa Cruz has been going through a transition, or whatever you want to call it, and I've seen so many businesses just crumble, yeah, and you know I see that the numbers is just not great. You know we still have great numbers at our weekend markets. People come out. It's an event and you know we just do swimmingly on the weekends, yeah, but that's only two days out of the week, right, and so we're, you know, really trying to bring people into the. You know we are actually very hidden here from the main street. We put flags and signs out there, but it is hard to draw people in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it is a very coffee-centric part of town. There's a lot of good coffee shops around and a lot of people that have time to hang out in shops want to go in a see or be seen kind of setting, and you know they'll go to Verve or Lulu's or 11th Hour, because that's kind of a happening scene, right, and we just don't have a big enough space to really offer that. Yeah, space to really offer that. What I really try to highlight, what we do well at, is organic, is locally sourced. All my years of brewing taught me how to make really good syrups and things like that flavor. You know we have a chai that it takes me three days to make. I love the chai Awesome. Yeah, actually, my mom taught me how to make that from her hippie roots.
Speaker 1:Well, without secret ingredients or giving away, can you describe your chai a little bit with ingredients and kind of what makes it special without giving away, like your secret, like what makes your chai special outside of it being passed down a little bit?
Speaker 2:Starting with whole organic spices and cooking them a very long time, which my mom taught me and then I've read, you know in detail that that actually extracts some of the healthy compounds from those spices, like mucilage from the cinnamon and things like that, and using high grade, like silent cinnamon, whole cardamom, all those spices and cooking them a long time. It kind of draws the essence and the oils out. A lot of chai is just made with ground up spices super quick and you know I've seen like over the counter, make your own chai at home. It's like a teabag and you steep it for 10 minutes and you know you're just not getting the same experience and the other thing that we're used to are just your soy milk with a cork from somewhere else.
Speaker 1:You know that kind of the process sort of thing. I do think that's maybe one as we kind of continue these conversations in the future or we work on the back end. I do think that's the hook. I think the hook is not only you know, the organic side of it. There's almost a there's a true farm to table coffee story here. That might not be, you know that I'm not saying it's a one of one, but it's towards a one of one. You know that's the thing we're always looking for is what makes my business one of one in a business of other one, right, but I do think that that that true, you know kind of one that you're hustling at the farmers markets still that you do have a farm that you're working out of. There's this integrity, you know, behind. You know each and every one that might be part of the narrative that this story starts and we kind of continue a little bit optimistic for the future then.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to be. Yeah, it's not easy. Right now we're dealing with tariffs that are, in some cases I've seen some of the coffees double in price in six months um, things like cups that are made in china. Um, ironically, the the most eco-friendly, compostable, tree-free cups are all made in china. So you know, we get the sticker shock of um our normal order two weeks from the last one almost doubled in price. And how do you react to that? And how? How do you? You know already a razor thin margin and people don't understand. You must make a ton of money. Coffee's so cheap and it's really not about the coffee, it's about the service, it's the level of service. You know, when we pay our staff $20 an hour plus, it's 40 cents a minute of cost.
Speaker 1:That's exactly it, and I think people need to understand the ecosystem a little bit more in that you know, behind I always say this there's you can go get a 79 cent cup of coffee at 7-Eleven Right now. We can go do that 12 ounces of that coffee. I can see the B2B machine. It comes out, but it doesn't have the story, it doesn't have this emotion, it doesn't have this one where we're actually down here trying to connect to a city center, trying to connect to humanity, along with a business model. That's really what like hidden fortresses, that's what vibes is even cruiser. To a certain extent, there's a human element to it that I think that that's why we we have these little sit downs, these tops and, um, we'll wind this one up a little bit, but, as clara's finding you right now, I'm sure, is it all the traditional places like? Is there an instagram or a website or how can they find out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we still go by a farm fresh coffee, or Instagram is at farm fresh coffee. And then Facebook hidden fortress coffee, okay, and hidden fortress coffeecom website Perfect.
Speaker 1:And we'll put this all on the show notes. This will go on. This is fun. This will go on Spotify, amazon, creating a little YouTube. So just little bits here. I'll give you some 15, 30 seconds so we can share on our socials. But, you know, hopefully this won't be the last time we talk and maybe we can do a small series. I was thinking as we go, where we can maybe incorporate Hidden Fortress with some of the podcasts we do here, so we can square up something so that works for that. You know, we can brand it up and since we it up and says we're right here, you know, and we can maybe incorporate that in, because we've got 17 podcasts we're hosting now and so there'll be circling through here and you're 18 feet away from me, right?
Speaker 2:now I did want to circle back, if I could. You know, thinking about the optimism. Yeah, you know, it's funny how I go through a cycle, like when I'm, you know, just in production mode at the farm roasting and I'm kind of in isolation and, you know, spending some time bookkeeping and getting frustrated, pulling my hair out, and then I start to feel unoptimistic. And then I come in and do a farmer's market or I'm here at the cafe and I'm interacting with our customers and that's what gives me optimism is that human connection and how valued, you know, our good longtime customers make us feel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then any conversation like that. It drives us. Yeah, yeah, we're all trying very hard. I always think on my gravestone I want to say, there lies Brian. He tried really hard and that's good enough. Well, this is a pleasure and we'll talk again, absolutely.