POULSBO’S CAFFE COCINA HAD OPENED a second location about five years ago on Bainbridge with the aim of using revenue from that space to fund their own in-house roastery. It was the midway point in the life of a coffeeshop that began as an off-the-highway drive thru and cafe to a wholesale roastery, importing coffee from around the world and serving multiple locations.
Owner Eric Mahler was on the mend from surgery at the time which required an eight-inch titanium rod inserted into his lower leg. Two weeks into recovery, on April 1, he signed the papers for the building. That building’s infrastructure, however, was not ideal. The building was near literally falling down around them, Mahler said. About a year in, they cashed out of the lease and used that money to build the roastery at the original location.
“I told myself that I would never do another location without a drive thru,” Mahler said with a hint of superstition. “As soon as the Bainbridge location did what it did, I told myself I would never.”
Now, Caffe Cocina is set to open a second location in downtown Poulsbo in the iconic building at the corner of Jensen and Front street. It’s the one with the red British phone booth out front. They’ve redesigned the inside of the space and reopened the staircase connecting the downstairs cafe to the upstairs patio.
But, notably, there is no drive thru.
And they are slated to open in April.
“April 1st?” I ask, playing into Mahler’s superstition.
“Second,” he laughs.
Caffe Cocina is set to open the downtown location with a soft opening April 8 and a grand opening with live music, beer, wine and more April 22.
Mahler has owned and operated Caffe Cocina on Finn Hill since 2012.
He has developed a massive supply network, importing organic fair trade coffee directly from 33 farms in 22 different countries, developing relationships with five different roasters in the northwest that house and move product through two different warehouses in Fife and Auburn.
“It’s this big thing that we are doing that no one really knows about… like big dog coffee stuff,” Mahler says. “I talk to people in Columbia every other day. I talk to people in Africa every other day.”
Mahler started building his own roastery in 2018, roasted his first batch in 2019 and has been building up the wholesale side of Caffe Cocina for the past five years.
He’s there roasting today, ska music blasting through the speakers.
If you would’ve asked him when he was a kid riding skateboards and listening to punk rock if he would grow up to be an entrepreneur, cafe owner and coffee roaster, Mahler would’ve said, “No way.”
He always thought he would join the military, like his dad, brother and grandfathers on both sides of his family.
Born in La Mesa County San Diego–and pretty sure he was conceived in the Disneyland parking lot–Mahler grew up here.
He went to Ridgetop Junior High before transferring to a couple different local Christian schools and graduating high school in 2006. When it came time to enlist in the military, his application was denied due to a pre-existing asthma condition that would’ve made him a liability in the service. His mom, having spent a 30-plus-year career in banking, offered why not get a job at the bank?
That pivot led Mahler to spend his formative years becoming a personal finance representative.
Beginning at the bank in 2006 and working at Washington Mutual, he had a front row seat to the financial collapse of 2008. He went on to work for Chase who had purchased WaMu. Then, he cut ties and moved to a position at US Bank. In 2012, his mom approached him with the idea of investing in and running this coffeeshop in Poulsbo. After checking into the business, everything in Mahler’s commercial analyst brain told him not to do it, but he relented, cashed in his retirement and “we jumped in with both feet,” he said.
“Well, I jumped in with both feet,” he laughs. “She swindled me!”
Putting the business analyst skillset to use, Mahler said they’d built the coffeeshop to the point where the next step would be to roast their own coffee…
Having developed a reputation with his roaster at the time — Zoka Coffee Roasters in Seattle — he asked Zoka CEO Jeff Babcock out to lunch.
“He’s been in this industry, he’s paved the way,” Mahler said. “Awesome dude. Just a good guy, great mentor. We sat down and I said, ‘I want to do what you do, teach me how to roast, please.’ And he’s like, ‘fuck you.’ So he’s getting ready to walk out of this lunch and I say, ‘I will work for you, for free, for two years. I want you to teach me. Just let me in.’ And he sits back down.”
For the next two years, Mahler commuted to Seattle, working and learning at Zoka while managing the Caffe Cocina Finn Hill location, working to build the roastery and the wholesale side of Caffe Cocina.
“Ten months ago, we were approached by one of our wholesale accounts,” Mahler says, back to the present, speaking of Mama’s Armenian Kitchen, a boutique bakery located in the upstairs of the building at Jensen and Front Street, whose owners also own the building. “They said here are the circumstances and here is the sadness…”
Another local coffeeshop owner Eric Dietze–of Viking Brew which had expanded into that building in 2021–had been diagnosed with cancer and died earlier this year. The building owners asked Mahler if he would be interested in taking over the location.
Though he’d swore to himself that he’d never open a second location without a drive thru, Mahler took the opportunity and says he is hoping to pay homage to both Dietze’s memory and the iconic downtown building by building community around the coffee experience. “To create kind of a coffee mecca, or a center,” Mahler said. “For baristas to come and learn and understand latte art and extraction and pour over art… To learn finite third-wave and fourth-wave coffee details, understand single origin coffees and develop their palates.” // BILLMAN
The grand opening for Caffe Cocina’s new location is April 22 in downtown Poulsbo w/ live music, latte art, extraction and pour over demonstrations, and more. More on the socials @caffecocina
