Al Liu wanted an general career, and he got it — along with juicy cups of joe from a Gayo Highlands of northern Sumatra and the low backcountry of southern Peru to a wrinkled landscape of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
He’s worked with farmers in Myanmar, trafficked one-lane towering roads noted with crosses where trucks plunged off a edge and dined on such delicacies as boiled yucca and gristly beef served on a steel plate.
He knows Spanish, Portuguese and German (his “wanderlust” starts with a “v” sound), speaks precisely and punctuates his remarks with his hands. When celebration coffee, he can tell a blackberry note from a spirit of strawberry.
His work-related nation count exceeds a dozen, and it’s not your standard list: Indonesia (10 times); Ethiopia, India and Bolivia (twice each); Tanzania; and some-more times than he can count to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil and Peru.
Formerly a wide-ranging coffee customer for a Seattle-based importer, Liu now is clamp boss of coffee for Milwaukee’s Colectivo and is assisting beam a flourishing organisation to an even some-more tellurian position.
It’s all good, though it’s not accurately what a 43-year-old who grew adult in Whitefish Bay graphic himself doing with his life.
“When we was in college we only totally discharged business,” Liu said as he sipped a small-lot Ecuadoran coffee (“very bright…citrusy, chocolatey”) in Colectivo’s Humboldt Blvd. cafeteria in Milwaukee. “I only never, ever suspicion I’d be in a private sector.”
In fact, until he initial started operative a opposite during what afterwards was Alterra, he wasn’t most of a coffee drinker during all.
“Not really,” Liu said. “Definitely did not splash coffee black. And customarily it was after cooking during a grill with divert and sugar.”
Nor did he devise on unresolved around Milwaukee.
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The son of a Marquette University math highbrow and a psychological administrator during Milwaukee Public Schools, Liu complicated general politics during Georgetown University and civic and environmental process during Tufts.
He envisioned a career in a nonprofit sector, and when he returned home for a holidays in late 2000 and took a pursuit during Alterra, it was ostensible to be particularly short-term.
“I was assured that there was zero here in Milwaukee for me,” he said.
But after a few weeks, specialty coffee and a expansion started to seem interesting. Liu drafted some suggestions, pitched them to Alterra’s owners — Paul Miller and brothers Ward and Lincoln Fowler — and found himself with a new pursuit as “projects and communications coordinator.”
He did that for 7 years, starting a company’s Latin song array during a lakefront and a partnership with a Florentine Opera. He also did some transport abroad to accommodate with coffee producers. Wanting some-more of that, he went to work for Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle.
That’s where Liu’s globetrotting accelerated. Two years in Bolivia with a Peace Corps in a ’90s had honed his “Sesame Street Spanish,” and he was picking adult Portuguese, too. He also kept his Peace Corps sensibility for a building world.
Specialty coffee links dual unequivocally opposite groups of people — the abundant urbanites who compensate $2 a crater or some-more to splash a stuff and a often-poor farmers who grow it.
Liu’s loyalty to a interests of a farmers is one reason he has a clever repute in a universe of coffee buyers, pronounced Peter Giuliano, comparison executive during a Specialty Coffee Association of America.
“I would indeed put Al in a arrange of — I demur to use a word ‘elite’ — but a unequivocally well-respected ones,” Giuliano said. “He’s utterly good known.”
Giuliano pronounced Liu is scarcely smooth in Spanish as a supposed immature coffee customer who contingency transport extensively in Latin America.
“He’s also a genuine deal,” Giuliano said. “I know him to be intensely ardent about ethics and firmness in coffee, and equity.”
Liu returned to Colectivo, and Milwaukee, a tiny some-more than a year ago.
With Atlas, he had grown imagination in Sumatran coffee and was holding roasters to revisit producers there. Late in 2015, a Colectivo owners came along on one of a trips, and as it finished they asked him to come behind as a firm’s coffee buyer.
Liu still owned a condominium and had friends in Milwaukee, his relatives were here and Seattle was removing swarming and expensive.
“It was only one of those things where we theory all roads lead to Milwaukee,” he said.
Liu fits good into Colectivo’s approach and brings well-developed believe to a comparatively tiny (16 cafes, about 525 employees) business, Lincoln Fowler said.
“There are not many immature coffee buyers out there who have spent 8 years roving a world,” Fowler said. “You would have to get adult into some unequivocally vast organizations to find people like that.”
Colectivo has bought coffee essentially from importers, though with Liu on house it is relocating toward some-more approach sourcing. Liu also is running staff members on trips to coffee-producing areas, that Fowler pronounced deepens their believe and generates enthusiasm.
Liu is on house with that.
“Coffee doesn’t grow in a vacuum,” Liu said. That aspect has proven to be surprisingly concordant with his educational background.
“It’s so intertwined with politics, history, economics culture, denunciation — all these things that we had studied,” he said.
Combined with a formidable and sundry properties of a savoury libation itself, it’s done for a surprisingly gratifying career.
“Even if you’re a maestro in a industry,” Liu said, “you never know everything.”
Reach Rick Romell during rromell@jrn.com.