Ask Leah Sparks about coffee, and be prepared to listen.
She can speak about beans, a chemical reactions during roasting, a opposite ways a sugars in a beans conflict to feverishness and how it all formula in a flavor. She can teach on a disproportion in cold decoction coffee and opposite season profiles. For her, it’s not only a crater of joe.
And like any barista, she serves adult copiousness of review at Southern Girl Coffee on Choccolocco Street in Oxford. But she owns a business, and given of that, coffee means conversation. As informed business come up, she tends to ask about family as she fills bags with beans or stirs adult their orders.
“I like a whole village feel of it,” she said. “Good conversations, an event to lay down and suffer life. Not to be consumed by what’s on Facebook or Instagram. Just to unplug. Sit and fellowship. That’s what it’s all about.”
Sparks, 26, began Southern Girl behind in 2014, a year after she started roasting coffee as a hobby. Her stepfather and grandfather helped her build her initial spit out of an aged gas grill, and she schooled how to fry examination YouTube videos and researching.
Now, she sells coffee from a customized retro camper subsequent to a storefront opposite from a Oxford Center for a Performing Arts. She roasts a beans from a specially-made Guatemalan indication during a behind of a adjacent building. She takes Southern Girl Coffee on a highway to festivals, though she unequivocally enjoys offered coffee right there in her hometown.
“Ever given college, we had to an thought to run a coffee shop,” she said. “Entrepreneurship is in my family, so we got started and never looked back.”
That’s also partial of her nature, she said. Sparks comes from an jaunty background, and pronounced she is really idea oriented. Just like a investigate she put in to meaningful a business, she also spends a lot of time perplexing to get her coffee in internal restaurants and integrated into locally-made products.
And she finds time to speak to students during Oxford High about using her possess business. She’s also removing married after this year.
It’s substantially a good thing she’s so heavily into caffeine.
Oxford, a city of some-more than 21,000, already has during slightest dual sequence coffee businesses, though Sparks pronounced she felt there was still an untapped marketplace for specialty coffee. It’s also a special time for Oxford, as a city continues to grow commercially from a Interstate 20 corridor, and a normal categorical travel area is undergoing an endless revitalization.
Summer tends to be a good time, too, as crowds come for shows during a humanities core and feet trade seeks out a shade for a good iced coffee.
In addition, Sparks pronounced she sells coffee by her website, that accounts for about 15 percent of her business. A lot of that business comes referred from internal business who send coffee to friends and relatives, who afterwards find out some-more online.
Still, a final of a business keep her moving.
“Small business is hard. Even when you’re not here, you’re here,” she said, gesturing to a camper. “People consider given you’re your possess boss, we can set your possess hours. But that’s only not a case.
“Still, it’s good when people stop by and lay down, only for a small bit.”