The folks behind award-winning Fort Worth craft beer brand Maple Branch Craft Brewery have expanded into a new category of brewing: coffee.
They’ve opened Branch & Bean, a new coffee bar next to/inside the brewery at 2624 Whitmore St. in mid-August, where they’re taking the same discerning approach to coffee that they’ve taken with beer.
That means not only a variety of coffee and espresso-based drinks made with exacting care, but also fresh-roasted coffee beans, roasted in house, plus accompanying snacks such as breakfast tacos, croissants, muffins, coffee cake,
Maple Branch was founded in 2020 by Stuart and Allyssa Maples, a savvy young couple with a wonderfully perfectionist zeal and eye for detail that has already earned them oodles of awards.
The two, who met while attending TCU, oversee a brewery-plus-biergarten, featuring a 14,000-square-foot brewery, beer hall, and 7,000-square-foot biergarten outside. They offer more than 20 beers on tap all brewed in-house, plus food, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages.
Beers such as their Raspberry Blonde Ale and Munich Dunkel have won dozens of awards including gold and silver medals from Texas Craft Brewers, New York International Beer Competition, and U.S. Open Beer Championship.
“With our beer lineup, we do some traditional styles like a Czech pilsner, but then some fun beers like our Gigi’s Juice, a jalapeño margarita gose sour beer, where we use real jalapenos,” Stuart says. “We try to have fun with it, but it’s not a gimmick. We’re doing high-quality craft beer, but fun — we’re not trying to be snobs.”
He says they always had a dream to do coffee, but the idea became a reality after they repurposed a former storage space into the coffee bar area. Getting it built took about a year.
“We always loved craft beer and we always loved coffee — we love going to coffee shops,” Stuart says. “Our mission is just like what we do with beer — to put the craft in beer — and we can bring that philosophy to coffee now.”
A big part of that involves roasting the beans themselves — providing an opportunity for freshness, and allowing them to source beans from Guatemala, Ethiopia, and other coffee countries around the world.
They have a roaster that does small batches — one and a half to two pounds at a time — which keeps the beans incomparably fresh.
“It’s part of our goal to not just be a small coffee shop but to pay attention to every element: the water, always having fresh beans, rotating our menu,” Stuart says.
For their coffee program, they’ve also secured a game-changer piece of equipment: an automatic pour-over machine.
Pour-overs — coffee made by slowly pouring hot water over ground coffee — have become one of the more popular techniques in recent years. For a while, it entailed baristas spending 3 to 4 minutes slowwwly pouring hot water slowly over the coffee grounds — a showy and immersive display, but not practical for a busy coffee shop, and often with inconsistent results. The automatic pourover machine achieves a superior level of coffee conscientiousness without tying up a barista’s time.
“People can watch the machine, as well — it’s a like a novelty,” Stuart says.
They’re also serving matcha, gelato in four flavors, affogatos (gelato topped with a shot of espresso), and will be doing some fun collaborations between the beer and the coffee, such as a coffee stout.
They’ve done a beautiful job on the space, which flows into the brewery and beer garden space. It has a subtle garden theme with subtle teal, mustard, and green walls, and hanging plants to bring the space to life. There’s a polished cement floor, an Asian-themed room divider, and a grand chandelier hanging over a coffee counter clad in planks of wood.
They softly opened in August and will celebrate a grand opening the first week of September.