I Know A Place: Bellwood Coffee & Joel Norman
Season 1: Episode 2
A universal remedy for long nights and bad hangovers. Coffee has ministered to many souls and is a far more inclusive addiction, for those looking for a little high in life. It finds itself enjoyed in many forms, whether that be dark, light, iced or burnt. It is found in the hands of those in pews, offices, courts, cells, space stations, and subs. But no matter where you go in the world, you can find yourself a cup. I’d say Atlanta isn’t known well enough for its coffee scene, but certainly ought to be. There’s a vast array of shops popping up all around that cater to each and every neighborhood in their own unique way and style. One shop in particular however, I find myself at more than any other, and that’s Bellwood Coffee near the town of Riverside. You can find me here most days, as I try my hand at writing. A pivotal part of my work requires that I have something to sip, whether that’s an americano or possibly a glass of wine. Thankfully I can find both of these here. A group of four started this place with a hope of bringing a neighborhood a spot for community, and I got to catch up with one of those four, Joel Norman, to learn the story behind it all.
The Place: Bellwood
What’s the story of Bellwood?
I think it’s necessary for me to explain kind of like growing up, because I think Bellwood is for me and also I’d say for my brother too, who started it with me, is a culmination of a lot of different pieces of our life growing up and also contains kind of pieces of who we say we are now that’s different from who we were then. In high school, I loved this one coffee shop in Roswell, and just enjoying a place I could be, without ever feeling like I needed to go home until they closed. That’s something I didn’t really have another place for. You have school, your restaurants, your bars, which you’re not old enough for in high school, but all these places, you kind of like go for something and then you leave, but a coffee shop, to me, especially when I was in high school and college, is a place that you never really had to go. It was kind of a third place, you could go and you never feel like you needed to leave. So in that regard it fostered community and friendships and events and all these things that kind of played into it in a way that just made it a comfortable place to be. So that idea of this place that I could go and stay and hang out was just so intriguing to me, before I really even liked coffee. Then kind of later in high school I started drinking coffee and I started with Starbucks, my mom was a big Starbucks fiend in the early 2000s and would even have coffee sent in from Seattle before Starbucks had a place in Atlanta, if you can even remember a day like that. So she drank a lot of coffee growing up, and that kind of translated to when I was 15 or 16 drinking lattes and then eventually cappuccinos at this coffee shop I really loved. Then into college I was drinking black coffee and not necessarily enjoying it the way I do now, but enjoying kind of the ritual of it and also kind of starting to like the flavor of just straight coffee now as is. That’s kind of the start of my relationship with coffee and how it begins there. Just this product I enjoy and this place that I enjoy. I can never really separate the two, the product and the place. So I studied music in college and quickly after college found there’s not really an easy way into a career in music and I'll add to it, that there’s not really an easy way into a career in coffee. But I started kind of working as a barista after college with the idea that maybe one day, my brother and I might open up a shop. So circa 2016, I started working at a place called Copper Coin coffee and worked there for a few months and then moved onto a company called Chattahoochee coffee. I was trained by people at Counter Culture coffee by people who I think are just amazing, they roast really really good coffee, their training program is incredible, just all good things to say about everybody at Counter Culture. Then my younger brother Charles did the same thing. He actually worked at Copper Coin, then Chattahoochee, but kind of had a similar story and then eventually we kind of just figured we learned what we can learn about brewing and the product and we’d been in the shop for three years and were like “let’s just start something.” So Bellwood begins in 2018 with Charles and me and another guy named Tommy who’s still a big part of the team and does all of our branding and design and a fourth guy named Ben who we kind of randomly reached out knowing he’s roasted coffee before and asked if he would join the team as a founder and roaster. The four of us did a kickstarter because I think I had like $1500 of savings to my name at that point. So we kick started and raised something like $20,000 and we immediately bought an espresso machine, built a coffee cart, and we bought some green coffee and that was the beginning of Bellwood. So we didn’t really know where the cart was going to go, we didn’t know where at that point, we were going to roast the coffee, but we knew we had this kind of vision. So we got this coffee cart and we stuck it January of 2019 at Jim Adams Farm & Table. So they were looking for someone to kind of come in and boost their sales of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, while we’re just looking for a place to put a coffee cart. So we popped the cart in there around 2019, put the name Bellwood on google and kind of acted as if that was our shop. We shared the space for about a year, but unfortunately the restaurant just never really took off and they decided at the end of the year to officially shut their doors and the landlord of the space approached us and just asked if we wanted to take on their lease, and so we did and kind of kept running things as the coffee cart for a little bit. We were a cart until summer of 2021. So we kept that cart going all through covid, up against the door of the space, and had outdoor seating. We eventually did a round of funding through friends and family to build out the space we’re in today and at the same time also raise money to do another store in East Atlanta. Once we built out this space, we opened it in March of 2023. I think once we opened this space, we felt like we were now fully who we are. Like we have our roasters here, we have our café and Riverside is our roots as far as a company. Our goal here was always to have our flagship space here and then have other smaller cafes around that we kind of service from here. So that’s kind of the story of the company and its journey.
What’s the purpose behind Bellwood?
If I had to sum it in to an answer, I think our purpose, I don’t want it to sound cliché but I really do believe that our purpose is to serve our neighbors. Each of our locations feel like such a neighborhood place, and for us, here in this neighborhood, was that there is no place for these people to go. A place where you can go and just kind of be, and there’s also no coffee. It was kind of a coffee desert. We intentionally chose a place that was not across from another coffee shop, from another café or places you can really go and build community. We wanted this neighborhood to experience that type of service from us. We wanted to be able to serve people an amazing place to gather, to talk, to play games, to eat food, to drink, whatever, and also serve them an amazing coffee product. I think our values of respecting people, and valuing people at how we think they deserve to be valued and when we serve people in here our entire goal is to treat them with dignity, and to almost add value to them as a person. If someone can leave our space better off than when they came or have a better day, then we’ve done our job.
What makes your coffee different than others?
I have a fondness for a lot of other coffee companies that do really good things, so it’s no hard feelings if you like another coffee better than ours, but when we started Bellwood, one of our core values was sustainability of our buying practices, something that’s good for everybody in the supply chain that it touches. We don’t believe that always buying low and selling high is good for the long term sustainability of coffee buying or quality of coffee, so in our buying practices, we want to pay what coffee is worth, and also buy coffees we can see longterm relationships unfolding with. For us, the easiest way to do that was to make relationships with specific importers that we known have long standing relationships with producers at the farm level. All of our importers can provide us with the comfort that we’re not doing harm at the green level. In all of that, we decided we don’t want to buy crappy coffee. We want to sell great coffee at all stages of the process. We just can’t bring ourselves to buy coffee that we cup on a cupping table and just don’t love. I think when we have really good coffee it makes it easier to find really good roasting profiles. Starting with great coffees on the green side makes it really easy to end with great coffees on the roasted side. On the brewing side, we take care to make sure all of our baristas know our recipes by heart and can dial in our espresso really well, so if someone comes and orders a shot of our house espresso or single origin, they both taste incredible or as good as they can taste. So what really sets us apart in our product, really just is care across the board, rather than being willing to compromise in one area and trying to excel in another.
What prompted y’all to open as a bar at night?
All of us love cocktails and we had planned to open evenings from the beginning. Part of the reason we did it is, one of the things we think we’re best at in the coffee world is being creative with signature drinks, like creating fun new things that can only happen at Bellwood. So every season we have a few seasonals that come out that are probably only ever to be had here that one season. Occasionally we’ll love them so much that we’ll throw them on a classics menu and stay around forever, but for the most part, it’s our chance to showcase our creative arm, and so cocktails are a creative arm in and of themselves. So we’ve kind of spent the last few years really working on cocktails at home and really enjoying places that had a really creative cocktail program. Starting with our love of that and our love of being a place for people, we wanted to have more evenings that people are here. There’s kind of a subset of people who work in offices and can’t really be here throughout the week and during the daytime, but could maybe be here in the evenings. So one of our favorite ways of building community is having events at night. Those events can become hard to make sense financially if you’re just selling coffee because most people quit drinking coffee at 3pm or 4pm. So how you have events and make up for that, is you have drinks. For us, we’re serving with the same purpose just on the different end of the beverage spectrum. So we’ve launched events like an open mic nights, and they’re just so fun. It’s like a gathering of community and people are coming with their friends and meeting new people and hearing their neighbors perform and it just a really cool way of bringing this neighborhood together. The last open mic night, we had 8 or 9 people play and had 80 to 90 people in the room, so it’s like a really fun way of getting this place full, showcase our cocktail program and also just this awesome space for people to come hang out and hear some good music. We want to add events to that, like game nights, trivia, or other one-off things that open up this as a space for people.
What’s the history behind The Victorian plant shop location?
So when we were the coffee cart, we met Cary, and he was at the time working on a film set down the road. He and his other crew members would come and pretty much single handily support Bellwood. They’re like ordering quad shot oat milk lattes, that we’re just so glad to have them as customers and we got to talking to him and became friends through that. Then one time, someone brought up “we should open a joint venture sometime,” which was just a pipe dream. You know, someone just says something, then you start thinking about it and then you’re just like “well yeah, why not? That actually sounds pretty cool!” We hadn’t heard of any coffee and plant shop collaboration at the time. The ball just kind of kept rolling until they found a space in East Atlanta and were like “hey, are we doing this?” and we just had to. It was such a cool idea and something that we were just so excited about. We love plant life and greenery adds so much to this space and in East Atlanta, it’s like everywhere. So it gives it this unique kind of feel. We opened that in 2021 and it’s been awesome since.
The Person: Joel Norman
What’s your story?
I grew up as one of six kids in Roswell Georgia. Was homeschooled growing up, but yeah being one of six, it really does shape who you are. There’s always something to do, some activity to get into, and being homeschooled kind of accentuates that. Most of my childhood was playing outside, probably even more than I needed to. When we were really young, we would catch salamanders in the back creek. Later we would either be playing some sport that exists or something we devised, so it was such a fun time. I just really enjoyed growing up with siblings and having a lot of neighborhood friends and just always having something really fun to do. I also grew up playing music which started to take even more of a hold later in life. I played piano since I was four when my sister taught me a little bit. Then I took lessons from her teacher and that ended up playing a big part of my life. I was in bands throughout high school and college, even went to study piano in college. For a while I thought I would somehow be a professional musician in life. Wasn’t sure if that would be touring as a band or a songwriter or whatever that might be. But post college I have a couple friends who are in that industry and just kind of on the road all the time and I enjoyed road trips, but to live your regular life like that is a different animal than anything I really wanted to do. So to me, coffee was kind of this backup of like “if I don’t become a professional musician, coffee is something else that I really love doing and could become a career in.” That’s where I ended up landing and I really love it. When I had graduated college in 2015, I immediately moved back to Atlanta and I was now working at Chattahoochee coffee. I also spent a lot of time working with church youth groups, so when I was volunteering at this one youth group type thing, my wife was on staff there and that’s where I met her. We got married in 2020 and a year ago, we had our first child. I have a son now and he’s 13 months old and that’s been an amazing life shift. It exhausts you as one of those things you’d never take back and you love more than anything, but also you're more tired and exhausted on a whole other level than you were before.
What surprised you most about running a coffee shop?
So none of us had any previous experience starting a business. I think one thing that surprised me was how different it is to work in the industry and to run a business in the industry. I really enjoy some of the things that come with the running of it, like freedom of creativity and you get to make your own calls about things and sometimes that goes really well and you think “why is no one else doing this?” And then you realize, “oh this is something we forgot about.” I think one other thing is that you project all these numbers when projecting your business ideas to investors, and I think what surprised me the most so far is just how different everything is than what you put on paper. Nothing is ever as easy or simple as it looks on a sheet of paper. You really just have to plan for the worst, and you really wanna make sure you’re not expecting everything to always go well. Our roaster has gone down like three times with a faulty motor and suddenly we have to shift and go roast at another company that has a roaster. Stuff just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
How do you spend your time away from the shop?
Well most recently, I went and walked some of the Camino in Spain. It’s an amazing thing, you walk for about 15 miles a day as long as you’re there and you meet people and stay in these hostels. Any time I vacation I try and do something different. On a more regular basis I try and go out snowboarding in the winter. Usually just once a year or so. I love riding a bike. I love just activity, especially sporting activities. I play basketball and I’m in a softball league. Walking through the woods is really fun and I also still love music, so a lot of my time outside of work is spent listening to music, playing music, recording music and just enjoying the art of it is really special to me.
What kind of traveler are you?
I’ve almost never relaxed while traveling. I’m such a fan of activity to a fault where I will overexert myself on most vacations or traveling times. I’m learning to get out of the scarcity mindset of “there’s only so many places in the world and I need to see as many as possible.” But I will pack as much activity as possible. If I’m driving somewhere, usually my bike is on the back of my car. Always have a ball and a glove, well two gloves since I can’t play catch with myself. I’ll play catch with anybody. Like when I go to the beach, if I don’t have spike ball or a glove, then what’re we doing out there? I’m not there to sit on the beach, that’s one of my least favorite things to do, is just kind of go sit idly. Although I’m learning that’s not always the healthiest way to vacation. Trying to learn to actually take a real rest day while there.
What’s it like having to work in a partnership, rather than by yourself?
I think for sure, Bellwood would not exist the way it does now if it was just me running it. It would have failed a long time ago. My brother and I love so many of the same things, but we are so different in personality and I think that’s really helpful. He’s a lot more of a rational thinker than I am and I’m a lot more of a dreamer and let’s just try everything kind of person. I think either of those on their own does not lead to a flourishing business, but with each other, someone who can dream and someone who can reel that in on a rational basis, is really helpful. Tommy adds kind of creative mind as well to the company. There are definitely times we are all on different pages and also a lot of times we are also just enjoying the community of each other. It’s something I would never trade, is having them, for making decisions on my own. I think it would come to the detriment of Bellwood if just one of us started making all the calls.
What is one quote you like to live by?
There’s this quote from Shawshank Redemption that says “The world went and got itself into a big damn hurry.” That movie came out in the 90s I believe, and if they’d only known how much even more of a hurry the world would be in. I just think for me, some of the best parts of life come unhurried. Even in the core of who Bellwood is, we want a place that is unhurried. An unhurried life, I think is well examined, thoughtful, and isn’t rash. I would love nothing more, than when people talk about me, they say, “that guy lives an unhurried life.”
What is something you can’t leave home without?
So I recently bought a teenage engineering op-1. Which is a portable synthesizer, sampler, and recorder. I love this thing. You can sit there for hours on this thing. It has a synth builder and it has a song builder. So you can literally record drums for songs into it. You can take samples out of it. It has a sampler for you to put sounds in it, tweak them, and play around with it. So it's just this kind of multi-faceted music world, portable thing. It’s like less than a foot long, less than three inches wide, weighs less than a pound. I took it to Spain with me and when I was lonely, I would play on it or if I like heard something or a sound I really loved, I would record it and put it into this thing. It’s amazing.
What’s your morning routine like?
Over the past 13 months, it’s been very different than the past 30 years. I always thought I was morning person, and I worked in an industry that forces you to be a morning person, but I think when I’m honest with myself, I love sleeping. I’ve become a night owl. I have to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable time now so that I can wake up to help feed my son and hang out with him which is like about 7am. So I’m usually getting up between 6:45 and 7. I’ll brew coffee on our pour-over. Usually do little bit of reading. Then we’ll make my son breakfast, play with him for 30-40mins before either of us has to leave for work. It’s been really cool now for the past year to have a true morning routine.
Recommendations: drink orders, time off, and music
What should someone order when they come to the shop for the first time?
This one is gonna be so lame, because our signature drinks are where we’re like really amazing, but I just love a cappuccino. So I think single origin espresso at the base for a cappuccino. You can never go wrong.
What is the perfect day off in Atlanta?
Well start it at Bellwood, I have to say that. I would probably go somewhere like The Chastain for breakfast. Their breakfast program is so good and it’s so casual and they have a beautiful space, and their biscuit is incredible. Maybe go walk some of the Beltline afterwards. The Daily for lunch is a great lunch spot. Throw a ball in the park. Then over to Decatur for drinks at Leons or Brick Store Pub. Then dinner at Kimball House, which is my all time favorite place in Atlanta to go for anything.
What artists are you listening to right now?
I have to say, and this is the cliché coffee shop guy, but Bon Iver. I’ve seen them in either five or six different states. Their live show is unbelievable. I think they think about music in a different way than most bands. I heard this recently and it may or may not be true, but the band, the sound guy, the light guy, whenever they do a tour they split everything evenly across the board. Just like valuing everything. If you see their show, you can tell they just all care about this music, they’re all incredibly talented. So I heard they are all in it for the same price tag. One other guy I love recently is Leif Vollebekk. He’s from Europe I believe, and it just feels really authentic. It has a really cool sound, kind of like folk. A really authentic version of that.
Well, now that the caffeine has settled in, my head is no longer hurting from last night and I’ve made sure I hadn’t sent any risky texts, where can a guy get something greasy to eat?
Always good vibes at Bellwood whenever I drop in.