Silent City Uprising Coffee Supports Peace and Justice

By Kristie Snyder, 

GreenLeaf Editor

Coffee tends to be a passionate subject, and Ithaca's newest coffee roasters are passionate about offering a great product. For Danny Burns and Mary Loehr, longtime friends and owners of Silent City Uprising Coffee, roasting coffee complements their lifestyles as peace and justice activists. They state right on the product label: "We are pro-worker, pro-farmer, pro-union, peace and justice roasters, and we're not ashamed to say it!"

Roasting coffee offers a way for the pair to work part-time, allowing them time to travel, participate in protests, be arrested and go to jail if need be in support of their causes, while at the same time supporting organic, Fair Trade coffee farmers abroad and local causes closer to home. A percentage of profits from each batch goes to a cause such as Veterans Sanctuary or Loaves and Fishes. Recently they sent six pounds of beans to the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Silent City was named for a historic area of Ithaca along the inlet that was populated by mostly immigrant families, who lived in shacks made of gathered materials and supported themselves by poaching, fishing, day jobs and whatever else they could cobble together – and by supporting each other. "They supported each other and looked after each other," Mary says, "and that's why we chose the name."

Mary's interest in coffee stems from a friend in Chicago, David Meyers, who's been teaching the art of coffee roasting to Latino day laborers as part of an effort to create an alternative economic model. Danny's interest in coffee comes from his habit of drinking it. "Gimme! and The Shop educated me to drink really nice coffee and appreciate it," he says, adding that some of the best coffee in the country can be had at those businesses and that Gimme! helped Silent City Uprising get its start.

Mary and Danny met through their shared involvement in the Catholic Workers peace and justice movement. "We want a different world, and we need to come together with other people to get it," Mary said.

Danny offers an analogy: "If Starbucks is like Coca-Cola, and Gimme! and The Shop are like microbreweries, we're like the moonshiners." Mary adds, "Both in the product" -— handmade in small batches — "and in the economic model" — paying coffee farmers and themselves livable wages, and forming part of a local, cooperative economy. Eventually they would like to employ others, paying a livable wage and passing along their roasting skills.

Roasting good coffee is part art and part science. "We buy really, really good organic, Fair Trade green coffee," Danny said. "The learning curve for roasting is steep, but we think we're getting there, and if you start with really good beans you can make great coffee." The beans are roasted one small batch at a time, and thus the offerings change from time to time, based on the coffee variety and the roast.

Silent City Uprising's coffee can be found, already brewed, on the GreenStar Deli's coffee bar, and, as beans, in the Bulk Department. Coffee lovers can order locally by calling Danny at 607-280.0369 and picking the coffee up on his porch downtown, or by stopping by IthacaMade at 430 W. MLK/State Street on Friday afternoons. Orders can be shipped to out-of-towners as well, by ordering on the website: www.silentcityuprising.com.