Brett Smith and Fred Houk started Counter Culture Coffee in 1995 with a simple mission. “We said let’s be the best at one thing—wholesale—and then give retailers the right tools to make great coffee themselves,” Smith says. Many of Counter Culture’s peers in the so-called third-wave coffee movement, snobby favorites such as Stumptown, La Colombe, and Blue Bottle, began the same way, hawking optimally roasted single-origin beans at farmers markets and selling to local restaurants. Now Counter Culture is the last of its kind. In August, Chobani yogurt mogul Hamdi Ulukaya bought a majority stake in La Colombe, and two months later both...
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