Milwaukee coffee man finds the world in a cup
Al Liu wanted an international career, and he got it — along with tasty cups of joe from the Gayo Highlands of northern Sumatra and the deep backcountry of southern Peru to the wrinkled landscape of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
He’s worked with farmers in Myanmar, traveled one-lane mountain roads marked with crosses where trucks plunged off the edge and dined on such delicacies as boiled yucca and gristly meat served on a metal plate.
He knows Spanish, Portuguese and German (his “wanderlust” begins with a “v” sound), speaks precisely and punctuates his remarks with his hands. When drinking coffee, he can tell a blackberry note from a hint of strawberry.
His work-related country count exceeds a dozen, and it’s not your typical list: Indonesia (10 times); Ethiopia, India and Bolivia (twice each); Tanzania; and more times than he can count to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil and Peru.
Formerly a wide-ranging coffee buyer for a Seattle-based importer, Liu now is vice president of coffee for Milwaukee’s Colectivo and is helping guide the growing firm to an even more global position.
It’s all good, but it’s not exactly what the 43-year-old who grew up in Whitefish Bay pictured himself doing with his life.
“When I was in college I just completely dismissed business,” Liu said as he sipped a small-lot Ecuadoran coffee (“very bright…citrusy, chocolatey”) in Colectivo’s Humboldt Blvd. cafe in Milwaukee. “I just never, ever thought I’d be in the private sector.”
In fact, until he first started working the counter at what then was Alterra, he wasn’t much of a coffee drinker at all.
“Not really,” Liu said. “Definitely did not drink coffee black. And usually it was after dinner at a restaurant with milk and sugar.”
Nor did he plan on hanging around Milwaukee.
RELATED: Colectivo plans 3 cafes in Chicago
The son of a Marquette University math professor and a psychological supervisor at Milwaukee Public Schools, Liu studied international politics at Georgetown University and urban and environmental policy at Tufts.
He envisioned a career in the nonprofit sector, and when he returned home for the holidays in late 2000 and took a job at Alterra, it was supposed to be strictly short-term.
“I was convinced that there was nothing here in Milwaukee for me,” he said.
But after a few weeks, specialty coffee and its growth started to seem interesting. Liu drafted some suggestions, pitched them to Alterra’s owners — Paul Miller and brothers Ward and Lincoln Fowler — and found himself with a new job as “projects and communications coordinator.”
He did that for seven years, starting the company’s Latin music series at the lakefront and its partnership with the Florentine Opera. He also did some travel abroad to meet with coffee producers. Wanting more of that, he went to work for Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle.
That’s where Liu’s globetrotting accelerated. Two years in Bolivia with the Peace Corps in the '90s had honed his “Sesame Street Spanish,” and he was picking up Portuguese, too. He also kept his Peace Corps sensibility for the developing world.
Specialty coffee links two very different groups of people — the affluent urbanites who pay $2 a cup or more to drink the stuff and the often-poor farmers who grow it.
Liu’s dedication to the interests of the farmers is one reason he has a strong reputation in the world of coffee buyers, said Peter Giuliano, senior director at the Specialty Coffee Association of America.
“I would actually put Al in the sort of — I hesitate to use the word 'elite' — but the really well-respected ones,” Giuliano said. “He’s quite well known.”
Giuliano said Liu is unusually fluent in Spanish as a so-called green coffee buyer who must travel extensively in Latin America.
“He’s also the real deal,” Giuliano said. “I know him to be extremely passionate about ethics and integrity in coffee, and equity.”
Liu returned to Colectivo, and Milwaukee, a little more than a year ago.
With Atlas, he had developed expertise in Sumatran coffee and was taking roasters to visit producers there. Late in 2015, the Colectivo owners came along on one of the trips, and as it ended they asked him to come back as the firm’s coffee buyer.
Liu still owned a condominium and had friends in Milwaukee, his parents were here and Seattle was getting crowded and expensive.
“It was just one of those things where I guess all roads lead to Milwaukee,” he said.
Liu fits well into Colectivo’s approach and brings exceptional experience to a relatively small (16 cafes, about 525 employees) business, Lincoln Fowler said.
“There are not many green coffee buyers out there who have spent eight years traveling the world,” Fowler said. “You would have to get up into some very large organizations to find people like that.”
Colectivo has bought coffee primarily from importers, but with Liu on board it is moving toward more direct sourcing. Liu also is guiding staff members on trips to coffee-producing areas, which Fowler said deepens their knowledge and generates enthusiasm.
Liu is on board with that.
“Coffee doesn’t grow in a vacuum,” Liu said. That aspect has proven to be surprisingly compatible with his academic background.
“It’s so intertwined with politics, history, economics culture, language — all these things that I had studied,” he said.
Combined with the complex and varied properties of the aromatic beverage itself, it’s made for a surprisingly satisfying career.
“Even if you’re a veteran in the industry,” Liu said, “you never know everything.”
Reach Rick Romell at rromell@jrn.com.