[MUSIC] [MUSIC] My favorite trip of all time on a bike.

[MUSIC] We did this scouting trip in Italy and we went over to Slovenia.

And this one day we climbed up in the Slovenia mountains.

We were climbing up in through the clouds.

[MUSIC] As we got through the clouds, we got off our bikes, walked over to the edge, and looked down to the city.

It felt like you were on top of the sky.

[MUSIC] We proceeded on with a ride, ripped down the side of the mountain.

[MUSIC] It felt like the temperature dropped so fast that our hands were freezing.

And the reward at the bottom of the hill.

Was a great cup of coffee.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] COFFEE, The Universal Language Is made possible in part by [Music] [Music] Hollander Chocolate.

Premium chocolate for your daily rituals.

[MUSIC] Tucson is such a beautiful city.

It brings you back in time a little bit and not in a bad way.

It's also still vibrant with culture.

Throughout the year, whether it's a parade, a market, artists, musicians, it is so rich in these areas.

Tucson does it effortlessly.

[MUSIC] I've never been anywhere and still feel like I'm not trapped.

[MUSIC] The things that make Tucson so zest for life, beautiful and vibrant, are the way that the community comes together.

[MUSIC] Here in Tucson, coffee is on the same level that you can find in some of the best cities in the country.

You can find an excellent cortado, you can find a great shot of espresso, you can find amazing cold brew here.

[MUSIC] Great seasonal drinks, anything that you would want, you can find here.

[MUSIC] Curtis has always been trying to do specialty coffee in the right way.

He doesn't cut corners, he's not trying to push his ideas on the industry.

[MUSIC] He feels like an uncle to everyone.

[MUSIC] I'm lucky to have a coffee mentor in Tucson like Curtis.

He's been a resource to other roasters, other cafe owners for years.

[MUSIC] He is just so generous.

That's something that's really, really special and really unique to him.

[MUSIC] [BICYCLE GEARS CLICKING] I grew up in Kentucky outside of Cincinnati actually.

We had eight in our family, two brothers, five sisters.

And I'm right here.

[MUSIC] Being a group of eight in Kentucky in the late 70s was as free as you can get.

I'd get on my BMX bike and ride.

Even into downtown Cincinnati, which was eight miles away.

I felt like my family was running around everywhere.

[MUSIC] The lifestyle itself was pretty rough at home and I didn't want to be there.

[MUSIC] Being in an abusive alcoholic family.

It felt like we all scattered when my father came home.

[MUSIC] Everyone ran upstairs to hide.

[MUSIC] And if you were in his pathway when he came home, he definitely put all focus on you.

[MUSIC] Unfortunately, my mother was always the one making dinner and was in the pathway.

[MUSIC] I was running from a lot of pain and anger that was in the household.

[MUSIC] Sisters did a great job of keeping it soft and warm and home feeling.

[MUSIC] But, I wanted nothing to do but move to Europe at 14 and be a professional cyclist.

[MUSIC] It's like really, really beautiful to see Jonathan and Itzel bring their love of coffee and their love of Mexican culture and their background to the community and they're saying, we want to elevate it in this way.

We want to show up for our community and we want to be that space for the community.

[MUSIC] My family's from Mexico.

My mom is from Hidalgo, El Estado de Hidalgo.

Not too far from Mexico City.

Growing up, we didn't get to visit too much.

Most of the culture that I got to grow up with were things that were passed down by my aunts who were in the US.

[MUSIC] Stories and recipes from my mom, things that have kind of pieced together.

[MUSIC] What I love about Carino is getting to introduce kind of our flavor of Latinidad, our flavor of Mexican culture.

[MUSIC] And introducing different ingredients and recipes that are found in a larger Mexico, not just in the north.

[MUSIC] Getting to share those things is really exciting.

People might have heard of tepache from their grandparent.

[MUSIC] But then getting to come in and try it for the first time is really special.

[MUSIC] Anytime that I'm thinking about who I'm serving, I'm always thinking about people like me who didn't get to grow up in Mexico.

They didn't get to get tepache at the corner store or chocolate de agua at the tianguis.

[MUSIC] We didn't have these experiences.

[MUSIC] With this menu and what we're trying to do with Carino, it's that we want to be that for those people who didn't get to grow up with these things.

[MUSIC] At the heart, it's always people in our community.

And what's special too is that other people get to experience it as well.

[MUSIC] Before I started working in coffee, I always had this dream that I would share with my mom.

[MUSIC] About one day having a little cafe, a little panedería, morning coffee spot.

And as I grew in the industry, that never faded.

It only became stronger and stronger.

[MUSIC] So now getting to do this with my partner and getting to do this for my community, it's so special.

[MUSIC] With coffee, you can't separate those two things.

You have to have community.

[MUSIC] As I've learned in a time as a roaster, coffee is connected to so many people.

People can relate to it, connect to it.

[MUSIC] Community is just part of coffee's nature.

[MUSIC] When I found bike racing, what pulled me into cycling is like these friendships that I had.

I came home from school multiple days, fell asleep on a couch, and I was not ready to ride.

But my friend Mike would be there knocking on the door to get me on the bike.

We held each other accountable a lot for everything.

[MUSIC] It took me two years to accelerate into the sport.

[MUSIC] By 18.

I was traveling so much that I wasn't even around in the summertime.

[MUSIC] I ended up going to Europe.

Europe's a whole other world.

I fell out mentally and became pretty depressed.

You have it in your head, you're gonna be successful.

I couldn't take loss.

So I came back after three months.

[MUSIC] Quit racing, just kind of absorbed myself into society.

And then my best friend Mike committed suicide.

That was my draw back to the sport.

After me falling out because I didn't understand what loss was, that made me realize what loss really is.

[MUSIC] I think cycling becomes a therapy tool for everyone that does this sport.

[MUSIC] From my abusive alcoholic father, it's a coping mechanism of me just running from my education from high school.

It's a coping mechanism for my friend Mike, and it carries on throughout life.

I'm thankful I found this sport.

[MUSIC] Cycling introduced me to coffee when I was 19, even though I didn't drink it that much.

Man, the bar is a little rusty on this guy.

- Oh, yeah.

Hello, is this thing on?

[INAUDIBLE] I stayed in Luca, Italy.

The three months I was there, I understood what community was.

The culture was, you go in the morning, you have espresso, you go on a ride, you stop in a town, have espresso, and then you finish up in town at the same spot, you have an espresso.

That was the center of the community.

There was days we would hang out at that cafe, and we saw the same people at least four times.

They would go to work, take a break, come down and have espresso, and then they'd go back to work.

And they'd do this multiple times throughout the day.

You understand community is based in this little hub.

And that was my first experience with coffee.

When I came back to the States, I didn't drink coffee at all.

And I was a stay-home dad.

Doing 17 hours a day doing graphic and coding.

At the time, I was lacking community.

I was lacking friendship because I was raising kids, but also running a business at home.

I found coffee, but not really understanding what coffee meant.

Going back to Italy, going back to Luca.

And that town was bike racing, coffee, community.

That's where it all kind of drew back, missing that element following the bike races.

Me doing a cafe in Tucson will allow the bike racers to come to me.

Hence, the start of Presta.

Exo is so loved in their community.

They have local food cooperatives that have drop-off points at their cafes.

They just really want people to know that they're for small business.

They are also just very laid-back, very Tucson.

Their new location is so elegant.

It has that adobe, historic Tucson character that people are in love with.

And it's just something special that they do.

That's something that Tucson needs.

Every coffee shop has its character.

In Tucson, customers go from place to place.

Sometimes I'll even go to Presta to work.

I just want to be somewhere where I can just get my work done.

And then all the customers are there.

We share this community of people that are passionate about coffee, but are also passionate about place.

And I think that they go to certain places for certain things at different times.

And that's really cool.

Tucson is different than a lot of places in the country because it has lost a lot of its historic spaces.

A lot of that was eviscerated in the 1950s.

So part of our goal is also to like inhabit historic spaces, revive them so that people can have an appreciation of what, you know, was once here.

We're next to Mexico.

You can't take away that borderlands feeling from this community.

Sadly, I think a lot of the border restrictions in the last 20 years have really, you know, it's dampened that feeling of that kind of exchange between Mexico and Tucson.

We share the same ecosystem.

So we have like a deep appreciation for food and for culture.

It being the sort of the UNESCO city of gastronomy, all of that, because it really is what kind of brings together the state of Sonora and Tucson.

I feel like community is the foundation of coffee shops.

I mean, those are the early places of where people would gather.

Trade was opening up for the first time.

So really, it's like this really important epicenter, I think, of exchange.

And that's in the roots of coffee itself.

This space exhibits sort of an ethos around slowness and slow living.

We wanted it to have sort of a convivial social feeling.

And it really does change the atmosphere of this space.

This room, for example, is more like a living room.

You sit in there and then you end up having a conversation with somebody else.

You end up having this nice exchange.

So it's that sort of slowness that we wanted to cultivate.

The typewriters go along with that.

They're anachronistic and all of that.

But they actually represent sort of this need or desire on our parts to return to something that's slower, more intentional, and brings us together.

The definition of Presta's coffee, bikes, and community.

I wanted to give back to the sport of cycling because that's what got me into coffee.

Presta symbolizes an elegant name if you don't know what Presta is.

People in the industry, they understand Presta as a bike valve.

But really, Presta is something that holds back pressure like our espresso machine.

Our racing pressure was 120 PSI at the time.

Which is nine bars of pressure that's in an espresso machine that allows you to pull a shot.

So it all made sense that it all kind of played off a triangle.

[MUSIC] At the time, I didn't know much about specialty coffee.

It was still pretty primitive in our tale.

We're talking 2012.

The night before I opened my cafe, I was found in my closet crying because I was about to leave fatherhood and jump into the industry.

I was into creating coffee.

I was into learning how to understand specialty coffee.

And I was into learning artwork.

Latte art was an obsession for me.

That's when I knew that this is going to grab me.

I almost felt the same way as me at 14 bike racing.

I was 42 years old.

Starting a business.

At the time, I was using EXO's coffee for my first two years of being a cafe.

That allowed me to learn and understand how to pull coffee.

How to extract it.

How to grind it.

But that's really when I was ready to rest.

[humming] - Did you like, um... - There was one on this side.

- I kind of like this one.

Yeah, I did.

[SLURP] Look, I even took a photo of it so it didn't copy off you.

The biggest part for me... ...that I didn't even think about was the relationship with the farmers.

[MUSIC] The traveling.

The community was like, eye opening for me.

You know, your first trip to the coffee farm, it puts you on another level.

You go home and you want to share every information about it.

And I wish I can take every staff member and just implant them on that first day.

The excitement that I come back with and the humbleness.

I think the most humble trip I had was Ethiopia.

I mean, that'll put you on a new level.

I can do this another 10 years with my eyes closed.

[MUSIC In Tucson, and I think in much of the country right now, Mexican culture is very popular.

But oftentimes, it's not necessarily presented by Mexicans themselves.

This is our story and people get to appreciate that in a very authentic way.

It's not someone else's translation.

It's our translation.

More roasters have come up in Tucson.

And more independently owned coffee shops have come up in Tucson.

The more that we can have of that, the better.

Presta was founded on the belief that especially coffee is meant to be shared.

That aspect of sharing coffee has been at the forefront Of what Curtis has been trying to do this whole time.

We talk about the community all the time.

What I love about Tucson.

It's a city that allows you to come and express your creative freedom.

I hope people can come to me and ask me questions.

That's what coffee is about.

It's not withholding information.

It's about sharing information.

Me being in this world for 14 years.

I think one goal ideally I've always kind of had in my head is to operate a coffee farm.

But that will be the final goal.

If I'm in the element and I have gone through every motion of coffee, one thing I haven't done was to run a coffee farm.

That's one thing I haven't touched yet.

[MUSIC]