The Cafe That Stopped Chasing

The roaster sits in the middle of the room. Not tucked behind a wall, not hidden in a back warehouse, but right there, where the light from the arched windows catches the drum as it turns. A customer at the rammed-earth bar watches the beans tumble through the sight glass. She's holding a triple-shot espresso, rich and low-acid, the kind of drink that doesn't need explaining.

This is Current State Coffee Roasting in Shawnee, Kansas, and the most radical thing about it is how little it's trying to prove.

The Tension Sofia Knows

Specialty coffee culture, whether in Kansas City or Sofia, is caught in a familiar bind. On one side: the relentless pursuit of the new, the fermented, the experimental. On the other: the quiet conviction that mastery lives in fundamentals, not novelty.

Sofia's cafe scene navigates this tension daily. Walk into any serious roastery here and you'll find baristas debating whether the next anaerobic-processed lot is worth the premium, or whether the money is better spent deepening relationships with farms they already know.

Current State, which opened its first cafe in early 2026, offers one answer: stop chasing.

A Building That Steers

The cafe occupies a nearly century-old red-brick building in downtown Shawnee. Co-founder Nick Robertson, formerly the green coffee buyer at Kansas City's Messenger Coffee, told Daily Coffee News that the design philosophy was simple:

We wanted the building to steer the design, because it is a historic building, pushing 100 years old now. Instead of design heavy, we wanted it to just be heavy.

Nick Robertson

Heavy means heated concrete floors, industrial rafters, walnut cabinetry built from old church pews, and a rammed-earth bar with layered colours. A windowed garage-bay door opens to a front patio with green metal chairs and potted plants.

This isn't aesthetic nostalgia. It's a principle: work with what exists rather than imposing a vision.

Restraint as Philosophy

Current State's coffee lineup is deliberately narrow: Colombia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Peru, and a decaf from Mexico. No experimental processing, no "funky coffees," as Robertson puts it. The sourcing comes through importers like Shared Source, Swift Coffee Sourcing, and Cafe Imports, with Robertson handling green selection while co-founder Kiersten Rex, former head roaster at Messenger Coffee, leads production on an 18-kilogram US Roaster Corp machine.

The concept of the brand is leaning into an early-2000s style cafe. In the same spirit of a high-quality Pilsner brewery, discerning quality in coffee or in a beer is about the fundamentals of processing, and not the imposing of other flavors to make it palatable.

Nick Robertson

This philosophy mirrors the approach of roasteries like Blue Bag in Sofia, which works with a curated set of verified partner farms rather than chasing every new origin. Both understand that mastery comes from knowing your coffees intimately.

Two Traditions, One Bar

The espresso program splits into two distinct stations. On one end, a three-group La Marzocco Linea Classic paired with a Swan grinder handles the house program: rich, low-acid triple-basket shots forming the base for classic drinks. Italian-spirited, unapologetically traditional.

On the other end, a single-group La Marzocco GS3 and Bee House drippers serve single-origin espresso and manual pourover. Robertson calls this the "more progressive American coffee perspective."

The two sides don't compete. They coexist, honouring different traditions without trying to synthesise them into something new.

Presence as Practice

The Current State brand is about being present, being in your current state, paying attention to coffee. Though the vision is simple, we've got a long way to go before we're perfect, so the next step is just trying to achieve perfection.

Nick Robertson

The cafe is not a destination. It's a practice space. A place where the roaster is visible because the process matters, where the menu is short because focus matters, where the building is old because continuity matters.

The customer at the bar finishes her espresso. She doesn't check her phone. She watches the roaster turn.