Angel Falls Coffee Company
A mug of coffee can be a lot of different things to different people. It can be the thing that helps you start a particularly rough Monday, the hot mug that you fiddle with during that really exciting first date or the reason to catch up with the old friends you haven’t seen in years. No matter what the reason, people gather in Highland Square at Angel Falls Coffee Company for that warm cup of joe.
The comfortable space invites you to slouch down into an armchair, sip your delicious caffeinated beverage and chat. Jim King and Rafael Oletta started Angel Falls in 1996 and have been staples of the community ever since. The name is a callback to Oletta’s home country of Venezuela. “It was named after the world’s tallest waterfall in Venezuela and we purposely became a Venezuelan coffee house,” says King. Though they originally sold Venezuelan coffee, it has not been available for about a decade.
Their namesake is an amazingly tall waterfall—about 3,200 feet tall—that is secluded from the rest of the world.
Just as they were inspired to name their company after one of nature’s wonders, the two men feel strongly about producing an environmentally friendly product. “It is a big thing that anything we do in coffee is from a place that cares about the environment, the sustainability of that environment. In fact we’re completely changing our line into organics,” says Oletta. Currently, King says that they are about 80 percent organic. However in the next few months they will be 100 percent organic.
Their coffee is also roasted in house. “We roast ourselves and we’ve been roasting for the past 14 years,” says Oletta. Locally roasted coffee is rare according to King. “That’s an important part that a lot of people don’t realize. We roast our coffee locally and we’re one of the very few roasters around.”
Angel Falls has worked to be a place where people can hang out and just sip on something delicious for many years now. “To us, the most important thing is to provide a great product, a consistent product and as a store, we want to provide a place that’s comfortable and safe for them to be in,” says Oletta.