September 4, 2018 – Max Georis found the first of his life’s obsessions—music—at about age 7, when he received a guitar for Christmas from his dad, Walter Georis, who is himself a musician and composer, as well as restaurateur, artist and winemaker. The younger Georis’s passion for music was so strong that it led him to start recording at 16 and release his first album at 17. And along the way, music helped him discover his second obsession—coffee.
“I quickly learned that music and coffee go hand in hand personally for me,” says Georis, who is now 30 and has established a career for himself as a recording engineer, musician and composer, referring to the challenging sleep patterns that were required to get him to this point.
But Georis’s interest in coffee has moved about as far beyond the simple need for a hit of caffeine as a coffee obsession can go: He’s preparing to open Counterpoint Coffee later this fall in Seaside, where he aims to eschew the bold, heavily roasted coffees that are (incorrectly) associated with high doses of caffeine, and instead serve the most nuanced, light, complex and delicious coffee that he can brew.
“I find making coffee strikingly similar to making music—you’re inputting a signal from an instrument and then you spend the rest of the time adjusting the parameters to get that signal to sound good,” Georis says, noting that with coffee, you’re inputting water and also adjusting factors such as the coffee, water temperature and air pressure, among others. “It all comes down to developing a taste, and it can either taste great or taste terrible.”
Georis chose the name Counterpoint—a musical term for one or more melodies layered over another—somewhat randomly, but it’s an apt one for a place where not only coffee will be made, but music will be recorded, rotating art will hang on the walls, strictly vinyl music will be played and a carefully edited, eclectic selection of biodynamic wines and under-the-radar beers from around the world will be served. Food will also be in the mix, and all will be offered 7am to 7pm, seven days a week.
This is a coffee shop that Georis himself can’t wait to hang out in. “My goal is a place where I can get up and not want to do anything else other than go there,” Georis says.
To prepare for the opening, he’s been researching coffee pretty much nonstop since returning home to the Carmel area from Europe a year and a half ago, where he’d been helping his brother, chef Klaus Georis, at his restaurant.
A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Georis had spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, where he’d learned the craft of sound engineering and established his career. But after returning from Europe last year, he wanted to relocate his studio to this area, where his family resides and owns Casanova Restaurant, Corkscrew Café and the Georis, Cowgirl and Endless Summer wine labels—and where he is hoping to focus more on his own music projects.
The challenge was how to afford to set up his studio in a place that doesn’t have the big music business presence needed to provide a studio with sufficient sound engineering work for others. So he and his dad, Walter Georis, hatched the idea for Counterpoint—a coffee shop that would both house the studio, and provide a source of income to support the studio and Max Georis’s own music.
The building at 565 Broadway is one of two that Walter Georis has purchased on the recently reconstructed and beautified avenue in Seaside to help his sons establish themselves in business; the other, across the street, is for a new restaurant that Klaus Georis is expected to open next year.
But back to Counterpoint, a new glass facade for the former Integrative Martial Arts studio is planned, and Max Georis has his Pro Tools HD rig up and running in the studio he constructed at the center of his shop. He’s excited to unpack Counterpoint’s new Slayer Espresso machine, which he selected for the high-tech control its Seattle maker gives baristas over air pressure, water temperature and other factors.
“No other machine came close,” in his research, Georis says. “It’s the Lamborghini of coffee machines.”
Georis’s search for the best beans he could find ended a little closer to home, with San Jose’s acclaimed Chromatic Coffee—another musical reference, as one of Chromatic’s founders is a sound engineer and Chromatic’s focus is coaxing out and highlighting the immense diversity of delicious flavors and smells found in coffee.
Hiver van Geenhoven, one of the cofounders, (whose family is coincidentally from a part of Belgium close to where the Georis’s are from) says he can identify more than 180 chemical properties, tastes and fragrances in coffee, much like a sommelier can isolate sensory qualities in wine. And just as a chef knows that exceptional food starts with exceptional ingredients, van Geenhoven says he believes the same is true for coffee. So as a result, he doesn’t just scour the world for the best beans, but partners with the farmers of those beans to help ensure that they can prosper and reinvest in their farms, making their products even better.
“Quality of life and quality of cup are inextricably connected,” van Geenhoven says.
Chromatic sees water itself as another key ingredient to in coffee—it uses different waters for different coffees at its own cafés—and the company is creating a custom water filtration system for Georis’s Counterpoint.
But if all this investment in the quality of its coffee is making you wonder what Counterpoint will need to charge, Georis says he’d like to offer some coffee drinks, perhaps espresso shots, for just seventy-five-cents.
“I would like at least some of my menu to be that accessible,” he says.
And how will it work setting up shop just around the corner from Acme Coffee, Seaside’s pioneering artisanal coffee roaster?
“Ultimately, it’s just providing more coffee, which as any coffee lover will tell you is a good thing.” Georis says.
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
