Inside the new Standing Wave Coffee shop in Pittsburgh. All images courtesy of Standing Wave Coffee.
Paddling into Pittsburgh with fresh roasts and quality brews is Standing Wave Coffee, a new cafe with a Probat P12 machine humming on site and a strong connection to the great outdoors.
Guests are greeted by a canoe suspended from the ceiling near the entrance. It hangs over a row of live-edge wooden tabletops along a wall decorated with wooden oars and a series of porthole-shaped framed works.
A bright red La Marzocco Linea espresso machine seizes attention from the white stone surface of a bar clad in natural wooden paneling.
Standing Wave co-owner Colin Frye, an avid outdoorsman, roasts all the coffee in a production nook at the back of the shop within full view of guests.
From its new location, the roastery also supplies the Standing Wave mobile coffee truck, which has been on the road for three years, as well as the Silver Horse Coffee shop that brothers Evan and Colin Frye opened in Donegal, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, in 2017.
Distinct but not unrelated to Standing Wave’s river theme, Silver Horse nods to the mountain frontier, ski culture and Colin Frye’s background in geology.
“[Silver Horse] has like a South-Southwest kind of motif, and since I’m a geologist we incorporate a lot of natural rock specimens,” Colin Frye told Daily Coffee News, noting that the new Standing Wave bar better reflects his background as a river guide.
The Silver Horse Coffee bar in Donegal.
“I’ve been a river guide since I was like 12. My entire lifestyle is being like a river-outdoorsy kind of person, so that’s the design of my coffee shop,” Frye said. “It’s kind of like Mac Miller meets The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in a Patagonia jacket.”
The roastery first took shape downtown in 2020 during the pandemic and has since grown into a program that accommodates a wide range of preferences, from Scandinavian-style light roasts to well-expressed dark roasts. Frye tries to keep his own tastes in check while crafting high-quality, not-too-overpowering syrups from scratch at both cafes to offer both familiar and more creative drinks customers now expect.
“Chains are starting to show up here, but they’re these Willy Wonka companies that are milk and sugar first. I tend to be a coffee-first kind of company, but I’m also not an idiot. I understand you’ve got to sell something that appeals to these people,” said Frye. “Here in Pittsburgh you either have the real expensive coffee labs that are doing $14 pourovers or you have these sugar shacks that are putting graham crackers on top of lattes. I’m kind of in the middle. I train all my employees like a classic Italian espresso bar, but they make that fire gingerbread latte as well.”
Standing Wave Coffee.
Prior to his life in coffee, Frye worked as a directional drilling engineer on oil rigs, traveling to remote locations and living in rugged industrial conditions for extended stretches before heading to the next job. A coffee lover even then, he would mail-order fresh roasts from Seattle and Portland to rigs in the Arctic, North Dakota and elsewhere, selling pourovers to colleagues for $5 apiece.
“I was a white-collar engineer, but you’re still out there with all the blue-collar dudes. You’re stuck together on this metal ship, basically, so there’s camaraderie and you make friends with people,” said Frye. “Wherever I’d travel, I’d take a pourover set and people would just know that I had fire coffee and they’d come looking for me.”
Frye continues to see parallels between coffee and the oil business, with coffee bringing people from all walks of life together. The design of the Standing Wave mobile truck was inspired by the oil rigs, purpose-built with many compartments and durable metals. Looking ahead, Frye intends to travel to places where coffee is grown to discover and retrieve “crude” coffees himself, as it were, for refinement in Pittsburgh.
Standing Wave Coffee.
“Travel-adventure coffee sourcing is my eventual goal,” Frye said. “My life and my style is my brand, and going to these places and buying these coffees is something that I’m really interested in.”
More immediately, to reach volumes that justify buying full containers of green coffee, Frye plans to build more mobile trucks as scouts for locations where he can install shipping-container drive-through coffee stands, offering a higher quality of coffee than is typically associated with drive-throughs.
“I’ll park somewhere and beat out local coffee shops because my coffee truck’s the shit,” said Frye. “Pittsburgh’s like 10-15 years behind Denver [in terms of] breweries and gastropub eateries. We’re just getting that kind of stuff, so, you know, I’m bringing the competition and that’s just kind of how it is.”
Standing Wave Coffee is located at 2024 Sarah St. in Pittsburgh.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
