New Park Slope Coffee Shop Offering Free Morning Cup This Week

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Park Slopers who want to get a free cup of coffee and try out a new spot in the neighborhood can do just that this week.

Uptown Roasters, which opened about a month ago on 7th Avenue., is offering a free cup of coffee before 10 a.m. every day this week.

Besides giving people in the neighborhood shelter from the mondo-snowstorm that was headed our way, the idea behind the promotion was pretty straightforward: "The idea is to get more people to taste our coffee," owner Dan Hildebrandt told a Patch reporter during a recent stop-in to his shop.

Hildebrandt's Park Slope location, on 7th Avenue between 11th and 10th streets, is the second store for the coffee shop, which features roasts from his family's native Peru and from around the world.

The Park Slope location is much bigger than Uptown's original location, a tiny outpost in East Harlem.

"We met somebody who came to our shop in Harlem and was involved in this building with their family, so we were just having an ongoing conversation about things that they could do in this space, and they really wanted a community building," Hildebrandt said about the Park Slope location.

The coffee shop also features a small room in the back for events, where the shop hosts next door's Brooklyn Game Lab on weekdays and plans to have a coffee tasting lesson for kids soon.

The space is also open for community events and meetings.

"We try to focus on creating as sense of community in that space," Hildebrandt said. "At the end of the day we’re a place where people meet and gather and ultimately drink coffee."

Some of the coffee comes from Peru, where Hildebrandt's father is from and where Hildebrandt has traveled back and forth to during his life.

"I started working with coffee in Peru through my dad," he said. "We went back to explore a social project and it kind of morphed into a little bit more than that. We have micro-lots of coffee that we’ve been working on for six harvests. So some of our coffee is very unique because we’ve been working on that for a long time."

For more info about Uptown, click here to see their website.