All Over Albany

Drive-thru caffeine

Flavour2Go's Joe Mancino.

Updated

I'm going to blame my love of coffee shacks on a story I read as a kid.

A sister and brother who'd gone to stay with their grandmother for the summer were captivated by an old garden shed by the roadside. They cleaned it out, tidied it up, hung checkered curtains in the windows, and voila! A tiny shop. They sold homemade cookies through the window to lines of hungry neighbors.

It just seemed so industrious, so compact: They had everything they needed, in miniature!

Add coffee into that equation and it gets even better.

Go out to the Pacific Northwest and you see them everywhere -- little shacks perched in parking lots or on roadsides, offering drivers fabulously strong coffee with on-the-road convenience. How useful! How small!

As far as I've been able to find, the Capital Region has two drive-up espresso huts. Sure, I like walking to my neighborhood coffee house for a leisurely cup. But when I'm out in my car, there are times when a coffee is the difference between finishing the errands and crumpling into a tiny ball. And I'll take an independent over the Starbucks drive-thru any day.

Sadly, neither of these coffee shacks is anywhere near my neighborhood. But maybe one of them's in yours.

Flavour2Go
501 Columbia Turnpike
East Greenbush

Flavour2Go is a spin-off of Flavour Cafe in Troy. This happy lime-green shack on Route 20, in front of Planet Fitness, opened in January. It also has a few picnic tables in case you'd like to get out of the car and stretch your legs.

Joe Mancino, the owner, had been involved in Flavour Cafe and had then gone on to a retail management position elsewhere. But he knew Flavour had been interested in expanding their brand, and he saw the coffee shack as an opportunity to become involved in local business as an owner.

I'm generally chai-wary -- it's too easy to get a lousy chai -- but their menu brags about theirs, so okay, I'll bite. And yeah: It was rockin'.

Aw, man. Did you have to put the cupcakes right near the glass where I can see them?

Joe gives an evil chuckle.

Before I drove away I asked Joe what I most wanted to know: "Is there a bathroom in there? Not for customers, I mean. Just for you, sitting in the little shack all day?"

"Everyone asks that," Joe says. And yes, there is.

Coffee Connection
5103 State Route 7
Hoosick Falls

The chainsaw-carved, coffee-drinking bear will flag you down as you're headed up Route 7: This is the Coffee Connection, which has been open for 5 1/2 years. Its owner, Mike Green, came out here from the Seattle area, where coffee shacks "are on every corner, and they're really handy, and we fell in love with them ourselves." They couldn't find any out here, "so we thought we'd do one ourselves," Mike said.

Currently closed for remodeling -- they're rebuilding the back wall after an arson fire earlier this spring -- they plan to reopen the weekend before Memorial Day.

I swung by this caffeine outpost amid the rural views recently to grab an iced latte, which they made expertly: sweet enough to be indulgent, but still tasting like coffee. Most of their clientele are, like me, people passing through, Mike says: "New York City people, New Jersey, leaf peepers." Not as many locals. In addition to coffee, they have baked goods and smoothies, even homegrown popcorn. Refresh the whole family without unbuckling all the car seats.

If you're headed up to Bennington and need to refuel before a cemetery tromp, you couldn't do better.

Zing! Thank you, caffeine. Isn't it nice to be back in iced coffee season?