Stories abound everywhere in the culinary South, even tucked into business parks in Pelham, AL. That’s where Alex Sherman and Jeff Daniels, who, along with the other members of the team of Non-Fiction Coffee, are changing the coffee scene for central Alabama. They view the supply chain from a bottom-up perspective, where producers are elevated and every contributor is seen as a stakeholder. See, in my world, where local food systems and farmers are often lauded, those doing the hard work of growing coffee in other countries are often dismissed, disenfranchised, and forgotten. Alex and Jeff are changing that in their corner of the world with every cup, not only training their wholesale cafe and restaurant clients how to brew exceptional coffee for their guests, but how the way it’s produced matters. At Non-Fiction, the scent of freshly roasting some seriously good specialty coffee is just the beginning.