A&E Coffee Roastery and Tea Searches for its Coffee MVC

A&E Coffee Roastery and Tea in Amherst is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month by searching for its Coffee MVC-Most Valuable Customer.

Caf owner Emeran Langmaid and Roastmaster Adam Langmaid have selected 25 of A&E's longest-term customers as a starting roster and will feature them on the company's Facebook page, where friends and family can vote for an All-Star team of nine semi-finalists. A second round of voting will determine the company's Coffee MVC, who will win free coffee for the rest of the year. Each of the starting team will be featured on a trading card with information including their favorite drink and how they take it. Players will be encouraged to share their trading cards with their social networks in order to generate votes. The Coffee MVC will be named on May 31. We have a handful of customers who have been with us for the entire time and supported us when we were a fledgling company. This is a fun way to honor them, Emeran Langmaid says.

The couple worked at coffee shops in North Carolina while in college, and got the idea for opening their own roastery after moving to NH when they couldn't find much in the way of local custom coffee. We wanted a local organic product that could service southern New Hampshire, she says.

A&E roasts approximately 600 pounds of coffee a week, and that number is increasing, Langmaid says. The business generates about a half-million dollars in total annual revenue between its retail and wholesale operations-each of which have been growing at double-digit rates monthly for quite awhile, she says.

The anniversary celebration isn't taking place just virtually. The company, which offers a variety of certified-organic, shade-grown, Fair Trade coffees from around the world, has a week of anniversary events planned for May 7-13. They include a roast demo with Adam, a discussion of current trends in the coffee industry with Emeran, a discussion with Majka Burhardt, author of Coffee Story Ethiopia: A Tale From the Country Where Coffee Began, and a Mother's Day Tea Party in the caf.

For more information, visit www.aeroastery.com.