Radical Growth

As Red Emma’s turns 15, it has become a model for a number of worker co-ops in the city.

- Ron Cassie

When Casey McKeel began roasting coffee, she started with a drum roaster attached to a backyard grill behind her Waverly home. She’d grown up in the business. Her mother ran a café in her native Michigan and, as an undergraduate, she’d studied the impact of the coffee trade on communities where coffee is farmed and produced. In 2012, McKeel, who’d moved here two years earlier, launched Thread Coffee determined to build a democratically run, environmentally sustainable, fair and transparent trade operation. A year later, Thread forged a relationship with Red Emma’s, the city's ever-expanding worker-cooperative bookstore, café, and venue—then in its original basement location on St. Paul Street. “That was before Red Emma’s moved to Station North, but it was looking for a larger space,” McKeel recalls. “We thought, ‘Why not share resources? We could roast in-house there and split a portion of the rent and licensing.”

This was hardly the first collaborative project for Red Emma’s, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month. By the time Thread Coffee began its association with Red Emma’s, named for the turn-of-the-century immigrant, anarchist, and writer Emma Goldman, they had already spun off the collectively managed 2640 Space—the still-thriving destination for grassroots political and cultural events—in partnership with St. John’s United Methodist Church. And they had assisted in the launch of the city’s only worker-owned and democratically operated bike shop—Baltimore Bicycle Works. Thread Coffee was in a good hands.

Five years after incubating with Red Emma’s, Thread moved into its own roasting space and café inside the Open Works building in 2017. The same year, Food and Wine named them Maryland’s “Best Coffee.”