Wayfarer's coffee festival to move to Concord

LACONIA — The Northeast Coffee Festival, previously known as the New England Coffee Festival and hosted by Wayfarer Coffee Roasters in the city’s downtown for the past two years, will be hosted in Concord next year, the festival announced earlier this month.

In 2022, Wayfarer launched the New England Coffee Festival aiming to combine the industry-oriented elements of a specialty coffee expo with the community connections and merriment of a street festival. For the past two springs, NECF has been hosted in downtown Laconia, split between spaces at the Belknap Mill, Canal Street, the train station and the stage and rooms at the Colonial Theatre. The festival is growing, organizers said, and the move to Concord comes with a new co-host, Revelstoke Coffee, and a name change, broadening the event's horizons.

“One of the things we learned in these first two years is that when we tap into the knowledge and experience of the coffee professionals around us, the festival continues to grow and gets better and better,” NECF founder and Wayfarer co-owner Karen Bassett said. NECF is still a fledgling festival and organizers are still determining their long-term vision.

One potential model is for the festival to travel to cities across the northeast on a rotating basis, where a “city host” will partner with the NECF team at Wayfarer to coordinate the community-based parts of the event. The move to Concord next year is an exploration of that model.

“We've been really open to where this festival can go. Because it's not just about Wayfarer, it's about the entire specialty coffee community and highlighting this entire region,” Bassett said. The mission of the festival is about making specialty coffee accessible to everyone, and changing the location continues that mission by folding in a new community in the region. 

Located on Concord’s Main Street directly across from the Statehouse, Revelstoke opened its doors in December 2018. It has been an enthusiastic and involved part of the NECF the past two years, hosting the event’s climactic Latté Art Throwdown in 2023.

Patronage of Wayfarer while visiting family in the Lakes Region was a “major inspiration” for Alex Stoyle and his wife, co-owner Lyndsey Cole, in opening Revelstoke. They have looked up to Wayfarer for some time and admire what its team has built in Laconia, he said, “So it’s a very cool thing to have them tapping now into us and into our city.”

In addition to a ready co-host with strong ties to the festival, the vibrant and emergent coffee scene, an established audience for street festivals and ample outdoor space near dedicated conference space, Concord is a natural fit for NECF’s first traveling appearance, Bassett said. 

Stoyle agreed: “Concord is the perfect place for this event,” he said. “I love Laconia and the festival has been really cool there. To take it to the next level, I think we need to look to Concord,” and maybe other cities in the future, with the infrastructure to support a growing festival. The capital is also more centrally located and accessible to people coming from across the northeast, he added.

With fellow specialty coffee shop Brothers Cortado as well as other prominent coffee shops including Teatotaller and Gibson’s bookstore, Stoyle said “Concord has grown into a really coffee-heavy city.”

Concord’s larger downtown also will help consolidate the festival’s two prongs — workshops for enthusiasts and professionals alike and vendor stations — and create a flow between them. The Bank of NH Stage, The Hotel Concord and the Red River Theatre will host the educational programming. According to Stoyle, Concord will close its Main Street from the intersection with Pleasant Street to the Concord Food Co-op for a community market with live music, food trucks and vendors.

“It feels like it makes more sense,” Bassett said. Attendees will better be able to intuit the layout, rather than organizers having to explain how different locations of the festival fit together. 

Sharing the organizing effort between a “city host” and the NECF team — who maintain regular work commitments at Wayfarer — eases stress placed on one business while widely increasing the reach of the festival. 

“I'm so proud of what we built, but now that it's a success, that is a ton of pressure for one business,” Bassett said.

Wayfarer and Revelstoke jointly holding hosting duties for the 2024 NECF event has also already upped its reach, she continued. The social media post announcing NECF’s move to the state capital, posted jointly on Revelstoke’s accounts, received more engagement than any other by the festival many times over. 

As hubs and meeting grounds, coffee shops are tapped into the culture and energy of their communities. Bassett hopes that, if the festival continues to rotate around the region, each “city host” will flavor their event with the notes of their locale.

Hosting festivals large and small has been one pillar of the city’s downtown revitalization push. They are an opportunity, as City Manager Kirk Beattie said, “to show that this area of the city is active and inviting and welcoming” to visitors from near and far. Beattie praised the coffee festival as well-organized and well-attended. He said it was “too bad” that it would leave, but emphasized it was one of an array of such events that help the city make strong first impressions. 

Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce President Karmen Gifford said "it's never great to see events leaving downtown," but also complimented the festival's expanded collaboration and ability to draw people into the Lakes Region from across the Northeast, when they might normally go to Boston.

Bassett emphasized the change in location was about exploring a new opportunity.

“It’s more about, we’ve grown so much to the point that we're taking the show on the road,” she said, noting that organizers and city officials had a positive relationship and the event could return in the future. 

Expanding the festival’s brand, and expanding Wayfarer’s brand, she continued, also develops the city’s brand. 

“Just because it’s not in this area doesn’t mean it won’t bring people to this area.”