Beanetics. It's Cool Beans.

I took a drive out to the dog groomer last week. It's a fair distance to go to get a dog groomed, but one-third the cost of the going rate for the same services in my neighborhood as I talked about in an earlier post.

While my daughter and I were waiting, we thought we'd go explore the neighborhood and stumbled upon Beanetics, a coffee shop in Annandale. It's an espresso-sized little place with a few local artist photographs on the walls and when we paid a visit, two people were surfing away at their laptops thanks to free wi-fi. It's in a subdued strip mall, which like many similar malls in the United States, have hidden gems.

Beanetics is actually a little cramped, although we had a good time. What intrigued us the most was the enormous bright-red coffee roaster and scale that take up a significant portion of the shop's space - and what intrigued me the most was the excellent coffee.

I'm not an avid coffee drinker by any stretch of the imagination, but I spend a lot of time in coffee shops to file stories and meet contacts and usually try out a cup where ever I happen to be. People often suggest to meet at Starbucks because it's so widely known and prevalent. (In fact, there's so many, I've several times been in situations where someone I was supposed to meet has been sitting in a Starbucks half a block away because we weren't specific enough to say the exact address, only the neighborhood.)

Beanetics bills itself as Annandale's only independently owned micro-roasting facility, and it sells 15 different kinds of fresh-roasted coffee daily.

The company has a colorful brochure, which advertises that "customers can watch as we use a computer-controlled roaster in our glass-enclosed roasting room." That sounds a bit fancy, but it's true.

After we finished our snacks, which they brought to us, I asked the barista (who is also the roaster) if he could give us a "tour" of the roasting room. He took myself and my six year old into the room, explained how the massive, shiny machine worked and let her take home a few pre-roasted greenish-gray coffee beans. When we showed them to her younger brother, he was greenish-gray with envy.

I enjoyed our experience and applaud the employees for taking the time out to show us how things worked. It's also an experience we couldn't have had at Starbucks.