On an overcast Sunday earlier this month, venture capitalist Ulf Schwekendiek stood in his garage in Bernal Heights, making free, luxurious lattes and cappuccinos for anyone who walked by.
At his side in a grey apron was Kalle Freese, a former world-ranked barista who now runs Taika Coffee, which makes those colorful cans sold at stores around the Bay Area. Together, they are the team of Yummy Coffee, a monthly, donation-only popup that started this spring.
The two met at a meetup Schwekendiek organized for coffee lovers, bonding over their shared passion for flat whites and intense espresso gear. Two years after buying their house in Bernal Heights, Schwekendiek’s wife gave him two choices for the expensive gear that was taking over the smaller space: It either needed to migrate to the garage or to the curb.
It was a perfect opportunity for Schwekendiek, who had been looking for ways to practice his espresso making — and his latte art.
“If I want to be a master of anything, I have to do it thousands of hours,” he said. “To master the craft of espresso, there’s no way I can drink more than four or five a day. My wife wants two. How can I make 100 in a day?”
When Schwekendiek suggested the popup to Freese, he promptly joined the project. The two first threw open the garage doors on April 20, and have since had three more pop-ups, on Sundays approximately once a month (upcoming dates are available on Yummy Coffee’s Instagram).
Their menu highlights rare coffees, including Ecuadoran microlots that taste like oolong tea and Scott Rao Geshan espresso, as juicy as a mango — coffees not easily available anywhere else in the Bay Area. And it’s all made on Schwekendiek’s extravagant gear, including a Decent espresso machine and BH AutoCombs to disperse coffee for pulling espresso shots, those two pieces in the collection running the better part of $5,000.
Freese handles much of the drink-making (he won the 2013 and 2015 Finnish Barista Championships, and ranked one of the world’s top 10 baristas for a time). Schwekendiek, meanwhile, works the crowd and tends to Freese’s barista needs with a “yes, chef!” attitude.
Schwekendiek made his money in tech. His first job in the industry was at Siri, while he was still in school. A German expat, he lived in Montreal and New York before moving to San Francisco when Siri got acquired by Apple, where he worked for a few months. He went on to found and sell several companies, which led to his role as a partner at venture capital firm Horizon 3.
He and his wife decamped from San Francisco to Marin for about seven years, before deciding they were city people at heart. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for Schwekendiek it came down to the coffee.
"There was no good food, no good coffee," he said. "Equator is great, hats off to them. But they weren't close to where we were."
The couple bought their Bernal Heights house in 2022. Back in the city, Schwekendiek began reconnecting to the local coffee network, organizing meetups for other coffee fanatics. It was at one of these events that he met Freese, connecting over their shared love of making coffee and sharing it with others.
Last Sunday marked Yummy Coffee’s fourth pop-up, but the future is wide open for the young project. There is no plan to commodify this venture, Schwekendiek said. He wants to bring his own step-by-step journey to coffee drinkers of every level; with Freese by his side, he can chat sourcing and extraction with other pros, or vault his neighbors into fourth wave and off their Folgers addictions.
“I don’t pretend I’m a coffee expert at all,” Schwekendiek said. “This is just for fun.”
