Local Business Spotlight: Story and Soil Founder Talks First Gen Background and Love of Coffee

Nick Cimillo ’26

Features Editor

For any students hoping to escape the Peter B’s – Underground binary for a change, a solution lies just about a mile north of Trinity’s campus on Capitol Avenue. Story and Soil opened their original Hartford location in 2017, and have also started operations out of the RJ Julia Bookstore at Wesleyan University in Middletown. Michael Acosta ‘13, the shop’s founder and a Trinity alum, met with the Tripod to discuss his background as a first generation student, his experience and obsession with coffee, and what coffee goers can look forward to from the shop.

Acosta was raised in the Bronx, New York, “in a neighborhood that, like many neighborhoods in the Bronx, [was] just quite diverse. This was [near] Pelham Parkway, so quite close to the Bronx Zoo.” He is of Peruvian and Puerto Rican heritage, his mother having moved to the United States from Peru at age 21 to “[restart] her life, and set up roots in the Bronx very quickly.”  While Acosta described himself as a “decent” student while attending high school at Mount Saint Michael’s Academy, something changed in him during his junior year while taking AP Psychology; “I got extremely motivated, and started really thinking about college and career and…how exactly I saw myself in the world. And a lot of that had to do with my teacher, Professor Guffey, who just opened up a lot of different avenues of thought and expose[d] me to a lot of different books.” 

He was surely used to being explorative at this point; “My background, being first generation and being six years separated from my youngest and only siblings meant that I did a lot of exploring on my own, and a lot of my influences were friends and pop culture and the things that I got myself into.” With his newfound academic motivation, though, Acosta had grown ambitious by the time he had to apply to colleges.“I applied to over 20 [schools],” he recounted, “most of them small liberal arts colleges… I was just very nervous, and I didn’t think that I was competitive enough. And so I did everything I could to just kind of play the numbers and make sure that I [could] get into a competitive school.” When the dust settled, he ended up choosing Trinity for its established neuroscience department. “That was sort of where I was trending towards. I really wanted to go into the sciences; I had my mind on medical school and whatnot. But like most freshmen and like most students, I really had no idea what I wanted to do.”

At Trinity, Acosta ended up majoring in neuroscience and minoring in philosophy, and, coming from a culturally diverse urban area, felt right at home in Hartford. “A lot of the folks in my [friend] group were from New York City and Chicago, and other major cities in the U.S. and  {even] internationally. So we were very comfortable just walking into El Serape (a Mexican restaurant on Broad Street), going to the mall, walking around the neighborhood…Everyone is in the bubble, of course, but we really did try to get out. And we were just super interested in what the city had to offer.” In addition to joining the Cleo of Alpha Chi literary society his sophomore year, Acosta also worked at the Underground Coffeehouse all four years he was at Trinity. What’s more, after graduating from Trinity in 2013, he would go on to run the Underground under a graduate assistantship. “I went above and beyond my duties there,” he recounted. “I did a lot of renovations to the space: renovated the bar, got a new espresso machine, new grinders, painted walls [with] new murals, partnered with a few local coffee shops to bring in coffee and [brought] in training. I really enjoyed that world and I really enjoyed the operations of the business.”

His experience at the Underground is what truly set off his interests in coffee; Acosta’s first startup, N2 Coffee, specialized in nitro cold brew. “We were the only ones serving it on tap in Connecticut at that point,” he said. “I started becoming involved with the Specialty Coffee Association of America. I went to Columbia, visited farms, judged competitions…In that process, I just fell in love with coffee and its place in Connecticut. I saw that it was growing and I saw that the market was still very young and [that] there was a lot of room to connect people through this great product.” And when the time came to “pivot away from the first business,” Acosta and his new business partners had identified an ideal location in Hartford to open their own coffee shop: the site of the original Story and Soil location on Capitol Avenue.

Starting relatively small with pop-up coffee stands, including some at Trinity football games, both of Story and Soil’s locations now aim to be welcoming spaces for community gathering. “From the very beginning, I just wanted to be able to celebrate our community and bring in all the people that I already knew who would be able to take advantage of the space and coffee shops as they are, [as] these third spaces. They take a life of their own and they bring people together and sort of that. That sort of intangible thing that you can create really has always been special to me.” Even the shop’s name, though directly inspired by a Bright Eyes album (“Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground”), speaks to these values and many more. “A lot of what makes us special, aside from the space we create, is the coffee that we buy. The companies that we choose to work with, work in an ethical and in a really kind of value driven manner. And so we’re not buying commercial grade coffee; we’re buying coffees that very much have a story and a face to them.”

This fall, Story and Soil is offering its selection of seasonal drinks and ingredients, including salted maple and chocolate lattes, and chai cold foam. “We do have several other things in the works that will hopefully allow us to bring in a lot more guests,” Acosts concluded. “We certainly strive to be able to do more. That gives us the opportunity to, hopefully, keep on doing good, but also be able to provide more opportunities for our staff…we truly pride ourselves [on] being a neighborhood cafe. And so we want to be able to continue to increase our ability to serve Hartford [and] Connecticut.”