John Hughes has been in the coffee and food business for nearly 30 years. He started with a small café in Laguna Beach in 1996. Then came the Filling Station Cafe in Old Town Orange — where he ran a coffee program for his wife Juliette — then a casual fine dining spot in Newport Beach that ran for nine years until the pandemic shut it down. By the time a space opened up in an old bank building at the center of Newport Beach, John had built up enough experience across enough formats to know exactly what he wanted to build next.
Juliette's Cafe and Coffee Culture combines a third-wave coffee program, upscale café food, and Juliette's bakery operation in about 3,500 square feet plus a 1,200 square foot patio. On a busy Saturday, 600 to 800 people come through. On Sundays — the busiest day — the line goes out the door to the next building. The coffee program is what drives much of that. And at the center of the coffee program is a Bellwether roaster, which John found at SCA in Boston and tracked down to a couple of locations in Orange County before deciding it was exactly what the concept needed.
When the bakery needed the room, the machine just rolled
The original roasting setup put the Bellwether in a dedicated room inside the café. Then Juliette needed that room to expand the bakery. With a gas roaster, that conversation would have been a significant construction project. With the Bellwether, John rolled the machine to a new location, moved the electrical connection, and was back up and running in under 24 hours. "Try doing that with a gas hookup," he said.
“Try doing that with a gas hookup.”
John Hughes, co-owner
The move turned out to be an upgrade. The new position sits in a walkthrough between the coffee side and the café side — visible to anyone moving through the space. John roasts there regularly, and the machine in action generates its own conversation. People notice it, ask about it, bring their kids over. "They see it, they get excited," John said. "You're able to educate people a lot more about coffee." For a program built around engagement and freshness, having the roaster in plain sight is part of the product.
The program: a dozen coffees, one clear philosophy
Juliette's keeps around a dozen Bellwether coffees on the shelf at any given time, organized around a few anchors and a rotating cast of single origins. The house espresso is Golden Hour — John tried all three of Bellwether's espresso blends at medium and medium-dark roast levels before landing on it as the right fit for the Newport Beach clientele. The house brewed coffee is Guatemala, which John has used at every location he's ever operated, for almost 30 years. Different suppliers, same origin; he likes that Bellwether sources from different Guatemala producers, because it keeps the conversation with regulars going even on a staple.
Beyond the anchors, the café rotates through 8 or 9 single-origin espresso offerings — Ethiopia (specifically the Shanta Globe, a natural John favors), El Salvador, and Honduras among them. Papua New Guinea and Burundi go into cold brew. Two or three coffees rotate through the single brew program at any time, served on a Ground Control brewer that gives the team pour-over-style control over a drip format. When Bellwether released the Guji anaerobic — their first anaerobic offering — Juliette's was one of the biggest buyers, deploying it through the single brew program for customers who wanted something with more complexity and fermented character.
John roasts almost everything at medium. His reasoning is flavor-driven: medium pulls out chocolate, nutty, and fruit notes simultaneously, and going lighter or darker tends to sacrifice part of that range. He'll go lighter for single brew and pour-over when it suits the coffee, and he stays flexible for customers who ask — but the default is medium, and it reflects his taste and his read of what Newport Beach customers respond to.
"You can't make bad coffee taste good. But you can make good coffee taste bad."
The degassing window
One of the things in-house roasting makes possible that buying roasted coffee doesn't is precise control over when the coffee gets served. Chris Perez, Juliette's assistant manager, explains it clearly: "Fresher is not always better immediately after roasting. Coffee needs time to degas." The volatile compounds in freshly roasted coffee make it taste unnecessarily bitter. Good crema on a just-roasted shot doesn't mean a good shot. You can have beautiful extraction and a genuinely terrible cup.
“Fresher is not always better immediately after roasting.”
Chris Perez, assistant manager
For Golden Hour espresso, the prime window runs from about 7 to 20 days after roasting. The team roasts knowing they'll start serving that batch 5 to 7 days out, and by day 20 they're shifting it into cold brew use rather than keep pulling espresso shots past the prime range. That window isn't static — it shifts bean to bean — and finding it requires tasting through the range and building an understanding of how each coffee develops. But once you know it, you can plan production around it and deliver the same experience every time.
Degassing even affects latte art. Coffee that's still gassing heavily produces unpredictable texture that makes consistent milk work harder to execute. As it moves through the prime range, the team sees better results both in flavor and in the cup's presentation. "It's all about offering that premium experience," Chris said. "It all ties into each other."
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Standards, staff, and the skill of not wasting good coffee
John built the café intentionally around an environment where staff can earn well — baristas and food runners averaging over $30 an hour with tips, pulling about $15 an hour in gratuities on top of base pay. That model attracts people who care about the work and stay long enough to develop real skill. Chris describes the growth clearly: staff who could barely distinguish a good shot from a bad one when they started are now flagging when something's off and fixing it without being asked.
The bar they hold themselves to is genuinely high. Chris has been to specialty coffee shops — ones with real third-wave credibility — and watched baristas pull 40-second shots and serve them without a second thought. Juliette's standard is different: latte art has to be right, the shot has to be right, and the team knows why both of those things matter. "You know how easy it is to make good coffee taste bad," Chris said. "It is a skill to make that good coffee taste good every single time."
“It is a skill to make that good coffee taste good every single time.”
Chris Perez, assistant manager
The throwdown: debuting to the community they'd been missing
Juliette's sits tucked in a corner of Newport Beach. The coffee program is serious; the space is beautiful; the regulars are devoted — some eating and drinking there every single day. But within the LA and Orange County specialty coffee community, the café wasn't widely known. People in that world who had found it said the same thing: you have great coffee. Why aren't you doing more with the specialty community?
Chris's answer was a latte art throwdown, which he organized and ran himself. The goal wasn't competition for its own sake — John actively dislikes the word competition — but visibility and connection. Bring the Orange County and LA coffee community into the space, let them see what Juliette's has built, and become part of a scene they'd been adjacent to without formally joining. The turnout was strong. The MC called it the most well-organized and fair local throwdown he'd seen — no complaints about the rounds or the calls. "I was expecting a ton of criticism," Chris said. "Everybody was like, this was really well put together."
The event created an unexpected downstream effect: the barista who won the throwdown is now buying five pounds of Golden Hour a month for personal use. The person who came to compete left as a customer. That's the version of community John talks about — not beating your neighbors, but building rapport wide enough that the category grows for everyone.
Retail, online, and what comes next
At 2.5 years into this location — and nearly 30 years in the industry — Juliette's is still building. The area where the roaster now lives is being remodeled to make the retail coffee display more prominent, with online sales planned as the next stage. John already has customers from international visits to his previous restaurant asking him to ship coffee to them out of state. The infrastructure to fulfill that is what the remodel is building toward.
John is also thinking about a second Bellwether. When the Shop Roaster launched he got excited immediately — a countertop machine that could run alongside the existing V2 and potentially support a separate space. He has his eye on a possible second location in Korea, where his wife's family is based and where electric roasters have a strong following. For now, the Newport Beach program is the focus. But the same qualities that made the Bellwether the right choice for a tucked-away café in Orange County — electric, ventless, moveable, permission-friendly — make it equally compelling for whatever comes next.