Why Contra Coffee and Tea matters.
Contra Coffee and Tea is an inventive coffee-and-tea bar where Old Towne Orange's independent commercial character meets food science, nitrogen infusion and a taproom concept modeled on craft brewing.
Set along North Orange Street near Chapman Avenue and just steps from Plaza Park, the coffee-and-tea bar occupies Old Towne Orange between Chapman University, the historic commercial blocks surrounding the Plaza and the former citrus-packing district beside the railroad tracks, where tightly spaced early twentieth-century buildings preserve the pedestrian scale of the city's original center. A long tap wall replaces the conventional espresso station, placing rows of handles and keg-fed beverages behind a bar-like counter. Cold coffee and tea form the primary encounter, with drinks arriving directly from taps after brewing, formulation and nitrogen infusion have already occurred behind the scenes. Flights extend that format by placing several formulations together for side-by-side tasting, turning the range of coffee, tea and caffeine-free preparations into part of the visit itself. The result is a compact Old Towne bar whose keg system, unconventional beverage engineering and brewery-derived service model overturn the physical conventions of the neighborhood coffeehouse.
What defines Contra Coffee and Tea.
Contra Coffee and Tea is best known for Paul Del Mundo and Julie Nguyen's transformation of food-science training into an all-tap coffee-and-tea business built around nitrogen infusion. The pair met in a food chemistry laboratory at Cal Poly Pomona, graduated with food science degrees and entered food-industry jobs before Del Mundo's difficulty with the condensed milk in Thai iced tea helped push their experiments toward nitrogen as a route to creamy texture. They began with a keg purchased through Craigslist, and Nguyen drew on research-and-development experience in food manufacturing to scale formulations from individual drinks into five-, ten- and thirty-gallon batches. Both left their full-time food-science jobs and launched Contra in March 2015, building an audience through farmers markets, a mobile taproom, Santa Ana's 4th Street Market and a pop-up at Scoops. A Patchwork arts festival brought them into contact with 1888 Center founder Kevin Staniec, who subsequently selected Contra for the literary and cultural center he was developing in Old Towne Orange. Their permanent taproom opened in August 2017 inside the 1888 Center, pairing Contra with a bookshop, gallery and performance venue in a 1925 building. Early traffic reached 200 to 300 customers per day, forcing a two-person enterprise to add four part-time employees and marking the conversion of an experimental mobile beverage project into a permanent Old Towne business.
Nitrogen gives the cold brews their characteristic dense, creamy body by dispersing fine bubbles through the liquid, allowing Del Mundo and Nguyen to reproduce some of the textural effect they originally sought. Dirty Horchata applies that approach to vanilla rice milk, cinnamon and spices, carrying the founders' early interest in dairy-free texture into a drink with horchata as its foundation. Gold Rush takes the repertoire toward Vietnamese-style iced coffee, and Love Birds combines espresso-roast coffee with black tea and brown sugar syrup, deliberately erasing the usual boundary between the two sides of a coffee-and-tea program. Contemporary tea formulations extend that experimentation through Derozan, which combines lychee and rose with black tea, and Prince Palmer, which joins Earl Grey with lemonade. That Orange Stuff uses vanilla oat milk with Thai tea, and Cartoons & Cereal pushes the dairy-free branch into house-made horchata designed around the flavor left at the bottom of a cereal bowl. Take-home 32-ounce fills preserve the keg-driven logic beyond the taproom, making the founders' scaled beverage formulations the connective tissue between experimental flavor, batch production and service.
How Contra Coffee and Tea fits.
Contra Coffee and Tea works as the anchor for an outing connecting Orange's surviving civic center with the industrial architecture of its citrus economy and a museum devoted to the artists who recorded California's twentieth-century transformation.
Begin at Plaza Park, the circular public ground that has functioned as Orange's central gathering place for more than a century. The surrounding street pattern preserves the intersection around which the town developed, and the Plaza Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 before the substantially larger Old Towne Orange Historic District followed in 1997. Commercial blocks erected during the citrus prosperity of 1905 through 1930 still define the surrounding streets, joined across Old Towne by more than 1,400 houses built before 1940. Continue to Santiago Orange Growers Association Packing House, surviving from the cooperative founded in 1893 as Orange's first growers' packing association. The plant developed into one of the city's great industrial complexes, and in 1929 it processed 60 million pounds of fruit, equivalent to 2,000 railroad cars. Villa Park Orchards later took over the facility and continued citrus operations there until 2006, making it Orange County's final operating citrus packing house. Conclude at Hilbert Museum of California Art, created through Mark and Janet Hilbert's collection of California Scene and representational art. Chapman University announced their gift in 2014 with more than $7 million in art and another $3 million toward establishing the museum, which opened in 2016. Oils, watercolors, sketches and lithographs trace California through rural landscapes, farms, coastal settlements, freeways and expanding cities, extending the collection into Hollywood studio art and animation. The progression moves from the civic nucleus around which Orange developed through an industrial survivor of the citrus economy and culminates inside an art collection preserving how generations of artists pictured California as agriculture, urbanization and entertainment reshaped the state.
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