Gingersnap, pumpkin pie and other fall lattes at The Wired Goat

Once upon a time, an Ethiopian goat herder noticed that his goats got jumpy when they ate a certain bean.

The herder took the bean to a local monastery and asked the monks whether the bean was good or evil. Upon inspection, the monks deemed the bean evil and threw it into a fire. As the beans burned, monks began to follow the aroma. The beans were scooped up, ground and became our first cup of coffee.

“So we owe all our coffee drinking to a wired goat,” said Jessamine Stone, owner of The Wired Goat Cafe in Chapin and recently, the Vista.

OK, maybe not.

“It’s just a myth, but it was the most colorful of all the myths, so we just decided to go with it.”

It’s this tongue-in-cheek approach to coffee making that has this locally owned and locally sourced caffeinated spot the latest watering hole to give coffee consumers the quality cup of Joe they never even knew they were missing.

“I’ve always had a passion for coffee,” said Stone, who’s worked with coffee for 16 years. “Branching into Columbia gave us a better opportunity to make and maintain relationships because we’re in a bigger area. So now we have a big, long list of local providers and relationships with our coffee growers and brokers. That’s something we’ve been really persistent about: high-quality coffee, roasting it in-house and making sure everything we bake is done in-house with high-quality ingredients sourced local.”

“Our coffee is not pre-roasted and brought in,” said Saul Seibert, the location’s roaster, who has more than 20 years of experience, learning the technique in the French Quarter of New Orleans. “It is roasted weekly, so you get the freshest cup of coffee in Columbia. That’s a fact. We stand by our coffee and believe that it is excellent in every regard.”

Stone and Seibert are planning to serve up their take on many of your fall favorite lattes, including gingersnap, French toast and pumpkin pie, and introducing oak-smoked sea salt and honey.

“For the pumpkin pie latte, we use real pumpkin, fresh-ground spices, brown sugar, a little allspice … It definitely tastes more like pumpkin and is our take on something that’s industrywide,” said Stone. “The oak-smoked sea salt and honey – the oak-smoked sea salt comes from Bulls Bay, near Charleston. They smoke their own salt with an oak tree that fell. We have local honey from Beach Hill Farms in Lexington and combined them. It’s really good.”

For the gingersnap latte, Stone works with customers from their Chapin location that own land in Vermont, where they make maple syrup.

“We candy ginger, boil it down with the maple syrup and create this syrup with it that tastes like a gingersnap,” said Stone. “It’s sweet and a little spicy, and the coffee plays nicely into it with a little smoke. The local milk is really rich, so you get a gingersnap.”

The French toast latte was so popular, it started out seasonal and is now available year-round.

“Brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon … it has that classic French toast flavor to it, so you get breakfast in a cup,” said Stone. “You get the scent of the cinnamon at first, then the sweet, buttery vanilla flavor in the latte. It’s probably one of the best-sellers, and it’s awesome. We have some French toast diehards.”

It’s hard to predict which seasonal drink will end up at the top of your list. But there’s certainly no harm in trying all four as you prepare yourself to fall in love with fall and all the seasonal drinks it has to offer – especially the ones that get you wired.

Dwaun Sellers, dsellers@thestate.com

This story was originally published September 20, 2016 at 6:23 PM with the headline "Gingersnap, pumpkin pie and other fall lattes at The Wired Goat."