The team behind Aslin Beer Company has converted an old gas station and valet parking lot into a chilled-out café and beer garden in Logan Circle. The new location opened Thursday.

The operation, which seats 21 people inside and 200 outside, marks the Northern Virginia brewing company’s D.C. debut and its first coffee bar. Aslin’s other locations are in Herndon and Alexandria, Virginia. They plan to open one in Pittsburgh this October and another one in Virginia Beach next year.

Danielle “Dani” Moreno, formerly the general manager of H Street’s now-closed Dio Wine Bar, runs Aslin Coffee.

She already had coffee roasting experience from working with one of Dio’s in-house partners, the Black-woman owned, Baltimore-based Southeastern Roastery Coffee. Moreno deepened that knowledge during the pandemic when she spent almost a year on a Hawaiian coffee farm, working in production and as a barista.

She met Aslin co-founders Andrew Kelley and Kai Leszkowicz  through a mutual friend, and they brought her on in September as a partner and co-owner to launch and head up the company’s coffee operation.

Some of the coffee drinks reflect Moreno’s background.

The Orange Cardamom Brown Butter Latte is a nod to her training as a French pastry chef — and to all of the madeleine cakes she’s made in her life.

“A madeleine is like a French little cake and it looks like a shell, but basically you ground butter with honey, you add orange or lemon oil and then add flour and eggs,” Moreno said. “So this latte is like with that in mind, just minus flour and eggs. I make a caramel sauce with ground butter and orange zest from cardamom.”

She describes her Café Morena as a Vietnamese coffee that substitutes dulce de leche — which is popular in the Philippines and came from Indonesia — for sweetened condensed milk. Her Filipina and Latina roots inspired the drink.

“When (the Philippines) got colonized, the Spanish took dulce de leche and brought it to South America,” she said. “And so honestly, dulce is both … Southeast Asian and Latin American to me. That’s how I see that dulce de leche. And that’s what I am.”

Yuanyang, Aslin’s Americano coffee and oolong tea beverage tsweetened with condensed milk, is an ode to Moreno’s Chinese friends, as well as to Thamee, the acclaimed Burmese restaurant on H Street which closed earlier this year. Moreno credits Thamee chef and co-owner Jocelyn “Jojo” Law-Yone with introducing her to the drink.

Aslin’s beer lineup highlights core beers you can find year round, as well as rotating sours, stouts, IPAs, double IPA’s and lagers. So far, Kelley said, D.C. drinkers can’t get enough of De Gens, a German-style pilsner, and Power Moves, its core IPA. Aslin slings 24 beers at a time.

Kelley plans to generate further buzz by creating aged, limited-edition beers named after D.C. neighborhoods. Its Shaw iteration, for example, offers notes of caramel, apple, cinnamon muffin, toffee and vanilla.

The Logan Circle opening comes as Aslin expands its offerings into a beverage company focusing on more than just beer. It started serving wine and cider in 2021 before introducing drip and pour-over coffee at its Alexandria and Herndon locations. The beverage portfolio is meant to offer customers choices based on their mood, the time of day, or the occasion.

They’re hoping the wide range of drinks introduces D.C. drinkers to new flavor profiles. If someone starts drinking Old Town, Aslin’s American lager, for example, maybe they’ll go out a limb and sip De Gens, its German-style pilsner.

“Evolving the customer’s palate from light lager to German pilsner to maybe IPA and then maybe sour or stout is the goal,” Kelley said.

Kelley and his brother-in-law Leszkowicz founded Aslin in 2015. They are married to two sisters and named the company after their wives’ maiden name. Kelley credits the wives for introducing the men to each other and to home brewing.

The team was intentional about honoring the site’s gas station heritage, even down to the winged canopy outside that stretches from one end to the other. Their garage-type bar stools and forthcoming corrugated-metal backsplash and rollup garage doors are meant to evoke the mechanics who worked there. Staffers polished the station’s original, sealed, concrete floors for an industrial feel.

Embracing the community is another top priority.

Moreno says she’s in discussions with Duende District, a pop-up bookstore by and for people of color, to open a site at the café, just like they did at Dio.

One customer promotion would give parents and guardians unlimited black coffee on Tuesdays when they show up with their children. A $16 promotion for teleworkers would give them unlimited coffee drinks at the café until it closes.

The D.C. location is already attracting a diverse group of customers, and some are already making themselves at home. On a recent day, one man was so comfortable that he leaned back and put his feet up on one of the stools as he read a book. Others chatted up employees and typed on laptops as the Wimbledon tennis championship silently played on large televisions. That’s exactly what the owners want.

“I want it to feel familiar,” Moreno said. “I think it’s the biggest compliment to feel familiar. All of this information, all of our craft beers that we spend so much time and energy thinking about, all the coffee we spend so much time and energy thinking about, it doesn’t really mean anything if people feel detached from it.”