For Taneisha Hasan, all roads lead to coffee — especially when it comes to paying homage to Black women and celebrating hip-hop music.

Through her six-year-old company, Black Vinegar Collection, Hasan produces and sells vegan cold-brew lattes via local delivery and at pop-ups. The D.C. resident says her lattes are a physical manifestation of “Black Coffee,” one of her favorite rap songs from Heavy D & The Boyz.

The song honors Black women and in it, Heavy D raps: “Black coffee, no sugar, no cream, that’s the kind of girl I need down with my team.”

“Heavy D has a special place in my heart because my dad played him a lot,” says Hasan, who lives in D.C. “He didn’t curse in his raps, so my dad didn’t mind listening to him around us; he was just a fly big dude.”

Hasan’s java comes in “plain jane,” your basic cold brew, as well as other flavors such as peanut butter and pistachio. You can also get your buzz on with two seasonal flavors: banana, available from March through August, and lavender, which Hasan sells from August through March. Her most popular flavor? Peanut butter.

She secures her coffee beans from Three Keys Coffee in Texas, which roasts them to her specifications. Then Hasan grinds them to make the cold-brew base. She uses agave and oat milk so vegans and people who are lactose intolerant can imbibe. The lattes are produced in a commercial kitchen, and she sells them on her website for D.C. customers and in-person at various pop-ups across the District. She charges $8 for 8 ounces and $11 for 12 ounces.

That’s where you may have seen her: Hasan has had a recurring pop-up at Tanner Park in NoMa for the past few months, but now that the weather’s cooling off, she’ll move her events indoors — she expects to pop up at Hank’s Oyster Bar in December at a date still to be determined. She updates her Instagram page and newsletter with future pop-ups inside restaurants, apartments, retail spaces and more.

As far as other growth, she’s currently raising $15,000 to can her “brew babies,” which would allow her to ship them all over the United States.

Hasan began Black Vinegar Collection as a fashion brand in 2017, selling various hip-hop branded items, including yoga mats, hoodies, tote bags and moka pots for making coffee. She chose the name because vinegar is often used to change how a dish tastes — and because she is Black and wants to “blackout” people’s negative perceptions about hip-hop, she says.

But she comes from the restaurant industry — she currently works as a part-time server at Hank’s Oyster Bar — so she eventually branched out to coffee. In 2020, Hasan noticed people stuck at home during the pandemic were reminiscing about their favorite places, including cafes. That inspired her to do an online coffee collaboration with RĀKO Coffee Roasters to sell a custom grind paired with one of Black Vinegar’s Moka pots.

In 2021, she did a similar online coffee collaboration with Three Keys Coffee. The following year, when she was bored and recovering from COVID-19 at home, Hasan tinkered with coffee beans, creating a cold-brew concentrate that she sold online. She turned the concentrate into cold-brew lattes to sell at a concert at The Convergence Project in Northeast D.C. More pop-ups featuring the lattes soon followed and took on a life of their own.

These days, BVC is more of a coffee brand that sells apparel and accessories every now and then, including a delicate gold necklace that says, “cold brew” on its nameplate. But even as the company has changed gears, her mission with BVC is to help change hip-hop’s negative perception.

“I try to do things subliminally, so people don’t know it’s happening, because I think that’s a more effective way or more palatable way for people to accept something than shoving it down their throat,” Hasan said.

At 37, Hasan is old enough to remember when politicians and the media condemned hip-hop for its explicit, sometimes misogynistic lyrics that glorified violence. N.W.A., 2 Live Crew and Ice-T were three controversial acts that faced a conservative backlash in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“It was always something that was like, ‘hip-hop’s responsible for this, because they said this in their lyrics and the kids are listening to this,’ and it’s like, that’s not necessarily true,” Hasan said. “Yes, that does happen but that’s not all that’s out there.

Like hip-hop, Hasan’s coffee has had broad appeal since she launched the product, she says. She estimates that 20 percent of her clientele is Black, with the rest being people of other races.

“Money goes how money needs to go,” she says. “I want whoever wants to support me.”