Local coffee roasters find success in freshness

For Bloomington Coffee Roasters and Brown County Coffee co-owner and roaster Nick Schultz, coffee roasting on a large scale has been a long time coming.

Although it started out as a simple hobby for his family, Schultz’s product is now sold at farmers’ markets in Bloomington and retailers in both Bloomington and Brown County. Schultz’s coffee is part of Bloomington’s growing desire for local, fresh food. 

He takes steps to assure retailers and consumers that local food from Bloomington and Brown County lives up to expectations.

“Our coffee has a ‘roasted on’ date on the bag, so you can tell when it was roasted,” Schultz said. “People don’t realize that coffee loses a lot of its flavor within the first few weeks of a roast. It also becomes more bitter.”

Schultz said none of this information is new for him, because he began roasting coffee beans on his own before upgrading to larger machinery.

“We started roasting at home, roasting our own coffee. From there, we progressed to a larger machine,” Schultz said. “After we started getting more business, we upgraded to a machine that can handle 50 pounds per batch.”

Bloomingfood’s bulk food buyer Nicki Owens said the store began carrying Bloomington Coffee Roasters and Brown County Coffee to tap into the local food market, and the store’s partnership with local coffee roasters quickly grew.

“We were really getting into local business,” Owens said. “We started with his packaged coffee, then started selling more of it in bulk.”

Bloomingfoods also buys local coffee from Partridge and Quigley Coffee Roasting Company, Jameson Coffee and Quarrymen Coffee Roasting Company. Coffee, however, is not the only product Bloomingfoods strives to obtain from local sources, Owens said.

“We’ve been bringing in a lot of local produce,” Owens said. “We’re bringing in more and more stuff, particularly in bulk, that is local.”

In addition to retail sales at Bloomingfoods and other distributors, The Pourhouse Cafe exclusively uses B-Town Beans from Brown County Coffee. Assistant manager Tim Felton said that using locally sourced coffee has benefits beyond freshness of product.

“We know the person who roasts the coffee,” Felton said. “We can ask (Schultz) any questions we want. He makes the deliveries himself. He’s in shop. We can visit him at the farmers’ market. That’s a valuable thing for us. You’re not working as much with a slick salesman who’s visiting different coffeehouses.”

Local business, Schultz said, is only one facet of his company’s success. The proximity to students at IU helps, too.

“University kids are more conscious of quality,” he said. “They also realize that we buy premium coffee to support the third-world growers.”

Felton said he agrees with Schultz and credits Bloomington with the success of The Pourhouse Cafe.

“(Bloomington) caters to people interested in buying from a local roaster who has a lot of variety in what he does and more of a connection with the farms and the distributors that he’s buying the beans from. That is popular here,” Felton said.

Schultz said that for his company and other Indiana coffee roasters, the differences in product for local coffees are measurable.

“You couldn’t pull off our level of attention to detail if you were outside of Indiana,” Schultz said. “The only thing that keeps us in business is freshness.”