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Monday, February 6, 2006
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Coffee time - all day EVERYDAY PEOPLE Outdoors Editor NISSWA - When Mike French met Julie Johnson 36 years ago in Algona, Iowa, it wasn't over a cup of coffee.
Today, however, their day-to-day life involves gallons and gallons of coffee, served fresh to their customers at Stonehouse Roastery.
The Frenches took a circuitous path to their shop, located on Smiley Road in Nisswa. After marrying in 1973, Mike and Julie moved to Texas, where Mike was stationed at Fort Sam Houston by the Army. While there, he was an instructor in environmental health at the Academy of Health Sciences.
When Mike was discharged from the Army in 1975, the Frenches moved to Winona, where Mike went to nursing school at Winona State University. After graduating he re-enlisted in the Army and the couple moved back to Texas. After Mike's second discharge two years later, the Frenches moved to Rochester, where Mike worked at St. Marys Hospital and taught nursing at Rochester Community College while Julie worked at IBM. While living in Rochester, they looked for land around Brainerd.
"We drove all over the state," Mike said, "and when we got to Brainerd we found everything we needed. It was still somewhat rural at that time. We wanted to build a house and raise a family, and this looked like a safe, secure place with the values we were looking for."
The Frenches bought five acres and built a house in 1983. Mike got a job at Brainerd Regional Human Services Center while Julie went to nursing school at Brainerd Community College. In a quest for more independence and to do "something out of the box," as Mike said, the Frenches bought Fritzy's Yogurt in 2001 and turned it into Sammi J's Stonehouse Roastery, a coffee shop named for their daughter, Samantha.
For the first three years they sold coffee that was roasted by a wholesale distributor. But the Frenches knew that if they roasted their own coffee beans they could offer their customers a much fresher cup.
"They were good," Mike said of the beans they bought from distributors, "but we wanted to offer more choice and variety. Wholesale beans have their limits, freshness being the main one. Beans begin to change within days and we didn't like the roast levels. Most of what we got was too dark.
Mike and Julie French
Ultimate TV snack?
Mike: "Chili con queso with corn chips."
Julie: "Coffee ice cream with peanut butter."
Favorite movie?
Mike: "Terminator."
Julie: "Doctor Zhivago."
Brush with fame?
Julie: "Paul Douglas from KARE-11 has been in here a couple times."
Worst summer job?
Mike: "Detasseling corn."
Julie: "Picking strawberries."
Book you want to read?
Mike: "The Chemistry of Coffee."
Julie: "The Broker" by John Grisham.
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"Five days after roasting, coffee loses 50 percent of its aromatics. People don't realize this because they're used to drinking coffee that's well advanced in staleness by the time they get it. That's what we can offer - coffee that's really fresh."
Before venturing into roasting the Frenches went to coffee seminars and workshops, talked to other roasters and read everything they could find on the subject. Then they bought a Diedrich roaster on the Internet. Later, they moved up to an Ambex, a bigger roaster that can crank out as much as 800 pounds of beans per day.
"But that would be real work," Mike said.
When the Frenches began roasting their own beans they didn't have a mentor; it was all trial and error and it took months to perfect the process.
"You need to know your roaster as well as the beans," Mike explained. "Each roaster is a little different, with different air flows, different peak characteristics. And each bean is different. They have different densities, moistures and flavors. Flavor peaks at different periods in the roast. If you roast every bean to medium dark you miss half of what coffee has to offer. Most peak in flavor at light-medium."
Stonehouse Roastery gets its beans from Columbia, Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Sumatra. Each nation produces a different bean, and each farm within each nation produces a different bean. Coffee beans, like any other agricultural produce, vary depending on where they're grown and what else grows around them.
"Beans grown around apricots will taste like apricots," Mike said.
Beans are delivered green to the shop and then Mike goes to work. His roasting system calls for "roast profiles" to be developed for each bean
"It's like a cook's own recipe," Mike said. "A roast profile can be duplicated, but it won't taste the same. It's like two cooks who follow the same recipe but turn out something completely different.
"It takes thousands of roasts to know when to dump that bean. A difference of 15 seconds can turn a fruity, flavorful bean into a dull, tasteless bean. Some beans you can't ruin. Colombian, for example. Not so with Ethiopian. You have to know when to dump that bean. You watch it change color, from yellow to mahogany, then the crack starts and it browns up a bit and you say, 'OK, before it caramelizes too much, dump it!' "
As Mike perfected the roasting process, Stonehouse customers took notice. The shop has developed a loyal following and counts among its customers locals and tourists, millionaires and bums, college presidents and college students - anybody who enjoys a good cup of coffee. The shop offers more varieties of coffee than anywhere else in the county, Mike said.
Walk-in purchases of single cups are still the mainstay, but the shop's whole bean sales are increasing. Nobody has ever returned a bag of beans, Julie said, and their customers' endorsements are the best advertising. The praises of Stonehouse Roastery have been heard around the world.
"We have customers," Julie said, "who go on vacation and come back and say, 'We had a great time except for one thing: we couldn't find a good cup of coffee.' "
VINCE MEYER can be reached at vince.meyer@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5862.
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