In Spite of Obamanomics: Garage-based coffee business goes nationwide

02.18.2014

No word if the beans originated in the same country as wood used in some Gibson guitars. Stay tuned..

Nick Reid, left, and Mark Royalty pose in Royalty's garage in Rapid City on Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 12. Reid and Royalty started a wholesale coffee business called Pure Bean Roasters out of the garage. Pure Bean Roasters is the only registered Fair Trade Certified Organic Air-Roaster in the U.S. 

Though Pure Bean Roasters coffee is sold in shops more than 1,500 miles from South Dakota, the business is still run out of a garage in Rapid City.

And co-owners Mark Royalty and Nick Reid are perfectly content with that arrangement, even if it means Royalty has 600 pounds of coffee beans in his garage right now. 

“We figure if it worked for Steve Jobs, it can work for us,” Royalty said of the Apple computer founder who launched his business from his garage.

Last July, Royalty and Reid invested about $5,000 and founded the wholesale coffee-roasting business in Royalty's garage and named it Pure Bean Roasters.

Now coffee shops in Waterville, Maine, Cody, Wyo., and Sacramento, Calif., and a church bookstore Sioux City, Iowa, all consistently place orders for Pure Bean Roasters coffee, Royalty said.

They started out selling about 25 pounds per week in its first month of operation, Royalty said. The company now sells between 100 and 200 pounds a week. 

In Rapid City, it is sold at Wild Strawberry Market at 2120 W. Main St., and a special blend of their white coffee can be bought from Straight Shot Espresso at 2123 Jackson Blvd.

Royalty and Reid had been talking about turning their coffee roasting hobby into a business for years before their idea began to brew in July.

Reid has been air-roasting coffee in his own garage for personal use for about 10 years. Royalty has done it for six or seven years.

The business started selling online through Facebook and other social media outlets, then worked to get a few local retailers interested, Royalty said. 

Social media has played a significant role in the growth of the business. It even helped them choose the business name, Royalty said.

"We figured out the name of our company through Facebook," he said. "It was amazing, people I didn’t even know responded."

The business Facebook page, Facebook.com/Purebeanroasters, also alerts customers to new coffee shipments or products, said Zsuzsanna McCauley, owner of the Wild Strawberry Market.

"They post online that the coffee has arrived here, then people come in and the coffee walks out the door," said McCauley, who estimates her store orders about 10 pounds of coffee per week.

Royalty made several business connections through his position as the U.S. Mountain Region director of a ministry called Burn 24-7. The ministry is a worldwide organization that hosts prayer meetings with people of different faiths to pray.

“It’s kind of coincidental that people who pray for long periods of time like coffee,” Royalty said with a laugh.

Pure Bean Roasters uses a commercial glass-roasting chamber to air-roast its coffee beans, said Reid, who works as an insurance broker in Rapid City. It makes the coffee smoother and reduces its acidity level, he said.

Most conventional roasting methods use a hot metal drum or pan, meaning the beans are roasted through contact with a heated metal surface, he said. A lot more coffee can be roasted in a drum, but Reid said it reduces the overall quality.

Drum roasting, he said, also creates uneven roasting patterns because some beans are exposed to more heat than others. The process also causes chaff to get into the coffee, which raises the acidity, Reid said. 

Air-roasted coffee, meanwhile, bounces on a bed of hot air so it's roasted by convection heat, he said. Since each bean is wrapped in hot air, all of the beans are roasted at the same temperature for a more even flavor.

Royalty said he is unaware of any other business that sells air-roasted coffee in South Dakota. 

While a garage may not create the most luxurious working conditions, it has a number of advantages, Royalty said.

"It’s cost-effective and allows us to keep our overhead down so we can afford to do everything fresh-roasted to order," he said. "We don’t stock any roasted beans, we only roast when it’s ordered. We’ve got about 600 pounds of unroasted coffee beans in my garage."

As the business continues to grow, the duo might have no choice but to find a commercial location to roast, Reid said.

"This business is going to force us to expand, but we want to keep it small and focused on quality," he said. "The business should dictate expansion, so we will hold out in Mark's garage as long as we can, but it's hard to say how long that will be."

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