What can I tell you about coffee? I suppose it’s best to start at the beginning, trouble is I have difficulty remembering when exactly “the beginning” was, and I have an odd way of remembering when it “sort of” was. I remember sitting at a coffee roaster when the verdict to the O.J. Simpson case was delivered, and that was October of 1995, so I have to figure that I got into coffee around 1993.
Back then I was working as a delivery driver for the St. Cloud Times, it wasn’t a bad job for the most part. I worked four days a week, drove a big, blue van and dropped off newspapers to stores, vending machines and route carriers (paper boys).
My route took me northwest of St. Cloud to Avon, Albany, Freeport, New Munich, Melrose, Sauk Centre, Long Prairie, Grey Eagle, St. Rosa, back through Albany to St. Cloud. The only day that sucked was Sunday.
Check in time at work was 10:30 PM on Saturday night and I’d be lucky to get home by 7:30 AM on Sunday morning. Let me tell you, having to be at work at 10:30 on Saturday night put a huge cramp in my social life, but a guy’s gotta eat.
I have to admit, I saw a lot of beautiful things working that job those hours. Once I saw an entire herd of deer run across the highway in front of me. They were led by the largest buck I’ve ever seen and ran like the wind! Another time at sunrise I saw an entire fogbound field turn bright orange in the reflected sunlight. It was amazing.
But ultimately the job started to take it’s toll in my personal life and in my musical endeavors. The last straw, however, was a day in the coldest, hardest part of winter when I was driving through Sauk Centre and I looked at the digital clock/thermometer on the bank and it flashed alternately “4:35 AM” and “-35ยบ F.”
“I have got to get a different job,” I said to myself.
The New Job
The new job was supposed to be temporary until I got a better job so I walked into a relatively new place in downtown St. Cloud called Sano’s Coffee House and I filled out an application. When it came to the line “Position applying for” I didn’t know what to put so I went to the counter and asked the woman working there.
“If you write down ‘Barista’ you’ll get the job.” she said, and that’s what I did.
I got a call from the manager for an interview a couple of days later and I did indeed get the job. The manager who hired me trained me in and I got to meet the woman who told me to write “barista” on the application, her name is Susan Rose and we are close friends to this day.
Shortly after I was hired and trained in, the manager went to California to visit her mother and never came back. A day or two later the owner, who shall remain nameless for reasons that will become clear, offered the manager position to me.
Later he offered to teach me to roast coffee. I spent two months apprenticing at his elbow before I took over all the roasting duties.
The man was tough to work for, but I managed to get along with him quite well. He wasn’t the best at customer service which I will illustrate with one simple story:
The place was pretty classy, we had the New York Times and the London Times our customers to read and each table had a small glass container full of sugar cubes. One day a couple came in after having just visited the library next door and ordered a couple of cappuccinos. As they sat and drank them another couple they knew came in, sat with them and waited for them to finish their drinks. The owner walks up to me about ten minutes after they arrived and says, “I want all the sugar cubes off the tables as soon as they leave. I am sick and tired of being nickled and dimed to death by these fucking freeloaders!”
Apparently he had witnessed one of the people from the second, non-paying couple eat a sugar cube. One. One cube sent him over the edge.
Eventually he had it with customer service and we closed the coffee house in favor of the roasting business. He went out got some grocery stores to carry his product. It was my job to make sure the beans got roasted and packaged, it was his job to deliver them and stock the shelves and bulk bins.
One Friday afternoon when he was out delivering I had finished roasting, had all the shelves stocked and alphabetized, had prepped my Monday work load and looked at the clock, it was 2:30 PM. On many other days when it got down to that point, where I had done everything that needed to be done and prepped everything for the next day, I was able to punch out early and go home without any problems. On this particular day I left at about 3:00.
In the meantime he came to realize as he was out and about that he didn’t have enough beans to fill some bulk bins, he drove back to the shop and found I wasn’t there. Despite the fact that there was plenty of product on the shelves, he wanted me to be standing there ready to hand him what he needed without having to get out of his van to get it himself.
On Monday I came in in the morning and started the day’s work. He came in about an hour later and paced and paced through the back hallway and into the adjacent garage for about 20 minutes. Finally he walked up to me and said, “Things aren’t being done to my satisfaction. I’ll pay you to the end of the week, but you’re fired,” and he walked back out to the garage.
I sat there in shock for several minutes. I just got fucking fired! I grabbed a cardboard box, put my personal belongings in it and walked out the back door. As I passed him he said, “Love you, man.”
“Well, you pick a strange fucking way of showing it,” I replied and walked out of his life forever.
Later I heard that he told people he had to fire me because I was “too efficient.”
I walked around the corner where a new coffee house was under construction and asked for a job. The boss wasn’t in at the moment and they told me to come back the next day. I did and got offered a job immediately, and thus began my association with the Meeting Grounds.
The New, New Job
I was hired as an employee, quickly became manager of the downtown location, and was eventually became the coffee roaster for the entire organization. It was during this time that I feel that I earned the title Roast Master.
I spent the next 12-1/2 years working for the Meeting Grounds both at the St. Cloud and St. Joseph locations. I met a lot of wonderful people, and others whose names I have long forgotten.
Eventually, the owner of the Meeting Grounds tried getting too big, too fast. He had dreams of being the next Caribou, and we had locations in St. Cloud (both downtown and on the campus of St. Cloud State University), St. Joseph, Waite Park, Sartell, and a satellite/franchise in North Dakota. Unfortunately, he spent money he didn’t have, and the business failed in early 2006.
By that time I had spent 14 years in front of the coffee roaster, and I didn’t really have any idea what else I could do in life. I had never imagined that I would become a business owner one day, but with the financial (and emotional) help of my dear friend, Jeff Engholm, we were able to buy all the equipment from the Meeting Grounds for a fraction of its actual worth, and in April of 2006 Muggsy’s Beans was born.
The rest, as they say, is history…