Cafe Lemont owners strive for area’s best coffee

Michael Beck and Jodi McWhirter sat at a corner table in the hallway of their cafe, reminiscing about the day they stopped at a red light on the corner of Pike Street and Boalsburg Road.

The building next door, Beck said, would be great for a cafe — and in 2010, it was.

The same conversation was happening among other people in the Art Alliance, their destination, when they walked in the doors.

“We had just been talking about that,” McWhirter said. “It’s a funny coincidence, so we stopped over (at what would become Cafe Lemont).”

The couple who enjoyed cafes around town soon opened their own.

“I think in a way there was a big buzz because Lemont had wanted something like this for a very long time,” Beck said. “The fact we were doing it got a conversation going.”

Q: How well do you work together?

JM: The surprise is we work really great together.

MB: I don’t think it ever crossed my mind because this was such a natural fit for us. There’s a lot of creativity that goes into this business. If you walk through, it’s like a mini art gallery. It’s a whole new avenue for us to be creative. It’s nice, too, to always have another person there to rely on when something is overwhelming. If someone calls off or a machine goes down, one of us is here to support the other.

Q: What roles do you two have?

JM: While we do have a baker, I bake more than Michael. I also do more of the business end of the things — the books, the accounting, the scheduling. We tag team on a lot of things, too, but Michael handles the roasting business side.

Q: Are the challenges in a small cafe really just day-to-day operations?

MB: Well, you know, if we have a refrigeration failure, there’s a lot of juggling that needs to happen. Those things can’t always be fixed the same day.

JM: In any type of business with a lot of equipment, anything can come up. Things can run really smoothly for months, and then all of a sudden it’s boom, boom, boom, boom, a bunch of things happen.

Q: You roast all of your coffee on-site. What’s your philosophy to making it?

MB: There is a bit of an approach we take. We branded ourselves initially as an all-organic cafe, so all the beans we buy and sell through the cafe are organic varieties. When we took over the roasting business, we realized we had the advantage of roasting small batches frequently and never need product around for more than a two-week window. We encourage people, too, who buy whole beans from us, to only buy what they need in that amount of time, so they don’t have stale coffee sitting around. So, as far as a philosophy, making small batches to always have a fresh product.

Q: Is consistency a challenge for you?

MB: As far as the roasting, no. The only inconsistency I think all roasters experience is the same green beans aren’t always available throughout the year. If one region has a bad year, you won’t get beans from that region. It’s like any agricultural product in that regard. The person we bought the (roasting) business from, Jay Scwank, had 20 years worth of roasting experience. We inherited all of his notes with the business.

JM: He roasted for us the first two years we were here, and we asked him in the first year if he’d thought about selling his business. He said he was and taught us everything he knew. It made it easy. We have some blends of beans that if one isn’t available we can mix another bean from that region to make it come out really close. That’s what most roasters do.

Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to open a café?

MB: There would be a lot of questions first before advice. It depends on what their goals are. Do they want to open a business to make a lot of money or do they want to open a place to spend their time at? They’re totally different goals. If we wanted to open something that we were going to franchise, we wouldn’t do something that looked like this. This cafe is designed very specific to the property and the neighborhood. The advice really would be to know what you want out of it before you go into it.

JM: We’re also always constantly making changes and adjustments and figuring out better ways of doing things. Right at the beginning it was just listening to customers and finding out what they want. It’s OK to do the things you want, but you’ve got to offer customers what they want, too.

Q: What changes have you made?

JM: We started off sourcing outside for food. We had bakers bring their goods in and sandwich wraps made for us. We didn’t cook much in-house. People wanted more food, more vegetarian and gluten-free options, so we started making more food. Everything we did had to be something quick and easy to prepare, easy to execute.

MB: We were going to focus on coffee and just have the best coffee in the region. We weren’t trying to introduce people to new foods. As time went on we realized it got a little easier for us with our system in place, and we had ideas and started making food in-house. We had the time to do it. It was a nice way to start off, though, focusing on the coffee and then transitioning to making more food.

Q: What’s your favorite coffee?

JM: Espresso, I like lattes.

MB: I’m an espresso drinker.

This story was originally published January 16, 2016 at 11:40 PM with the headline "Cafe Lemont owners strive for area’s best coffee."