We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Castelaz a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ryan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
To be successful as a small business owner, you must have a relentless desire to bring your vision to the world, no matter what stands in your way. Being a business owner is one of the hardest things you can choose to do. You will be constantly challenged by new situations that you are unfamiliar with and unequipped to handle, and it will likely take all of you to overcome them. Without a relentless desire to realize your vision, the countless obstacles before you can crush your ambitions.
All of that said, being a small business owner is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling careers on Earth. To be constantly learning, growing, and sharing your passion with more and more individuals who fall in love with your vision is immensely humbling and endlessly gratifying.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Ryan Castelaz, I’m the Founder and Creative Director of Discourse Coffee and The Counter Day Bar in Milwaukee, WI.
For most of my life, I was pursuing a career as a professional opera singer. While studying opera in Florence, Italy, I fell madly in love with espresso, and the daily ritual it provided to me, and upon returning to the states I dove into coffee culture head first. Within a few years, I had what was essentially a small cafe in my house, and I thought it was high time to share my passion for coffee with the world.
As a life long story teller opening a coffee shop with zero street facing signage in Sister Bay, WI, a sleepy Summer tourist town of 600 people that I hold dearly in my heart, I borrowed concepts from modern mixology and high-end gastronomy, ranging from farm-to-table to molecular, to apply to our work as coffee professionals. It was this fusion of the bar and the kitchen that came to shape our unique style of drink making at Discourse, one that celebrates innovation and seasonality and seeks to tell the stories of the people, places, and things that occupy our hearts.
As a Fourth Wave coffee shop, we take the sourcing and service of tremendous coffee as a given, and not a goal. Instead, our goal is to create unique and memorable guest experiences around coffee and tea. We see drink making as liquid story telling, and each of our drinks are designed to yield a nostalgic or emotional response.
Since moving the shop from Door County to Milwaukee in 2021, my partners Olivia Molter (Director of Design) and Sean Liu (Director of Operations) have been instrumental in growing our footprint in the city. In 2022, we opened 3 cafes across the city and grew our team to 15 passionate baristas with a cumulative total of over 75 years behind the bar. We’re extremely proud of our relationships with some of Milwaukee’s most influential institutions, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum and Direct Supply, and how we’ve been able to work with these new partners to bring incredibly intentional experiences to the city.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
What ended up being our last year in Door County was originally poised to be our biggest yet. Within the span of 3 weeks, my Cafe Lead and future business partner decided to step away from the company and move to Colorado, a local partner we had been working on a new cafe with for months pulled the plug, and a building we were 12 hours away from signing a lease on was sold out from under us.
It felt like the universe was telling me that Discourse’s time was up, and that I should hang up the towel. Instead, I moved the company to Milwaukee and decided to host a pop-up in the back of my friend’s vintage store to gauge local interest. To my immense surprise, I had a line out the door. It was that day that Olivia Molter, a local barista who was just trying to get herself a latte, hopped behind the bar and helped me crush the rush. We planned another pop up, together this time, and then another, and another. Two years later, and with a lot of extra help from Sean Liu and our incredible team of baristas and bakers, we’ve grown the company to what it is today.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Our first location in Milwaukee was at Crossroads Collective, a food hall on the East Side of Milwaukee. While originally a strong performer, as time went on and we opened additional locations with more intimate spaces and a wider array of offerings, traffic fell off to a point where it threatened the short term health of the company. Locked into a 2 year lease, we had to act fast.
We identified that the core problem was that the price of our offerings was too low to sustain ourselves on the current volume of customers, and limited by our contractual obligations to offer a service that wasn’t already on offer at the hall, decided to pivot to something that had little precedence in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or the United States: a non-alcoholic craft cocktail counter. This new concept allowed us to charge cocktail prices as opposed to coffee prices, and avoided the need to ammend our existing licensure or purchase expensive new equipment. It also allowed us to capitalize on the hours the hall was already busy, instead of relying solely on our own draw.
Discourse at Crossroads closed on December 31st, 2022, and our team had just 30 days to transition our stall into The Counter, including menu development and design, a full overhaul of the stall, hiring and training our team, and advertising the new concept via fresh social media channels and a new website and reservation system. It was an all out sprint from everyone on our team, but we made good on our intentions and launched The Counter Day Bar on February 1st, 2023. Since opening, we’ve been featured 4 times on television and many times in print media, and have served nearly 100 tasting menu experiences for our opening menu, Myths and Fables, a liquid celebration of Greco-Roman mythology and Aesop’s eternal fables.
Contact Info:
- Website: discourse.coffee
- Instagram: discoursemke
- Facebook: discoursemke
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-castelaz
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/discourse-coffee-downtown-milwaukee
- Other: Hot Coffee for the Creative Soul – Podcast on Spotify / Apple Music The New Art of Coffee: From Morning Cup to Caffeine Cocktail – Full Length Book published by Rizzoli and distributed by Penguin Random House
Image Credits
Portrait + First two Images – Allison Evans Remaining Photos – Ryan Castelaz