We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shelly Lammon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Shelly, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

In 2012, while pouring another cup of overrated coffee in the break room of a local IT company, someone told Mike, “You know, you can roast your own coffee.” When a person who is already a homebrewing and culinary enthusiast hears that, it’s on!

For our first roast we created a roast drum using two colanders attached to a broomstick and shook it inside our wood fired pizza oven. It was fun to try, but certainly not sustainable. We graduated to converting our gas grill to a roaster using an electric rotating drum. Couple a constant rotation and an introduction to specialty grade coffee beans, and we were making some pretty good coffee for ourselves (& friends & family of course). We spent the next eight years working with importers trying coffees from all over the world and moved towards selecting beans rated high enough to be considered “Specialty Coffee” per the standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA).

In June 2019 we attended our first formal training on grading beans, importing, roasting, and cupping at Mill City Roasters in Minneapolis. We decided it was time to share our love for higher quality coffee.

Peak City Coffee was born to share and enjoy specialty, locally roasted, small batch coffee with our community (& friends & family of course)..

Shelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

OUR MISSION To bring the highest quality specialty coffee from origin to you, the coffee lover!
Our goal is to source, develop and roast the finest coffee for your enjoyment. We believe coffee should be an experience and not just fuel. Whether you’re enjoying your cup solely by yourself or amongst friends or family, it should always be special. Experience the finest flavors and enjoy!

We also like to address the question…. Is specialty coffee really special?
You bet it is!

And not just because it tastes special.

Specialty Coffee is actually special because it has been graded as special.

The green beans themselves are graded using a scale developed by the Specialty Coffee Associations (SCA). Beans that have been graded over 80 points on a 100 point scale by the SCA are considered Specialty Coffee. The beans are graded both based on a visual analysis as well as a cupping (or tasting) analysis.

The SCA not only has developed a set of green coffee standards, but also standards for cupping (or tasting), water, and brewing coffee.

Now you know that when we tell you Peak City Coffee is Specialty Coffee, you know it’s special in more ways than one!

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We do all our own roasting at Peak City Coffee. As hobbyists, we were roasting our coffee on a converted grill in our backyard. But developing products require consistency and precision. Partnering with Mill City Roasters gave us the knowledge and access to the right types of roasting equipment to provide that. We initially purchased the 1kg sample roaster. That gave us the ability to sample coffees and develop our initial products. However, at launch time, that roaster could only produce 3 retail sized bags per roast. So the next leap was to scale up to a true production roaster. Shortly after our launch, we pruchased a 10kg roaster. This production roaster is capable of roaster 8 times the coffee in a roast. Our next hurdle is to continue growing to meet our potential. Our production roaster is capable of approximately 100 lbs of coffee per hour and we’d love to be roasting all day!

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One vision we had for Peak City Coffee was that the aesthetics of our bag would help our product jump off the shelf and resonate with our customers. We spent a year working with amazing creatives to develop our logo, icons, color palette, fonts, and artwork. That time and investment has paid off, significantly at times. One of our largest single sales to a retail boutique was completely based on our bag aesthetics! I cold called this prospect via email and she responded quickly with a huge order and said it was completely based on our designwork. She never even tried the coffee at that point and to this day we’ve never even had the chance to meet! We hope to have a long partnership with her and certianly hope to meet over a great cup of coffee!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://peakcitycoffee.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peakcitycoffee/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peakcitycoffee/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@peakcitycoffee

Image Credits
Peak City Coffee