There are bigger coffee shops. In fact, about each other one in city is bigger.
The reason that Story Coffee is small — like, small residence small — goes behind to an epic family highway trip. Don Niemyer will tell we about it, if we have time, when we transport into his strikingly small coffee emporium in a heart of downtown Colorado Springs.
First, he’ll say, it doesn’t unequivocally start with a highway trip.
“Like each good story, it all started as a adore story,” Niemyer likes to say.
The adore story began on Halloween night in 2002, when Niemyer walked into a coffee emporium in Dallas. He was visiting from Colorado Springs and beheld a barista dressed as “a suacy small hippie.” Her name was Carissa. The dual spent a integrate of days together and during a finish of a weekend, he asked Carissa if he could call her when he got behind to Colorado. She pronounced yes. They were married 7 months later.
Coffee was critical in this adore story. They adore a drink, sure, though they unequivocally adore a village around coffee shops. At 31, Niemyer quit a corporate pursuit to work during a Starbucks in downtown Colorado Springs. They dreamed of something more.
The integrate changed to Oregon and non-stop adult a few coffee shops. And they had a integrate of kids.
As their daughters grew up, they again dreamed of something more.
“We knew we wanted to come behind to Colorado to be closer to family and we knew we wanted to do something with coffee,” he said. “But we didn’t know what that looked like exactly.”
They motionless to sell their coffee shops and take a integrate of weeks to transport to Colorado in a Volkswagen Rialta, that they bought on Craigslist. After offered their initial dual shops, a family sole their residence and changed into a Rialta to speed adult a process.
But afterwards there was a twist. It took dual years to sell their final coffee shop.
So that meant dual years of vital in a Rialta, a 100-square-foot space, on a streets of Portland.
“That was an accident,” Niemyer says. “We incidentally became experts during minimal living.”
When a final emporium finally sold, a Niemyer family was prepared to take off. At first, they designed on visiting a few additional attractions on their approach to Colorado.
“It started off as, ‘Let’s stop a few days in opposite places along a way,” Niemyer said. “And what coffee shops can we check out while we’re there?”
It incited into what he calls “a inhabitant coffee crawl.” They visited 45 states and some-more than 200 coffee shops over several months.
As they explain on Story’s website, a integrate “talked with everybody who would take a minute, did some consulting along a way, judged a few barista competitions here and there, reported on a knowledge for Barista Magazine,” all while home-schooling their girls.
They took records about a coffee shops they were visiting.
“We schooled what we wanted and didn’t wish in a subsequent place,” he said. “We desired these huge, pleasing places, though we also desired a minimalist thing we had been doing.”
Niemyer had an idea: What about creation coffee inside a small house?
The outcome was Story Coffee, that resembles a small wooden cabin and serves qualification coffee brewed by Niemyer. It non-stop in 2015 in Acacia Park.
Its design, inside and out, is so considerable that Architectural Digest named Story Coffee as a many pleasing coffee emporium in Colorado.
“What stands out to me is there’s literally not anything else accurately like it,” Niemyer said.
Customers notice, when they sequence a splash from a walk-up window or lay inside one of dual high-top tables. Like other coffee shops, regulars are greeted by their initial names. If you’re new, a one or dual baristas operative will ask how you’re doing.
But no other coffee shops come with a story accurately like this one.