Published June 2003

Sales, premium coffee brewing at Java Inn

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

Coffee isn’t the only thing brewing at the Java Inn, home of Snohomish Coffee Roasters. So is business.

Since its founding in 1998, the coffee-roasting and retail establishment in Snohomish’s downtown historic district has seen its sales grow 30 percent per year, according to Don Everest, who runs the business with his wife, Karen.

Snohomish County Business Journal/ KIMBERLY HILDEN “Roasting the perfect cup of coffee took a lot of trial and error. You need to be consistent with the time, the weight and the temperature,” said Don Everest, roasting a batch of coffee at the Java Inn, which he operates in downtown Snohomish with his wife, Karen. Everest’s Snohomish Coffee Roasters brand recently took top honors at McCormick & Schmick’s annual M&S Cup competition.

“We’re right on track this year, too. It’s been a real pleasant surprise,” he said.

To go along with those growing sales is a perking reputation for roasting premium coffee, coffee that in April took home the top prize at McCormick & Schmick’s annual M&S Cup competition in Seattle.

Competing against Snohomish Coffee Roasters were six other “micro roasters” around Puget Sound, including wholesale coffee roaster Caffe Umbria of Seattle, Dillanos Coffee of Sumner, Fidalgo Bay of Mount Vernon, Ootopia Coffee Roasters of Bremerton, Poverty Bay Coffee Co. of Auburn and Vista Clara Coffee of Snohomish.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Everest said, adding, “It’s been a fun little ride.”

The ride started in the mid-1990s when Everest, then selling aircraft interiors for Boeing, decided he “just wanted a change.”

His work had taken him to Italy and Brazil, where he ventured into the little coffee shops, with their on-site roasters and comfortable, social atmosphere. He decided it was something he wanted to replicate — “but with really good coffee.”

So, with no coffee roasting experience but a desire to strike out on his own, Everest and his wife bought and remodeled the 104-year-old Northern Hotel Building on First Street and purchased a gas-fired drum coffee roaster.

Snohomish Coffee Roasters and the Java Inn were born.

“Roasting the perfect cup of coffee took a lot of trial and error,” said Everest, who received a lesson in the craft from a representative of the company that sold him the roaster. “You need to be consistent with the time, the weight and the temperature.”

It’s also important to buy high-quality beans.

“We get the best coffee and buy it from the right places,” he said, noting that he works through a broker for most of the beans but also buys directly from farmers — a growing trend in the industry.

Everest roasts coffee twice a week, the process done in view of customers sipping one of his many roasts, which include Guatemalan Antigua, Sumatra Mandheling, Colombia Supremo, Cafe del Peru and Kahuna Kona, a high-end specialty coffee whose beans come from the Kona coffee region of Captain Cook, Hawaii.

“That’s been a big hit,” Everest said of the roast, made of 100 percent Kona beans. “There’s definitely a market for it.”

And not only for those who drop by the store. Thanks to word-of-mouth and the company’s Web site, the Everests ship coffee all over the country, including to the Connecticut home of Mary Travers, the folk singer of Peter, Paul and Mary fame.

The company now employs five part-time staffers, but Everest isn’t looking to expand into the wholesale market. Rather, he wants to maintain the comfortable atmosphere he and Karen have created at the Java Inn, with its lodge pole pine furnishings and philosophy that the “customer is No. 1” — a philosophy he learned from Boeing and Karen learned while working in sales at the Bon Marche and Nordstrom.

“I don’t want to do wholesale and turn into a production roaster,” Everest said. “I’m doing this because I want to have fun.”

And so the “fun little ride” continues.

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