This piece about Houston County’s two coffee roasters is part of a larger project to document the culinary resilience of southeastern Minnesota’s Houston County during the pandemic. You can read more about my Crystal Creek Citizen-Artist Residency project here.
With a population just shy of 20,000 people, Houston County offers residents and visitors an ample supply of locally-produced meats, cheeses, honeys, mushrooms, baked goods, fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles. And if that doesn’t sound impressive enough, this southeastern-most Minnesota county boasts not one but two superb coffee roasters.
The two coffee roasters aren’t connected in any way. Bob Carlson of Carlson Roasting Co. in Houston is more familiar with the Driftless area as a Luther College alum, and Tricia Babinski of Caledonia’s Heart Rock Coffee moved to the region just a few years ago after living internationally. They’ve only met once, according to Tricia. But they have one major thing in common—a shared love for coffee.
Bob Carlson is a coffee fanatic. And not just a fanatic about drinking coffee, but roasting, charting, testing, and experimenting with it, too.
I arrive at Carlson Roasting Co. with a belly full of beef brisket after a tour of Fat Pat’s BBQ. Bob dives right in to the technical details of roasting. He shows me the computer system attached to his coffee roaster controlling the rate of rise, a metric that’s key to consistent roasting. He flips through multiple Excel spreadsheets. “Every coffee has a set profile that we try to follow, like a roadmap,” Bob describes. This profile drives the settings for the roaster. It’s a warm day, so he needs to adjust for humidity and temperature.
We watch the beans change from grassy to yellow as the Maillard reaction caramelizes the sugars and the scent of toasted oats fills the air. Bob makes sure the coffee is roasted through but doesn’t want to eliminate flavor by over roasting. “The important thing is knowing your market,” Bob advises. “It’s a Medium to Medium-Dark market around here,” he adds.
Bob gives me a basic lesson on coffee flavor profiles. Every region has different soils, environmental factors, and altitudes that affect flavor. Just like wine has terroir, coffee has location. “That’s what’s fun about coffee. You get to explore and try different flavors from unique regions of the world,” Bob says with a smile.
We hear a popcorn-popping sound as water escapes the beans. “They’re opening up nicely,” Bob notes. Once the machine hits a certain temperature, the beans come out to cool down. “And that’s how you make coffee!” Bob exclaims. “Once it cools, we bag it up and off it goes.”
Next up, a cold brew lesson. A lot of coffee shops brew cold brew at room temperature, but Bob likes to do true cold brew in the walk-in cooler. I watch as Bob grinds the beans, pours in the water, and lets it sit for 30-45 seconds to activate the coffee. This process, known as blooming, extracts a better flavor.
I sample some cold brew concentrate, first straight and then watered down with equal parts water and cold brew. It’s incredibly smooth and delicious. Carlson Roasting sells bottles of this cold brew concentrate at Root River Market in Houston and People’s Food Co-op in La Crosse, but the cold brew enthusiasts want more. “People are asking for gallons of this stuff!” Bob exclaims. He planned to focus on that project this summer but then COVID-19 happened.
During the summer months, Bob sells coffee beans, cold brew concentrate, and nitro cold brew at farmers markets throughout the region. He rattles off the list: Fridays in La Crosse, Saturdays in Winona, Tuesdays in Rushford, Wednesdays in Spring Grove. Bob is a busy guy.
We turn to espresso. “Espresso’s a fun one,” Bob says. “It’s all about pressure.” With espresso, I learn that you should be able to drink it straight without it being horrible. Carlson Roasting has an espresso blend which I happily sample: Electric Owl Espresso. “Espresso is like a magnifying glass for coffee. You take all the flavors and you intensify them into this little tiny portion,” Bob explains. “Everybody has a different recipe, that’s what makes it fun. And there’s not one right way to do things,” he adds.
I ask about his current favorite coffee: Ethiopia Guji from Kayon Mountain Coffee Farm. “It’s probably the best coffee we’ve ever produced,” Bob says.
Carlson Roasting Co. started in 2015. Their fair trade organic coffee is available on their website and at twelve grocery stores and six coffee shops in the region including The Wired Rooster, Free Range Exchange, and Red’s IGA.
When COVID-19 first started, Bob had no idea what to expect.
“We feel very fortunate,” Bob shares. “We had some of our best months ever,” he admits. “It was a little scary at first when shops closed and orders stopped, but then grocery store demand went up. March and April were really good for online sales then May was down and June bounced back. So why the up, down, up? We’ll see how it all plays out.”
More people are working at home and wanting good coffee to drink, boosting online consumption. “I think that’s a long term trend. Now that people know they can, I think they’ll demand to work remotely,” Bob says.
Bob hands me a bag of Ethiopia Guji on my way out the door and tells me he plans to enter it in a contest. After returning home and brewing some for myself, I understand why.
If I were the judge, I’d give it full marks.
About seventeen miles down the road from Carlson Roasting Co. sits Heart Rock Coffee.
Tricia and Jeff Babinski love coffee so much they turned it into a business. While living in Turkey, the two bought a Turkish-made roasting machine and started roasting for fun. When they moved to Norway, Tricia roasted coffee for the tiny bar and grocery store on the military base. But it wasn’t until the Babinskis left Norway and relocated to Caledonia in 2018 that Heart Rock Coffee officially began.
I arrive at Heart Rock Coffee’s roasting building on a hot day in late August to find Tricia grinding beans. An enticing coffee aroma fills the small space. On hot days like this one, Tricia roasts early in the morning to avoid the heat from the roasting machine. “Though it does make it cozy in the wintertime!” she says.
Heart Rock Coffee offers about 25 or 30 coffee varieties. “We like variety at our house,” Tricia says. Heart Rock Coffee’s single-origin coffees come from across the globe. When asked about her current favorite she replies without delay, “Definitely the Sulawesi from Indonesia. It’s our all-time favorite.”
Tricia explains that by the time she gets the coffee beans, seventeen people have already touched them. “I try not to screw up that investment. All that work can weigh kind of heavy on you. I don’t want to mess it up,” Tricia explains.
Heart Rock Coffee’s renovated roasting building highlights materials salvaged from Driftless-area farms. “We’re all about reuse,” Tricia tells me. “We’re also all about heart rocks. Anywhere we can put little heart rocks in, we do,” she says, pointing out spots where heart-shaped rocks are placed in the walls and floorboards.
Tricia and her husband collect heart rocks everywhere they go. When they realized a coffee business might be in their future, they were on vacation and Tricia was looking for heart rocks. “We were like, ‘That’s it!’” she recalls. “That’s the name of our coffee store. It’s always been Heart Rock Coffee.”
Before the pandemic, Heart Rock Coffee beans were only available at the La Crescent farmers market and local shops like The Wired Rooster in Caledonia, Free Range Exchange in Hokah, and Red’s IGA in Spring Grove. But when COVID-19 shuttered coffee shops, their sales slowed without a website. “School shut down on March 13th and restaurants on the 17th. At that point, things ceased a bit,” Tricia reports. In the midst of all that, her husband pushed her to get a website. “I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what a website would bring,” Tricia adds.
But eventually, they couldn’t wait any longer. Heart Rock Coffee’s website launched at the end of March. Tricia offered free shipping and local delivery to keep people home. She thinks more people are supporting local businesses during the pandemic. “Maybe some good can come out of something so bad,” Tricia says with a hopeful shrug.
Heart Rock Coffee’s website now offers a variety of coffee beans, stay fresh canisters, and handmade wooden charcuterie boards by Tricia’s husband, Jeff.
As for her own coffee-drinking preferences, Tricia is a black coffee drinker, unless drinking it cold and then she adds milk. “Once in a while I have a cappuccino,” she says. Tricia travels with an AeroPress because it’s light and won’t break, but at home, it’s an espresso machine.
Big things are brewing for Heart Rock Coffee. In early 2021, Jeff and Tricia purchased the Bluff Country Artists Gallery building on Spring Grove’s Main Street. They plan to share the space with the art gallery. With construction underway, Tricia hopes to have roasting operations up and running by mid-March.
For this couple, bringing a spirit of exploration to their customers through global coffee flavors and traditions provides an alternative to traveling. “Almost anywhere you go in the world, there’s some kind of coffee. Many places have their own coffee rituals. When we lived in Turkey, we loved learning about Turkish coffee rituals,” Tricia describes. In a year when many people are spending more time in their homes, coffee is one way to fill that travel void.
“We like to explore coffee, so why not roast it ourselves? And why not sell it to other people so that they can do the same thing?” Tricia asks.
Elisabeth A. Fondell is a writer, potter, and food enthusiast living in the rural Midwest. She is currently working on Food Stories From Houston County, a project documenting stories of culinary resilience in Minnesota’s southeastern-most county through the Crystal Creek Citizen-Artist Residency.
Elisabeth began focusing on place-based food writing after receiving a grant from the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council to create a body of work celebrating the intersection of food and culture. See that exhibit here.
