Roasted in
the shadow of
the mountains

When I was a kid, my dad and I used to drive across the country to hunt javelina with his buddies in the Arizona desert. Really, it was an excuse for old friends to pull lawn chairs around a fire, tell stories, sip whiskey, and play poker for pocket change. We younger guys ran around in Willys Jeeps and on ATVs, collecting firewood and getting into things.

It was a good bunch of people to grow up around. I still have some of those friends. I miss some of those old boys, especially the ones with the best stories.

On the drive, I’d sit in the navigator’s chair with a Rand McNally atlas and a little ruler, measuring distances and figuring out where we should stop. But my eyes always wandered north, to the top of Montana, where the roads seemed to disappear into the mountains near the Canadian border.

So few people. So much wilderness. I wondered what it would be like to live there.

It took a while to find out. I spent the better part of a decade working with my dad in the Midwest, getting an apprenticeship in more than a trade. During the recession, I joined the Army, served as a cavalry scout and then an intelligence analyst, and deployed to Afghanistan. I enjoyed serving, but eventually my kids needed me home.

Back in civilian life, I landed in Phoenix, where my parents could help us get our feet under us. I went back to industry, met Robynne, got married, and started a business. With another child on the way, we decided to find a place we wanted to live and figure out how to make a living there.

We wanted water, a mountain for skiing and snowboarding, and Idaho residency so I could go back to school. We picked Sandpoint. We sold what wouldn’t fit in a six-by-twelve trailer, packed the Nissan Xterra, and drove north.

After twenty-four hours on the road, we reached Sam Owen Campground on Lake Pend Oreille as it was getting dark on the Fourth of July. We didn’t have a house lined up. We had a tent, two kids, and another on the way. We laughed that it felt like our own Independence Day.

We camped for a couple of weeks, until Robynne was too pregnant to keep sleeping on the ground. There was a hotel room in Sandpoint, huckleberry picking, and huckleberry shakes. Eventually, we found an old log cabin south of Sagle, near the lake.

The family we rented from told us it had been built by a French trapper in the late 1800s, then served as an assayer’s office and a one-room schoolhouse for a mine before becoming a family home. Our landlord gave us a copy of his grandmother’s journal about growing up there. She wrote about wildlife, hardships, and a winter spent snowed in. I still have it.

We had our own introduction to winter. Our vehicle couldn’t make it up the hill in the snow. The trees let so little sunshine into the cabin that we’d put our new baby girl in the one patch that arrived each morning. Chinking was falling out of the logs, and I went around stuffing paper into the gaps.

After about nine months, we moved around the lake to Clark Fork. We made friends, found a church, and started talking with other coffee enthusiasts about a little shop where we could roast and serve our own.

My interest in roasting went back to my early twenties. A friend invited my family over for lunch and offered coffee afterward. That was familiar territory: my mom made coffee after meals, even at eight o’clock at night. We’d sit around and talk.

But this was the best cup I’d ever had. I asked where he’d bought it. “I roasted it myself,” he said. I laughed. I thought he was messing with me. I hadn’t known that was something people could do.

He showed me how he roasted and where he bought his green coffee. I thought, someday I’m going to do that. It took about ten years, but I got there.

In Phoenix, Robynne and I tried oven roasting. I built a roaster out of an old gas grill, with a fabricated drum, a rotisserie motor, and a thermocouple. The setup that served me longest was a Whirley Pop stovetop popper I’d pretty much automated. For years, I roasted our coffee that way and spread the beans on a tray to cool.

Life in Clark Fork wasn’t easy. Our business was struggling, and we took whatever work we could find. I taught music and did some security work; Robynne worked with kids at a local boarding school. Then our youngest daughter was born, and we learned she had a heart condition.

At eight months old, she had heart surgery at Seattle Children’s. More procedures and a long stretch of uncertainty followed. She’s one of the bravest, toughest kids I know.

Her surgeon was a Texan who wore cowboy boots in the operating room. After the surgery, he came to tell us how it had gone. Somehow, we got to talking about coffee: roasting it, opening a shop, and showing people different brewing traditions from around the world. We talked so long that a nurse had to call him away.

Back home, with our hearts heavy and plenty still unsettled, friends from church offered us an opportunity to start that coffee shop. It seemed like the worst possible time to begin anything. In some strange way, it also felt like the best. That conversation in Seattle felt almost like confirmation.

We took out a little loan and jumped in with both feet.

Scotchman’s Coffee began with our friends and neighbors in Clark Fork, at a place called The Well. The church had bought it to give the town somewhere to gather: a place that was consistent, that stayed open, that didn’t disappear after a year or two.

That’s where we roasted, served, bagged coffee, and started making the designs that went on it. We were having fun with coffee and building relationships.

Over the years, things changed. We moved on from The Well, and at one point we were running three coffee shops: Sandpoint, Clark Fork, and Thompson Falls, Montana. There were practical problems, and running all three stopped being fun. We scaled back to Thompson Falls.

Those became our people. That was our shop and our home for a long time. Eventually, we bought a building in Noxon and moved the roastery there. It brought me closer to the part I loved most: the roasting itself.

We gave Clark Fork another try, but eventually decided to pass both shops into other hands. Barefoot Bakery took over in Thompson Falls, and Hartman Coffee took over in Clark Fork. They’re still our partners, serving Scotchman’s Coffee in the places that helped shape it.

Now our work centers on the roastery in Noxon. We have space for our green coffee, two gas-fired roasters—a workhorse for our small batches and a smaller machine for testing—and room to bag, seal, and ship.

We get to put our attention into the art of roasting, the artwork on our bags, and the people we meet along the way. We get to travel a little more. We get to raise our kids.

The hope is to keep making coffee that gives people a starting point for conversation, community, and adventure, and let them make those things their own. As we go, we get to share their stories and bring their experiences into what we do.

This new phase comes from the same place as the first: a love of coffee, the pleasure of sharing it, and a desire to enjoy the adventure that is life.

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