It started with two college graduates, newly married young men bored enough to experiment with different ways to make good coffee in their garage.
It has since turned into a coffee shop on wheels.
For about a year and nearly a decade since the two started brewing and selling their own coffee, the founders of Beans Coffee Company have been serving fresh coffee to the Mankato area from their coffee trailer.
“In 2021, when everything came to a halt because of the pandemic, we wanted to find a way to keep things going,” said Beans Coffee co-founder Eric Poppler. “So we decided to buy a trailer and completely renovate the thing.”
The renovations transformed a trailer commonly used to transport and move large furniture into something akin to a food truck, equipped with all the tools needed to brew their coffee.
Poppler and co-founder of Beans Coffee Clay Sharkey park their trailer outside Best Buy every Saturday to participate in the Mankato Farmers’ Market, which Poppler considers to be the roots of their business.
“This is where we’ve seen the most local support,” he said. “We have people that we’ve known for 10 years, come over every time.”
It’s also where Poppler and Sharkey started distributing their coffee. But in 2014, Poppler said they were broke college graduates who could barely afford to hang a small awning around their table.
“In the beginning we only sold bags of coffee,” he says. “We didn’t have espresso machines or anything. So all the profit we made from selling bags of coffee went straight back into our business.”
Their first major purchase was an airpot coffee brewer.
That allowed them to serve samples at the farmers’ market in the hopes that, after tasting how good their coffee is, customers would buy more bags to brew their own.
It worked.
“With that money, we were able to buy some big coffee machines so we could brew coffee and actually take it to market,” Poppler said.
They then started selling brewed coffee and with more money made at the farmers market, more equipment was bought to continue their business.
What really changed the game for them was the purchase of a commercial coffee roaster.
What’s special about theirs is that instead of the coffee beans moving over an open flame – creating a smoky flavor regardless of the beans used – their roaster uses the same heating elements as a washing machine and dryer.
“It’s called a fluid bed roaster,” Poppler said. ‘There is no open flame. Instead, it shoots air at around 800 F and acts like a giant air-popped popcorn machine. That way you get the taste of the beans instead of that fire flavor.”
Beans Coffee Company now works with three fluid bed coffee roasters to keep up with demand.
Their choice of roaster is – literally – an advanced version of what they started experimenting with in 2012 after being inspired to make good coffee after tasting a bad batch from their church.
“I didn’t even know how to make coffee then,” Poppler said. “We googled it and found that you can use an air-popper popcorn machine, so we tried it out.”
The two were pleasantly surprised when it worked, but regretted that they could only make half a cup of roasted coffee beans at a time.
They also turned off circuit breakers, set things on fire, and set the smoke detectors off in the process. But Poppler and Sharkey persist.
“We ended up making some good cups of coffee,” Poppler said. “Then our friend wanted to buy a bag from us and it took us four hours to make a 16 ounce bag.”
They knew then that they had to find a faster way to brew their coffee if they really wanted to be lucky enough to sell it.
“We went online and we saw that someone could convert a gas grill into a coffee roaster,” Poppler said. “We bought it from him for $400. We were able to earn 6 pounds at the time. We left from there, but it was nice to have a little lab for mad scientists in our garage. ”
The two self-proclaimed mad scientists have over the years made coffee so good that customers keep coming back.
Beans Coffee Company co-founder Eric Poppler likes to drink his coffee black with a shot of espresso.
Brandon Knudsvig and his wife have been buying from Beans Coffee since Poppler and Sharkey first started selling at the farmers’ market.
“It’s just really good coffee,” he said. “It’s so fresh, locally roasted and grounded and all that.”
When Knudsvig worked at Scheels, he said they even brought some to their employees’ cafeteria as a special treat.
“We’ve been doing that for a while,” he says. “Scheels has also started their own coffee brand, so I think they switched to that.”
Either way, the loyalty of Beans Coffee’s customers remains intact.
Poppler shared that a woman — who hates the taste of coffee but loves the smell — buys a bag of theirs every month to throw in her car to use as an air freshener.
“I think our coffee is great, that’s why it sells,” he said. “But I also think people would buy it, even if it was terrible to support us, which is great. Mankato has local pride. It’s so cool that people here are behind the local aspect of things.”
Community members continue to support Beans Coffee outside the farmers’ market by stopping by their trailer parked across the street from the center of the Children’s Museum. Their hours of operation are Monday through Friday from 7-12am.
They also deliver free bags of coffee grounds to Mankato locations when orders are placed through their website: coffeebybeans.com.
The bags are also available for purchase at Hy-Vee locations in the city, Neutral Groundz, Mom & Pops and Wooden Spoon, among others.
Beans Coffee now also serves fresh tea, lemonade and other beverages for non-coffee drinkers.
“We like to do things organically,” Sharkey says. “It was nice to be able to do this.”
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