Garage Band: Eastern Iowa couple roasted before they brewed

Bob and Teri Hagers had to learn an entire industry. And Bob admits they 'went at it sort of backward.”

'Bob came home one day and said, ‘I've seen a YouTube video that shows how you can roast coffee beans with a hot-air popcorn popper,'” Teri recalled. 'I was thinking that this one of his ideas that probably wasn't going to go anywhere.

'He rigged the machine with a metal funnel and made roughly half a dozen batches of coffee. His friends began asking to try his coffee and we began making coffee for them as a hobby.”

Bob and Teri were roasting about eight pounds of coffee each week when they decided to turn their hobby into a business. They invested $6,000 in a Coffee Crafters Artisan 5XL professional hot-air coffee roasting machine.

'Virtually everything we've bought we paid for without asking for loans,” Teri said. 'It has been a good challenge.”

The Hagers launched their business, Hagers Roasting Co., with a booth at the NewBo City Market in Cedar Rapids.

'We spent almost every Saturday and Sunday for a year at NewBo learning the craft of brewing coffee for people,” Bob said. 'We had never done anything like that. Neither one of us had any food service experience.”

From NewBo City Market, the Hagers ventured to the Cedar Rapids Downtown Farmers Market and the Dubuque Farmers Market.

'We roast anywhere from 100 to 150 pounds of coffee beans a week during the summer farmers market season,” Bob said. 'When the Cedar Rapids and Dubuque farmers markets are operating the same Saturday, our daughter and her fiance handle the Dubuque Farmers Market.”

'It can be kind of chaotic at times, but it's good,” Teri said.

In January, Teri opened a coffee shop adjacent to the coffee roasting operation in the former Quasqueton elementary school.

'A lot of the women here said they didn't have anywhere to go to enjoy themselves,” she said. 'They come in, have a cup of coffee or tea, and chat. We had the space to do it, so why not?”

Hagers Roasting also sells bags of coffee at grocery stores in Fairbank and Winthrop, and at Goldfinch Cyclery, 208 12th Ave. SE in Cedar Rapids. Greyhound Deli in the Downtown Cedar Rapids Public Library serves Hagers Roasting coffee as well as selling packaged coffee.

Roasting coffee beans and selling coffee at NewBo Market and farmers markets led the Hagers to create and manufacture 'pour over brew” stations. The stainless steel stations, which use a glass funnel to hold the filter and coffee, produce a single freshly brewed cup of coffee.

Hagers Roasting sells the pour-over-brew stations, which range from a single to four-cup variety, to customers for home use or at small shops or restaurants.

The Hagers purchase their coffee beans from a supplier in Madison, Wis., or directly from overseas sources. The company also buys coffee grown in Maui, Hawaii, making it one of the few Eastern Iowa coffee businesses to offer coffee grown in the United States.

As for the future, Bob and Teri would like to bar code the bags of coffee and make them available to the larger grocery stores. They also are looking at marketing to smaller boutique-type stores.

'We've had to learn practically an entire industry all at once,” Bob said. 'We went at it sort of backward. Most of the time people start by brewing coffee and working up to roasting it.”