Ellettsville residents Terry Cox and Karen Scales will bring their passion for coffee to downtown Ellettsville when they open the Heritage Trail Café and Coffee Roaster on North Sale Street.
The dream began when Scales’ brother owned a roasting company in Bloomington called B-Town Beans and Cox was on the board of directors for the Owen County Farmers Market. They started experimenting with roasting coffee and selling it at the market.
“We kind of figured out how to roast, what we liked, and what people liked,” Cox said.
Then Scales’ brother moved out of town and B-Town Beans closed. When that happened, Cox and Scales said they could not get good coffee in the area, so they continued to roast their own with a small roaster in their home.
Cox said good coffee sellers provide “freshly roasted, a choice of different coffees from around the world, the different types of roasts you can do with each bean.”
“You can take a really good green bean from, say, Ethiopia and you can roast it wrong and it’s no good, but you can roast it right and it’s some of the best coffee you’ve ever had,” he explained.
“And it’s not just how you roast it, it’s how you brew it, too,” Scales added.
Wholesale and retail coffee roasted onsite in a U.S. Coffee Roaster machine will be available at the café. They hope to be a coffee provider for other local restaurants as well.
As for the restaurant, they expect to be open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. There will be a full kitchen serving breakfast and lunch, but Cox said there will be “no greasy foods, no deep fryers.”
“There’s actually not even going to be a stovetop,” Scales said. “We’re going to be doing everything in the oven, soup pots, panini presses.”
Cox and Scales are also the proprietors of the organic Dragonfly Farm, which will influence their menu.
“We have a very big garden and when we planted this spring, we tried to think about what we are going to be preparing at our restaurant,” Scales said.
The farm can plant year-round because it has two hoop houses on site, but the menu will sometimes take on a seasonal element.
“When the blackberries are ripe, there’s blackberry pie or we might throw blackberries in salads,” Scales said as an example.
Customers can expect a breakfast menu featuring scones, muffins and breakfast sandwiches and a lunch menu primarily made up of soups, salads and sandwiches.
“What doesn’t come off the farm, we want to, of course, use local people as much as we can,” Scales said.
While the menu may vary, Cox said the restaurant is happy to accommodate any health or lifestyle-related dietary restrictions.
They also grow habanero and ghost peppers on the farm, which they use to prepare their Kow Killer sauces.
The name comes from velvety red and black wasps they found around the peppers called cow killer ants.
“They’re called cow killer ants because the sting would be enough to kill a cow,” Cox said.
There are two flavors of Kow Killer sauce, habanero mustard and habanero peach hot sauce, both of which will be available for sale at the restaurant.
The Heritage Trail Café and Coffee Roaster has not announced an opening date. It is located at 206 N. Sale St. in Ellettsville. Once it opens, there will be Wi-Fi inside the 22-seat capacity restaurant, with additional seating outside.
“We’re just really excited, and we hope Ellettsville is, too,” Scales said.
Originally published in Ellettsville Journal, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.