“I grew up near here, a Hillsboro address but I went to Peebles High School. Once I left college, I ended up living in Columbus for three years and was the Assistant Manager of a condominium complex. There I met my future husband, who also happened to be a graduate of Peebles and is a chiropractor. We decided to move back to set up his office here in town and he’s been in practice for 31 years now.
I read a book called Fresh Brewed Life by Nicole Johnson, and it was just about how coffee brings people together. You don’t even have to like coffee, but people will say, ‘Let’s get together for coffee,’ and it’s true—when I started drinking coffee, it was just something my family would do to get together, and then we’d get together with friends.
But here in our community, we didn’t have that many opportunities for a place like this – no coffee shops – and that meant missing out on this opportunity to bring people together. I thought a coffee shop could be a place for people to go and to get away and escape life. I never really was sure it would come to fruition, I dreamed about it for 20 years before it actually happened. It was a long, long dream.
I said, ‘If I ever do have a coffee shop, this is where I want it to be.’
Then there was this house that used to be a bed and breakfast I had been looking at since 2007. A beautiful home. The location was perfect. I said, ‘If I ever do have a coffee shop, this is where I want it to be.’
There were other buildings available in the town of Peebles. People would say, ‘Hey, you could put your coffee shop there’ or ‘This place is selling.’ I said, ‘No. Unless it’s that house, I don’t want it.’
It came on the market, but my daughters were still in school, so I couldn’t make it happen. But when the girls graduated in 2014, the owners started drastically dropping the price. I thought, ‘Okay, it’s going to sell now, it’s time to make my move or forget it entirely.’
We opened in February of 2015.”
“I built a roasting room because I roast my own coffee. My very first roaster looked like a little toaster oven. It was a Behmor 1600 where I could only roast about 12 ounces at a time, but once me, my sisters, my family, and friends tasted how good freshly roasted coffee is, there was no going back. No more store-bought stuff that’s been sitting on the shelf for however long.
And from a business perspective, I can make more profit from my coffee by eliminating the middleman.
From there, I went to a coffee shop in North Carolina, saw this big, huge roaster and I thought ‘Wow, that looks neat!’ I went to Sandpoint, Idaho where they manufacture Diedrich Roasters. I bought a roaster and I told my husband. I said, ‘I’m so worried, what if this doesn’t work?’ And he said, ‘Well, at least we’re going to have some good, fresh roasted coffee here at home!’
That particular roaster that I bought roasted about five pounds at a time. I increased my volume, then got a new roaster in 2017 where I can roast 25 pounds at a time. We roast at least 100 pounds or more a week of coffee which for this area, that’s probably pretty good.
It’s just so good, fresh roasted coffee is so good!”
“I’ve got one employee, Janie Rhodes. She has been with me from day one and she is now my coffee shop manager. Between the two of us, we somehow manage to run the place. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we run it! We learn as we go. It’s just something I knew I wanted to do, we’ve learned from our mistakes, especially learning how much stock you need starting out.
That process was like, you don’t order as much and you realize, ‘Oh my goodness, I gotta run to Cincinnati real fast and get my supplies!’ But just learning all that stuff, learning employee issues and scheduling, you don’t know what you don’t know so sometimes if the desire is there to do something, you just gotta do it.
The whole rewarding thing is knowing it’s a place that people love, and that they love coming back to.
You’ve got to have a good location and a demand for what you have. Here, we have both. We get a lot of traffic from the highway. It’s so wonderful to see new people come in and get to talk to them. People want and like the product. The whole rewarding thing is knowing it’s a place that people love, and that they love coming back to.
The caffeine, frappes, smoothies, or lunch gets them in the door. But I love just getting to know people, building a rapport with them, and building a bond with them.
We know when they come in if there’s something wrong, and we can chat with them about it for a bit if they’ve got time. I got a prayer box where they can throw a little prayer in there and we’ll commit to praying for them for 30 days. It’s just a safe place for people to come and get something good but also have good fellowship.
Janie, she is the best at that. I like interacting. But my main thing is I like to roast the coffee and just do the background behind-the-scenes stuff. But Janie is so good at interacting with people.
Because I’m a Christian, I think of doing my job as if the Lord was just right there with me, and to be like Jesus to people. That doesn’t mean that’s the only way you can have a good business, of course, but for me, it starts with that, and then just having integrity and being open with people.
I think people would be genuinely upset if we weren’t there right now. I’m doing what I feel like God has put me here to do.”
“Our community is only probably 1,800 to 2,000 people in Peebles. We pull from the county, but in my community, it’s just people who know each other. Our community is a very giving community and reaches out when people are in need, like having benefits for people who have cancer or suffer from a fire. We have a lot of caring and hardworking individuals. We have a lot of good farmers and farming families. It’s just a good, close-knit community that helps one another when there’s a need.
I would be afraid to open a business in a big city because there are probably a lot of coffee shops in a big city. Because I had already been established in the community and my husband is a tremendous chiropractor, people already knew me, so they weren’t afraid and that helped the business, especially at the beginning. I wasn’t a newcomer trying to break into a big city and that helped tremendously.
Here we had a dairy bar, two restaurants, pizza places, but nobody had a coffee shop. People love coffee but we didn’t have it, so the demand was there.
I don’t have any desires or anything to change much. It’d be great to have more space in our kitchen area and our dining serving area, but that would mean changing the structure of the house and that’s just not going to work. I’m really content with what we’re doing and what we’re giving to the community.”
– Cheryl Greene, The Greene Beanery
Peebles, Adams County
#WeAreOhioSE
