As we approach our 5th birthday as a business, I am awestruck at everything we’ve experienced since opening in September of 2009. It has been an incredibly trying, fun, eventful, surprising, and rewarding couple of years. We’ve had an incredible number of transitions from when we first opened. It’s hard to imagine the day when we used to brew coffee by the airpot. Then, after less than a year of doing that, we had done so many experiments that we simply could not serve coffee that way anymore! We began doing pour over coffees in the Spring of 2010, and made the full switch and got rid of our coffee brewer by the end of that summer. Since then we’ve added 5 more brewing methods just for coffee, implemented using scales to weigh everything out for all coffees and espresso drinks to ensure quality and consistency, and done away with certain coffee-related products that we just couldn’t stand by as quality products. This year has also been a crazy one, as we added craft beer and fine wines to our beverage offerings in conjunction with a deeper personal appreciation for a broader variety of beverages made by people who view their work as a craft. We added some delicious tapas to add some classier food options to pair well with wine and craft beer, and we found a great local coffee roaster, Ruby Coffee Roasters (shout out to Jared!), to work with alongside our strong partnership with Intelligentsia’s lovely coffees. We’ve been the recipient of the Fox Cities Magazine Golden Fork Award for Best Cup Of Coffee in 2011 and 2013, been involved in lots of events, and met some incredible people.
We want to sincerely thank all of you for being great customers. We’ve not only served you food and drink, but gotten the chance to hear about your lives, share ours with yours, see you change, have kids, watched your kids grow, walked through good and bad times with you, and even developed deep friendships through our meeting at the coffee shop. Thank you for being a part of this business. Little Chute has never had this type of place before, and I’m glad to be here with Seth’s Coffee. When I opened Seth’s Coffee, I was 1 day into my dating relationship with my now-wife, Kate. Oh how things have changed! Kate and I are 1 month away from celebrating 4 years of marriage, and we now have 2 beautiful little boys, Everett (2 1/2) and Moses (1), as well as another child due in February. You’ve been a great network of friends and support through my life of single-hood ending when Kate and I married in October of 2010 as well as in preparation for the birth of our kids. You helped us come up with some great options for names, talked about approaches to parenting, shared marital advice from your years of experience beyond ours, and so on and so on. We’ve been blessed.
Thank you for being patient with us as we figure out all the changes that we are constantly facing–from new staff from time to time to the ever-evolving way we approach our craft (coffee). There have definitely been rough spells in there while we were figuring out the flow of what we do, but I believe we’re more efficient than ever, having beefed up on staff to make sure we’ve got adequate workers to handle the volume we’ve grown into. Here’s to the next five years! May they be as fun and successful as the first!
