WELLMAN

Prior to owning Kalona Coffee House with wife Rhonda, as he has since 2010, Jeff Yoder was never really that into coffee. She was the passionate one, learning the ropes at Caribou Coffee while Jeff studied at Kirkwood and the University of Iowa; he didn’t even touch the stuff until she started bringing him iced white chocolate Americanos, a cold drink more sweet cream than espresso.

While he eventually grew to love coffee more than sugar, you still wouldn’t see him with a hot cup at his coffee house, even on a cold day. “I almost exclusively drank iced coffee” up until this year, he says.

But learning to roast green coffee beans woke up his palate and his appreciation for a cup of freshly ground, freshly brewed, hot black coffee.

“Once I started this process of finding coffees and sample roasting and tasting it all the time, I realized, wow, hot coffee is really great,” Jeff says as we stand inside his Wellman roastery, waiting four minutes for a cup to brew. “Now I drink a hot black coffee every morning.”

When the time is up, we take the round cupping spoons and sample the single-origin Ethiopian light roast that started out as a bag of green beans less than an hour before.

“Hmm, that’s really mild,” I say. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting that.”

I am not a coffee drinker either; the number of cups I’ve had in my lifetime can be counted on one hand. This in spite of, or perhaps because of, growing up in a household where coffee was something of a religion; my parents imbibed it in all of its forms, from percolator-brewed to instant, always unadulterated black.

This cup opened my eyes in wonder. “That’s really nice,” I say. “This is smooth.”

The Road to Roasting

After owning a coffee shop for over a decade, Jeff and Rhonda began to think about roasting their own beans just a couple of years ago.

“We just love unique, great-tasting coffee and wanted to be more involved in the process of finding and developing the kinds of coffee that we love,” Jeff says.

Early conversations with Kalona native Hans Hochstedler, who owns Florin Coffee in Columbus, Ohio with wife Joelle, whose parents founded Hemisphere Coffee Roasters in nearby Mechanicsburg, helped the Yoders know what to expect.

There wasn’t enough space in their Kalona location to house a roasting machine, never mind the required sinks, storage, and packaging space, so the couple looked to Wellman for a separate manufacturing outpost. In early 2024, they purchased the single-story building downtown that used to be Young’s Law Office and began working to build Ambrosia Brew Coffee Roasters.

They outfitted the workspace with a 2K Mill City drum roaster, which produces about four pounds of coffee per batch, with an average roast time of about 11-12 minutes. Natural gas heats the rotating drum, while air flow provides convective heat and removes chaff from the roasting coffee.

With the infrastructure in place for roasting beans, the next step was to learn the process. Last spring Jeff headed to Mill City Roasters in Minneapolis for a three-day course where he learned about roasting times, temperatures, and factors that affect taste. He learned about the phases beans go through as they roast, from the drying and Maillard phases, through first crack and development.

“I knew it was going to be a lot of practice before you were good, but it was a fun class,” Jeff says.

Today, with about six months of roasting experience under his belt, Jeff’s favorite part of the process happens the day after he’s turned off the roaster. Once the beans have rested overnight, he grinds a scoop and brews a cup of coffee to taste, a process called ‘cupping,’ the purpose of which is to assess quality and make notes for future batches.

“That’s definitely the best part,” he says. “It’s really interesting how the same green coffee can taste so different depending on the speed and length of the roast.”

Even though the tasting and discovery process is fun, “There are definitely some challenges,” Jeff admits. “Sometimes you’ll think it tastes really good at the cupping table and then it tastes different when it’s brewed on a commercial machine.”

Other types of challenges the roaster faces are those of personal taste vs. customer preferences, and the way each bean variety responds differently to roasting. The availability of beans is also always in flux thanks to seasonal and market fluctuations, so he is constantly learning and adapting to new beans.

“There’s so much to learn, some days I feel like I’m just playing coffee professional, hoping to turn into one,” Jeff says. “Especially with the process of cupping and trying to detect all the different flavors. It’s a process.”

Tasting Territory

Oenophiles (wine connoisseurs) are familiar with the concept of ‘terroir,’ the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced. So it is with coffee.

Ambrosia Brew Coffee Roasters is a small batch roaster of specialty coffee, which means that it has scored at least 80 points or higher according to an expert evaluation using Specialty Coffee Association guidelines.

“What makes specialty coffee better is that you’re really tasting the flavors of that region or that farm,” Jeff says. “Even in the same farm, there might be plots of land at different elevations or different varieties. So, coffee can taste pretty different, even within a farm.”

“That is what really gets me excited,” he continues, “Bringing in different coffees where you can really taste the region.”

The Yoders source beans from all over the world. An Ethiopian bean from the Kayon Mountain Farm in the Guji region has a strong blueberry note with wine-like acidity. Beans from Papua New Guinea and Guatemala make delicious dark roasts and are components in Ambrosia Brew’s Bulltown Blend. Mexico’s Puebla Region produces beans so versatile that they can be roasted light, medium, or dark.

“My favorite coffees are light roasts from East Africa, especially with a fruity note,” Jeff says. “A coffee bean is actually the seed of a coffee cherry, and I really love a coffee that reminds you that you’re drinking a fruit.”

He is also especially excited about their first direct-trade relationship with the Gaucha farm in the Cerrado Mineiro region of Brazil.

“We met Caroline Seibt Kruse, a third-generation farmer, and her husband and Iowa native Matthew in October, and their high-quality coffee has been an amazing addition to our lineup,” Jeff says.

Making the most of those specialty beans, which farmers cultivate with such care, is of great importance for the Yoders.

“The most important thing for us is to honor the work of the people producing this amazing coffee on farms all over the world,” Jeff says. “They’re finding the varieties and processing methods that are going to raise the value of their crop, and it’s our job to bring out the flavor, sweetness, acidity and balance in that coffee so our customers can appreciate its unique qualities.”

Finding Ambrosia Brew

In August the roastery was licensed by the state. Now Jeff roasts 100 pounds of beans a week for the coffee house, mostly espresso blend; maintains the website, AmbrosiaBrewCoffee.com; and fills and ships orders.

He’s also worked hard to make his coffee available locally. In Wellman, folks can purchase fresh packages of whole bean coffee at Simple Happiness and ground coffee at Freeman Foods. In Kalona, Ambrosia Brew coffee is served at Kalona Coffee House and the Lambs and Ivy Play Café; whole beans can be purchased at the Kalona Coffee House, and ground coffee is available at JW’s Foods.

Great coffee isn’t cheap; as Jeff notes, “It’s a tough time to start a roastery, with average coffee prices reaching a 50-year high last week and specialty coffee soaring even higher.” But locally roasted coffee is sold at peak freshness, and for those seeking art and beauty in a cup, this is where you’ll find it.

And if you’re not a coffee drinker already, one sip of Ambrosia Brew just might wake you up.