Coffee By Thirty

Spammers. That’s what.

Coffeebythirty.com got hijacked by spammers. The volume of returned mail was so great, this domain alone threatened to shut down the entire web server on my shared hosting plan. Not good.

Rather than have my entire account deleted, the web host and I decided it would be best if coffeebythirty.com didn’t resolve to anything for a while.

But now it’s back, and boy are there stories to tell.

As part of opening a coffee house, one key bit of research is to visit other area coffee houses and determine what they do well/poorly. Here in my town, we have about sixty houses from local mom-and-pops to the Big Green Mermaid. I’ve visited them all.

Today I started to revisit the shops I visited back when I knew nothing of coffee. What a difference two years makes.

While I’m still not to the level I’d like to be, my palate has certainly trained itself to distinguish good coffee from bad coffee. Today’s coffee was bad. Stale and lifeless, the beans had obviously been ground for some time; easily a few days. It tasted the same today as it did two years ago. To my palate two years ago, though, it tasted like any other coffee.

The moral? Continuously drink better coffee; today’s brew becomes tomorrow’s swill.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time.

Coffee by Thirty isn’t going to happen. There will be a coffee house, but the 30 part is dwindling.

Keep reading Coffee By Someday. »

Coffee by Thirty doesn’t have a sales tax ID yet; with tax ID’s come a whole new slew of headaches, so we’re holding off until we actually need it. Having completed a glorious year of Silver Leaf, though, we obviously sold stuff. Thankfully, the state of Michigan makes this easy with the concessionaire’s tax return.

This nifty little piece of tax law allows vendors to file their sales taxes a couple times a year without needing the full tax ID. It’s very handy for tiny little businesses like me. Unfortunately, I found the drawback to this tax return the hard way.

The state doesn’t want to wait for it’s money. Prepping my tax return on the Thursday after the end of faire, I happened to glance at the fine print. Taxes are due three business days after the end of the event. Three days. Of course, I was filing on Thursday, also known as business day four. Fifteen extra dollars in penalites and interest later, my tax return dropped in the mailbox, bound for the money grubbing hands of the state of Michigan.

Frankly, I feel a little gypped. Three days is not a lot of time in the business sense. Some vendors from the faire aren’t even home yet after three days. Heck, I’m not even totally unpacked yet. This whole setup seems very mobsterish - easy to get into, but following the convenience comes the unreasonable terms.

I’m still waiting for the bounty hunters to come for me.

I’m not complaining in the least bit, but all of you who purchased an iced coffee or smoothie last Saturday at Silver Leaf made me drive to Grand Rapids and back to Battle Creek Saturday night.

Thanks to you all, we had a banner weekend. The Hummingbird Coffee House blew through the weekend’s stock of cold cups in a single day, prompting me to return home to fetch additional supply.

Not to mention the midday emergency milk run I made. We used twice as much milk on Satruday as any of the previous four days of the faire.

Thank you, thirsty patrons of Silver Leaf, for drinking way more than I could have planned.