Advertisement

Mountaineer Coffee brings a flavorful education to downtown Brooksville

 
Jim Ford enjoys a cup of fresh coffee at Mountaineer Coffee, a coffee roastery in downtown Brooksville offering high-quality, single-origin coffees. The business, owned by a husband and wife, moved to downtown Brooksville in August.
Jim Ford enjoys a cup of fresh coffee at Mountaineer Coffee, a coffee roastery in downtown Brooksville offering high-quality, single-origin coffees. The business, owned by a husband and wife, moved to downtown Brooksville in August.
Published Sept. 14, 2016

BROOKSVILLE

Taylor Buttelman, a barista at Mountaineer Coffee in downtown Brooksville, demonstrated how beans for espresso must be ground as finely as cocoa powder.

He displayed a properly steamed pitcher of milk — not liquid on the bottom and frothy on top, as at some shops, but a consistent "microfoam" the thickness of wet paint.

He showed off the well-practiced flourishes that produce images of fernlike white "rosettas" on the toast-brown background of finished lattes.

"It's all muscle memory," said Buttelman, 20.

This is what customers can get at Mountaineer: not just bags of site-roasted beans and rich cups of a wide variety of coffee, but brief symposiums about brewing, growing and roasting — even about the newly opened shop's minimalist decor.

"Black, white, raw materials. We have to tell people that's the style we're going for. It's not that it's not finished," owner Daniel Pritz, 24, said last week at the shop with the dark green point job outside and, inside, sunlit concrete floors.

"We're trying to educate people."

Pritz and his wife and business partner, Darby, grew up far away from one another — he in Brooksville, she in Oklahoma — but with a shared longtime goal of owning a coffee shop.

They both started working at the Coffee Barn, south of downtown, shortly after it opened in 2012, and started making payments to buy it from the original owner a few months later.

In August, they achieved another goal, moving the renamed business to downtown Brooksville.

"Mountaineer" is an homage to Pritz's grandfather, Richard Lantz, a native of West Virginia who once ran an antique store of the same name on Main Street.

"I just always really liked the idea of being downtown, the community of it, and I really think downtown Brooksville is beautiful," Pritz said.

Another of his long-held passions is for brewing and especially roasting coffee, which he says will become the shop's main business.

"I don't know why, but I've always been obsessed with coffee," he said.

Pritz, the son of former Hernando school administrator Ken Pritz, and his wife, Beth, looks like the owner of a more urban shop, with a hipster's top knot and beard. He has the strong build of an athlete, but has to be prodded to say that he was "a pretty good" wrestler at Hernando High School, where, in fact, he won the state championship his senior year.

This modesty gives extra credibility to his firmly stated belief in the quality of his product. He buys the best beans he can find, he said, uses only top-of-the-line equipment and has spent long hours "researching and teaching myself" brewing and roasting techniques.

The roasting room, behind the serving area, is dominated by a high-tech, $12,000 roaster that wouldn't look out of place in a machine shop and a row of gray plastic tubs filled with beans from exotic origins, including Brazil and Guatemala.

All of his raw materials are "specialty" grade — meaning that farmers sort out unripe or overripe beans — rather than the unsorted "commodity coffee" used by supermarket brands and fast-food restaurants. Most of his stock comes from a supplier with a warehouse in Jacksonville, but Pritz buys the Costa Rican beans directly from a farmer and hopes to eventually do the same with all of his coffee.

Raw beans, he demonstrated by dipping his hand into one bin, have the color and smell of grass seed.

These are poured into a funnel leading to on oven-size roasting bin, where they are heated at about 400 degrees for varying times, depending on whether Pritz is cooking a light or medium roast — the only options at Mountaineer.

Though many people associate a dark roast with a stronger, richer flavor, the opposite is true, Pritz said. Too much exposure to heat saps the beans of caffeine and nuanced flavor.

"People come in and say, 'I'll have the darkest coffee you have,' and we kind of steer them in the right direction, and they tend to like it," he said. "That's another thing we try to educate people about."

The store's products include Hill & Holler Craft Espresso Blend, a mix of Brazilian and other beans, for $10.99 a bag. The roasted Costa Rican beans, which cost more to buy raw, go for $13.99.

Either the beans or coffee brewed with them are available at 14 other local outlets, including the Rising Sun Bistro and Market, also downtown, and at Marker 48 Brewing in Spring Hill.

The packaged beans offered at the store are roasted fresh each day, and so are the beans used for lattes ($3 for a medium), Americanos ($2.50) and other varieties that are sold, along with a few baked items such as homemade "Pop Tarts" at the front of the shop.

David Coats, 72, arrived in late morning to order a latte, as he does almost every day.

"Actually, I've been known to come in twice a day," said Coats, a trim retired federal employee who lives several miles east of Brooksville. "They like to get you hooked here."

The trip is worth it, he said, because of the friendliness and the open space and "the quality of the coffee and the care and extra attention that Dan puts into choosing the beans and roasting the coffee. It's a real passion with him."

Having thought he could only find such good brew in Tampa, Coats said, he was delighted to discover the Coffee Barn "out here in the boonies" several years ago.

"Taylor," he called across the counter from his table, "do you have any idea how long you'd been open before I first showed up down there?"

"Probably about a year," Buttelman answered.

Coats looked dismayed.

"You mean I drank a year of bad coffee that I didn't have to? What a shame."

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.