Leelanau Coffee’s journey from Empire to Glen Arbor
Photo features Steve and John Arens.
By John Arens
Sun contributor
John Arens reflects on the coffee company—and Glen Arbor mainstay—he and his brother Steve launched 33 years ago. They sold the company early this year to Grand Rapids-based Schuil Coffee Co. Leelanau Coffee opened in 1992 on Lake Street, sharing a 500-square-foot space with another startup called Cherry Republic.
At the time, my brother Steve owned a new black Toyota Tercel. It was rather unusual, really: Steve owning a new Tercel. First of all, he seemed famously too parsimonious to own a new car, and second, he was supposed to be cycling across the United States with his (first) wife Kathy. But, on Dec. 31, 1992, those days were over. Both the cycling trip and the marriage were abandoned about half-way through (even though they were decided achievement in their own right), and Steve had subsequently moved to Whitefish, Montana, and gotten a regular job—roasting coffee, actually—after a decade of avoiding from such bits of conformity. Previously, he’d mostly supported his ski-bum habit as a bar-band drummer or hired restaurant hand. Now?
Now Steve was home, back in Mason where I lived, south of Lansing, revving things up for his Next Adventure. Steve did that: Moved from Adventure to Adventure, with little more than his drums, skis and bike. But, after the marriage and bike trip fizzled, along with his Montana residency, he seemed ready to tackle something that might be of a more enduring nature.
His plan was to buy a used, tiny, electric fluid-bed coffee roaster, and find a storefront in the equally tiny village of Empire, close to Glen Arbor (where he’d lived a half-decade earlier), and open the “Empire Coffee Company”. Back in the days before the Internet, though, he combed through the Thomas Register and various phone books, and found there were already a half-dozen “Empire Coffee Companies” scattered around: so, he was noodling with other names. That, and he’d discovered through some early reconnaissance that there were no suitable (and cheap) storefronts at the time in Empire.
So, some of his plans were already hitting speed bumps.
As I say, he’d driven home from Montana with his few bits of things (drums, skis, a Walkman) and was now good-to-go to set up shop in Empire—er, wherever—in the general area. And so it was, New Years Eve, 1992 and we were driving together, along the roads north of Mason, looking for an open coffee-shop to chat about such things …
Me? I was the “Creative Director” at Central Advertising in Lansing—which sounds Mad Mannishly glamorous, but believe me, I wasn’t driving around in Cadillacs like Don Draper, and I was busy rebuilding a wreck of a house in Mason, while simultaneously trying to figure out why I had such rotten luck with women. Both of these ventures took a while …
Anyway, there we were, driving in Steve’s new Tercel, through the deepening dark of the early winter evening, and Cedar Street had a thin gossamer coating of snow as we drove along, such that we could see via the fresh tracks that we were one of only a half-dozen cars out and about, despite it being New Year’s Eve.
“I was thinking, maybe ‘Big Glen Coffee’? ‘Crystal River Coffee’?” Steve said as he drove. “’Crystal Coffee?’”
“No,” I countered, there in the darkened automobile—saying it more out of complete ignorance of the area, but also from my Marketing Genius: “Crystal Coffee” seemed like some hippy-dippy weirdness from which we ought to steer clear. And the goal, at least in our shared chit-chat, was ‘Great Coffee for the Masses’—not just Hippy Dippys, but for everyone.
“If it were up to me,” I said, with all of my Solomon-Esque, 28-year-old-wisdom, “I’d just call it the ‘Leelanau Coffee Company’”.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “That’s probably good…”
And so it was.
At the time, I’d made no firm commitment to move Up North with Steve, and help him tackle the project full-time; I’d merely committed to helping him with the remodel of whatever space he might find to set up shop… Then we’d see.
Our older brother Mike, though (who had his own career and family over in Howell) had volunteered a good chunk of his spare time to write up a business plan and start Steve off with at least a patina of earnest seriousness. After all, Steve was borrowing some $8,000 from Mom and Dad and would likely have to secure further funding somehow. Mike had figured out at the time, that perhaps $6 million in “gourmet coffee” was being purchased and consumed in Michigan north of Grand Rapids; so, Mike reasoned, perhaps Steve could wrangle a portion of that. Mike marshalled all the facts and figures and pie-charts to make the claim seem at least somewhat reliable… Mike’s business plan for the Empire Coffee Company is still around here somewhere, in my stacks of nostalgic effluvia: all held together with nifty plastic binder-combs, looking very professional for 1992 …
Eventually, Steve gave up looking for rentable opportunities in Empire, and placed a phone-call about a tiny storefront he’d spied for rent on Lake Street in Glen Arbor, across the street from the Lake Street Studios. Nailed to a bizarre stockade-like garden trellis in front of the door of the place was a professionally lettered “For Lease” sign, with a phone number—which Steve soon dialed. That number connected him with an old acquaintance and friend from his earlier days when Steve had lived in Glen Arbor, back during his rock-drummer days in the mid 1980s.
That acquaintance and Steve had worked together at the Red Pine (which is now the Good Harbor Grill)—Steve as a cook, he as a waiter. It seemed serendipitous. His name was Bob Sutherland, and Bob was trying to sub-lease that little store-front because he didn’t think he’d need all the space he’d rented from the actual owner. He was trying to start a cookie business, and he didn’t think he would need the extra 500 square feet with the separate front door …
So, Steve found the landing place for his Coffee Roaster with the fortuitous intervention of an old friend, and Steve and I spent the next several months getting it ready. Drywall, countertops, plumbing… and a second-hand 25-pound electric “Sievetz” fluid-bed coffee roaster, the first one ever north of Grand Rapids.
Remember: This was before most anyone had heard of “Starbucks,” or what the flaming heck a “cappuccino” was. In Michigan, there was Folgers, Maxwell House, Hills Brothers, and—if you were REALLY looking for the Good Stuff—Cadillac Coffee, or maybe Paramount. Oh, and General Foods International Coffees from Felpausch. That was it, pretty much. “Specialty” roasters were very few, far between, and not well-known …
So, “gourmet” coffee in Leelanau County? Who ever heard of such madness?
Today, of course, it would seem nearly impossible for two numbskull brothers like Steve and me to rent a storefront in Glen Arbor, plumb it, wire it, remodel it, install an outrageously odd-looking coffee roasting machine themselves, all hoping someone might stumble by and purchase a pound or two of coffee.
But, that’s how it started. New Years Eve, 1992.
And it’s nowhere near ending: Leelanau Coffee isn’t going anywhere. Even though a very nice man came by last winter, and he worked with us to buy the place, Steve and I will still be around the company for quite some time to come, keeping an eye on things, making sure the coffee is still excellent—even if was meant to be, well… an Empire.










