Three Wallowa County couples jokingly call themselves the “motley crew” of their new Motley Brew Coffee Co.

Owners and first employees of the new specialty enterprise are Dan and Nancy Holub, Jim and Pam Sackett and Dan and Lynn Stein, all residents of Wallowa County.

After months of preparation the partners are ready to go public with the results of their efforts to create perfect coffee bean roasts in a small remodeled barn halfway between Enterprise on Joseph.

“We use Colombian, Costa Rican, Kenyan, Indonesia/Sumatran and decaf Guatemalan coffee beans,” said Dan Holub. He said that after at some 100 separate roastings and “cuppings” – sessions to evaluate samples taken from each roasting to determine the best taste – the partners have so far developed seven roast profiles so far that they satisfied enough with to market.

“A profile is kind of like a recipe,” explained Lynn Stein.

Whole bean and ground coffee samples are being distributed to possible retail outlets in Wallowa County this week. The new coffee merchants will be setting up a booth at the Christmas in Joseph bazaar dispensing free drinkable coffee samples and selling coffee in shiny purple bags with their Motley Brew label.

“At first we came up with serious names, like Ruby Peak or Wilderness Coffee Company,” said Lynn Stein. Instead they decided to go with their whimsical side when they settled on “Motley Brew.”

To carry through with that sense of humor, for marketing purposes several lines have been created to sell the custom coffee in different outlets. For example, in sporting goods or Western-style stores, the Motley Brew coffee names include “Brewster Cogburn” and “Grizzly Whiz” or in gift stores, either a crazy line (“Bean Me Up, Scotty’) or classic (“Gulpability”). Among other roast names are “True Brew,” “Hug-in-a-mug”, and “Blendsetter”.

Motley Brew is also developing custom blends for area restaurants, which will be unique to them. Personal contacts have already located potential outlets far outside Eastern Oregon, from the Oregon coast all the way to South Carolina.

Anyone interested in contacting the Motley Brew Coffee Company can call the company at 541-432-BEAN; the Web site address is but the actually site isn’t up quite yet.

While the partners have had a lot of fun with their coffee names, they are dead serious about their coffee roasting which is both an art – because taste is subjective – and a science.

“For the past two months we’ve done nothing but practice, practice, practice,” said Jim Sackett.

At the center of their operation is a brand new, state of the art, infrared Deidrich coffee roaster, purchased in Sandpoint, Idaho, and delivered in October. The four designated roasters of Motley Brew are the Holubs, Lynn Stein and Jim Sackett, who all attended a coffee roasting seminar in Sandpoint to learn the basics of their new craft.

While coffee taste is somewhat subjective, coffee profiles are developed by carefully recording the temperature of the beans at each minute of the roasting; the longer the roast the darker the bean, but beyond a very fine point the roast actually becomes a burn. Samples are taken at different times during the roast and labeled carefully, for an eventual taste evaluation, or cupping, by all six partners. The infrared feature on the roaster makes duplicating profiles much easier than older models.

A long way from the world’s coffee-growing countries, Wallowa County may seem like an unusual place for a specialty coffee roasting business to take root, but the fact is that with a growing public taste for quality coffee.

While at least in metro areas that taste originally was developed by such coffee chains as Seattle’s Best and Starbucks, they are apparently out of favor with the increasing number of coffee connoisseurs, who favor small custom roasters.

Lynn Stein said that the strong taste of the dark roast coffee the chains tend to favor is actually the taste of the roast, rather than the coffee bean. “It’s actually 20 percent ash, carbon,” she said, comparing it to burning a marshmallow in a bonfire, rather than roasting it to a golden tan.

You want to taste the bean before the roast,” she said with authority. “It takes a lot more finesse to do it right.” Stein is convinced that the “motley crew” are developing that finesse and are ready to go to market. “We’ve come a long way in just the last couple of weeks.”

First the partners, who all have day jobs in various fields, would like to support their own families with their new business, but eventually expanding and supplying some much needed family wage jobs in Eastern Oregon

“You never know. If we’re moderately successful, it could happen. A lot of small roasters grow rapidly,” said Holub, who mention one he knew that was employing 22 people in three years.

And while business dreams extend beyond the roasting room, for now the Motley Brew crew is sticking to business.

“We’re really open to developing in other aspects in the future, such as a coffee shop or retail store, but we want to become really good at roasting first,” said Jim Sackett.