CONRAD – Folklore Coffee in Conrad recently won a gold medal in the Golden Bean North America competition in Portland, Oregon. The husband and wife team brought home the gold in the pour-over category.
“Small town Montana doesn’t always get the best treatment coffee-wise, so we thought, ‘Let’s go all in’,” owner Andrew Pollard said.
He and his wife took a chance on Conrad. His wife being from Conrad and Andrew from Lewistown, they were excited to bring the coffee industry home.
“With the fact in mind that we wanted to become a whole sale roasting company, a small town made a lot of sense because we could run a coffee shop pretty successfully while trying to grow the business of roasting for shops around the country,” Pollard said.
The two traveled the world, looking for the perfect brewing recipe to perfect that cup-of-joe.
You can find Folklore Coffee around the country.
Al Banco in Great Falls roasts Folklore Coffee and sells it by the pack, and Cut Bank Brewery in Cut Bank has Folklore Coffee at a pour-over bar.
And Folklore even ships their coffee to Washington and Louisiana.
“Both the people in the Tri-cities and in Baton Rouge tried our coffee in the shop here and got a hold of me later on and said I’m thinking about opening a coffee shop would you guys be interested in roasting for us,” Pollard said.
But no matter how big this small town coffee shop gets, Pollard says his Conrad regulars will always be first.
“We’re going to give you the best quality of coffee we can. We pride ourselves in thinking that we have some of the best quality in the state,” Pollard said.
You can find out more about Folklore Coffee on their Facebook page.
Reporting by Elizabeth Transue for MTN News
