Ryan Rouse and Sheryl Rosa are among the many people whose pandemic hobby became a career pivot. For the couple, it already happened to be a favorite daily ritual: making coffee. They started out roasting coffee seeds at home using secondhand popcorn poppers. Then they leveled up with a small at-home roaster.
In the meantime, Rouse and Rosa left Chicago to make their cabin in Whitewater, Wisconsin, their permanent residence. They sold their first Nordskov Coffee products — bags of coffee beans and hot coffee drinks — at the Janesville Farmers’ Market. But consistent requests for iced coffee quickly charted a new course for their business. “It just became abundantly clear, we’re not going to have a business if we don’t figure out how to make cold coffee,” Rouse says.
In the next several years, Rouse and Rosa fine-tuned their approach to brewing cold coffee. The main challenge was developing a brewing method that preserved the depth of flavor and richness more prominent in hot coffee. “We were, like, everyone’s cold brew just kind of tastes the same. … Why is that?” Rouse says. “There just wasn’t much innovation in that space,” Rosa adds. Eventually, they found a novel solution: serving coffee that’s been extracted at cold temperatures with the same precision as brewing a pour over at home…