(upbeat music) - Welcome to A Shot Of AG.

My name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm a fifth generation farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

I started a podcast which led into an XM radio show, which led into a national television show, which led into me sitting right here today.

But today, today is not about me.

Today is about Mitchell Popadziuk.

How'd I do?

- Terrific.

- Really?

- Spot on, yeah.

- Popadziuk?

- Yes.

- That's how you say it?

- That's how we say it.

- Okay.

What kind of name is that?

- It's Polish.

- Polish?

- So, my dad immigrated from Poland when he was 14 or so.

- Gotcha.

So, I mean, you grew up, you probably knew how to say that the whole time.

- Yeah, actually it was until junior high that I was saying my name wrong.

Actually, yeah.

I'm not Polish, I'm US.

My mom's from Canada.

- Yeah.

- So we kind of grew up, we didn't really learn Polish when we were growing up.

So I was saying my last name wrong, probably until junior higher or so.

- Yeah, the Canadians probably don't do a real good job about interpreting the Polish language.

- I think she tried, but yeah, she's (indistinct) - How are you saying it?

- I was saying Popadziuk.

I was actually pronouncing the Z and, - There is a Z in there.

- Yeah, so in Polish, the DZ is actually like a J sound.

So that's where the juke comes from.

- Popadziuk, it's a cool name.

- Yeah, thanks.

- You could own that thing.

- I'm pretty sure we're the only family with that name in the United States.

I've kind of been looking around for it.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- It's like you put it in a Google machine, you don't get a name.

- Exactly, yeah, and then even in Poland, I think it's a really rare name, so.

- Oh really?

- Yeah.

- Is it royalty?

- I'm not sure.

We think it's probably an old name that sort of made its way to Poland, but has roots maybe somewhere else.

- Someday you might get a call from some obscure country you don't know about and say, "Oh, you're the last of the line.

You're now the king of, I don't know."

What do you wanna be King of, Turkey?

- Yeah, maybe, something like, that'd be kind of fun.

- I don't think they have a king.

Anyway, enough about world politics.

(both laughing) All right, Mitchell, you are the CEO, right?

Of the CxT coffee and The Missing Zither.

- That's correct.

- All right, let's start with the CxT.

- Sure.

- What is that?

- CxT is a family owned and operated small batch coffee roasting company here in Peoria, Illinois.

We started about six years ago with a dream in the garage of our house.

We started roasting on basically a small one pound roaster, and it's kind of grown since then, so.

- So, okay, this is great, but don't take this a wrong way, but who dreams of like being a coffee roaster?

How does that start?

- Well, you know, honestly, we were just sitting around one day in our family room wanting to start a business in general.

I had a pretty good career at Caterpillar and my mom was working for a merchandising company and my brother had just gotten out of college.

And we kind of had that little entrepreneurial spirit and we thought, let's come up with, like, a little side hustle of something we can do.

And we were thinking about all these different ideas, maybe starting like websites or some kind of resale business et cetera.

And the whole while we were sitting there drinking coffee and Tristan, my brother, who's the CEO in roaster at CxT Roasting Company.

He was sitting there hand grinding coffee, and he was making a Chemex pour over for us, which was something kind of.

- A Chemex pour over.

- I don't know what that is.

- It's a kind of an old, new brewing method where we all used to automatic coffee brewers at home, and that sort of.

- Like crewig?

Ever heard of those?

- Yeah, I certainly have.

And I've had my fair share of the pods, yeah.

And this is sort of a manual brewing process.

It's kind of got an hourglass shape, very chemistry looking.

And you put the coffee in there and you sort of pour water over it in the manual process.

- It's like the "Breaking bad" of coffee.

- Yeah, pretty much.

And I thought it was really wild at the time.

I didn't know why, or if it would make any difference, but then we tried it and we're like, "Wow, this is really good."

And he was buying coffee from some companies out west.

So nothing even really local or Starbucks or anything like that.

We were sitting there, like, what business could we do?

And we're just big fans of coffee in our family.

And my mother just pipes up out of nowhere and says, "You know what, I thought about starting a coffee roasting company, like 10 years ago."

And where just like, - So not just a coffee shop?

- Right.

- A coffee roasting.

- Yeah.

- There's a difference?

- Yes, there is.

There's a lot of coffee shops that don't roast their own coffee.

They source their coffee from roasters or, - You ever heard that Starbucks?

- Yeah.

- They sell a lot of coffee.

- They sell a lot of coffee, and they roast a lot of coffee.

- Do they roast it?

- Yeah, they roast, I'm sure they roast most of it in Seattle, but I'm sure they have contract roasters throughout the world.

- It's not real coffee though.

(Mitchell laughs) - Yeah, it's, you know, that's a great segway into a different discussion about what kind of grades of coffee there are so.

- Well, they just throw enough sugar and stuff in there and then it tastes good.

But the person that wants a true coffee taste, I don't even know how to describe it.

What do you say?

Bold Arabica-ish or whatever.

People have lots of word for coffee.

That's what you guys are selling.

- Yeah, so we do small batch roasting, which means, we roast small batches of coffee very frequently, where a lot of other contract roasters will roast just tons and tons of coffee, and it's very obscure what it is they're roasting.

You're basically getting an agricultural product.

So it's naturally inconsistent, but what they're doing is actually sort of more of a logistical thing.

They're trying to roast as much coffee as they can and keep the profile and taste the same as possible.

- Yeah.

- For like a, you know, an inherently variable product.

So how they do that is they basically burn the coffee.

So, you know, have you ever had like a really, I'm sure you've had a really nice steak, how do you like it cooked?

- I've had a few.

- Dude, look at me.

I've had a few.

- What's your preferred temperature on your steak?

- Medium rare is almost too much done.

- Right, right, so it's that, Starbucks coffee is basically like a well done steak.

- Oh, okay.

- So at a certain point, you don't know like what you're tasting, you just taste sort of that medium, that well done stake.

- I mean, you think, can they sue us?

Can they sue us?

- I don't think this is, - Starbucks, I mean, I don't wanna be sued.

They hate when I look in the camera, you see what they do is they call that the fourth wall, what you're never supposed to acknowledge.

So if you look in that camera right there.

Oh, don't.

- Oh, okay.

- Yeah, they all get nervous and they're like, "Oh, he's breaking the fourth wall."

That's just a little bit if you're telling me about your business.

I just thought I'd share a little bit of mine.

- Sure, yeah.

- So there you go.

- Happy to be here.

- When you leave here, - Unique experience for me.

- you say, - "Hey, Mitchell, what you learn in the interview?"

So I learned about the fourth wall and I'm never, ever, ever supposed to break it because they get mad.

- Yeah, that's right.

- Coffee.

- Coffee.

- All right, so, what does it mean to roast coffee?

- So coffee is a product that comes from a bunch of coffee countries on sort of the equator, we say between like the 30 and 30, is north and south latitude lines.

And it comes as a like really dense, hard kind of bean.

That's a pale, dark green color, and actually smells a lot like hay and grass.

So people don't really recognize green coffee when it's in its unroasted state.

And basically what we do, is we take that coffee and we put it in our roaster, which is essentially a big drum that's heated and has a lot of sophisticated airflow, anything like that.

But we track all that while we roast it and it actually follows what we call a roasting profile where we're adding heat and airflow at different strategic times throughout the roasting process to try to give the maximum amount of heat while reducing smoke and things like that, and creating what's called the Maillard effect or Maillard reaction.

Where all the sugars convert inside the bean to make that caramel, delicious taste that we all know in coffee.

- How do you know all this stuff?

- A lot of books, a lot of going to classes.

- So you're edumacated on the old coffee.

- I have sort of what's called like the book smarts of it.

But Tristan, my brother, he does as well, but he's actually our roaster and he is a level two certified roaster with the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

(indistinct) - Like he's like a black belt.

- Yeah, he's credentialed.

Yeah.

- Of coffee, that'd be pretty cool.

- And he was training with one of the US roaster champions from 2018.

- You have champions too.

- Yeah, there's roast offs and everything.

- Really?

- Yeah.

There's like, what's called, I think the golden bean.

- The golden bean.

- Yeah, yeah.

So roasters from around the country are basically sending bags of coffee to be rated and you know, certain roasters win.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

Oh, that's really cool.

I have to admit, I have not been to CxT coffee.

My wife has and as we were driving down here today, she's like, "Their coffee's so much better."

I'm like, Hey, everybody says that.

And she's like, "No, you'll just have to stop because their coffee is so much better."

And is that because of your book smart and your brother's karate ability, you've learned to make a superior cup of coffee.

- There's some of that, we buy a really nice product as well.

I kind of mentioned it earlier, that there's different grades of coffee.

So all of our coffee is specialty grade, which generally means that it's got high elevation of growth, and then it has very few defects per sample size.

And so we're starting with a great agricultural product.

Then you apply the roasting knowledge and experience there.

And what you get is like a really fresh and tasteful bean that honors the terroir, if I can say that of that bean.

- Terroir.

- Yeah.

- That shows they look like a cow, but they almost have the elephant, is that what you're talking about.

The terroir is like a French word for like the origin of the land, where it came from.

It's kind of like, if you think about wines, where if the wine comes from a certain region, that's its terroir.

And it has certain characteristics.

The same thing happens in coffee.

There's hundreds, if not thousands of different varieties of coffee.

You might wanna think of it like an Apple or you have Macintosh or Fuji, or, you know.

- Those honey crisp.

- Honey crisps, something like that.

The same thing applies to coffee as well.

- The coffee, I always thought it was like cigarettes, right?

'Cause you got different parts of the world.

Here we got the Cubans, you got your Jamaicans and everybody's like, "I'll only smoke that."

Now is like coffee, is it that much of a difference?

If you get like say, Jamaican coffee compared to a Dominican Republic coffee.

- Well, if you burn it all, not really but, (Mitchell laughs) - Is that a rip on that?

I can't say Starbucks 'cause they're gonna sue us.

- Right, well, you know, as much as crap that Starbucks takes, you know, they've done a lot for the coffee industry too, so it's kind of hard to rip them 100%.

- That's you know, that is true.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

All right, so going back to starting, all right, knowing all this stuff, knowing how to make coffee and starting a business, way two different things.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- So who's all involved in CxT.

- So there's three owners.

It's myself, my brother Tristan, I kind of mentioned, and then our mother Kelly is also one of the owners.

So like you mentioned, if it was just about roasting coffee, it would be probably hard to get a business going.

It's nice to have the three of us all working in sort of different spheres of influence in the company.

So we kind of leave all the coffee - Who's the boss.

- Well, I guess I'm the CEO, but the real answer is Kelly's the boss, you know, she's our mother so inherently, she's got that trump card on us.

- That is it.

- That's a wise answer.

- Yeah, yeah.

We all know and the staff all knows so.

- So it's in a building that was refurbished.

Where are you guys at?

- So we're in Keller Station, which is a new development in North Peoria and it was a redevelopment of the old IDOT transportation building.

And it was owned by the park district most recently, and they were using that for different maintenance reason.

- Yeah, they did a fine job of keeping that building.

- Yeah, exactly.

So it's been quite the adventure over the last two years.

- Yeah, when you drive by it, now, you honestly, I didn't even really know there was a functioning building there.

It was just all grown over.

I don't know the people that did it, but it looks really good now.

- Yeah, the Kim group did it.

And when they first approached us about a space, 'cause we were looking to expand our business from our downtown location.

They mentioned where it was and we're like, where are they talking about?

We had no idea.

And literally the building was covered with trees and vines and everything.

- Is it behind that Bush?

- Yeah.

- No one needs that Bush.

- You know, let's just say it took a lot of vision to see a successful business coming out of that place initially.

But the Kim group did a really great job in getting that up to speed.

And our cafe now sits in what was the old blacksmith shop?

- It's a hip trendy type of look to it, ain't it?

- Yeah, we kind of call it industrial chic.

I don't know Kelly is the marketer in our group.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- So you have CxT coffee.

Tell me about The Missing Zither.

- The Missing Zither is what we felt to be a natural extension of what we're doing in the cafe.

So in the cafe we strive to create beautiful coffee drinks that really tell a story and also kind of highlight the different terroir of the beans as well.

And we wanted to bring in a new angle of that and work our coffee into alcoholic beverages.

So that's sort of where the idea stemmed from.

So The Missing Zither is our expression of that with a cocktail bar that serves a high quality crafted cocktails and with an emphasis on coffee related once, we have a full menu, but coffee is probably mostly what we're known for.

Our espresso Martini is our signature drink.

- The espresso Martini.

- Right?

- So what is that?

- So what makes our espresso Martini a little bit unique is that we actually use espresso.

So hopefully that doesn't blow your mind.

But when I was doing marketing.

- Blow my heart.

(both laughing) - When I was doing research, I was really surprised to find that a lot of cocktail bars and stuff don't actually use espresso in their espresso Martinis, they use like a concentrate or some kind of coffee liqueur.

So we make our own in-house coffee liqueur and we pull a shot of espresso.

It can be decaf if you'd like, and then we use vodka and a little bit of oat milk creamer.

- Oat milk?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- And top it off with a few coffee beans.

- Oh really, so it's what do the kids say now?

It's bougie.

- Yeah, it is a little bougie.

- Is it a little bougie?

- It's a little bougie, yeah.

- I don't even (indistinct) - But I think we try to be fair about it and we've, when we try to introduce people to great balance in their drinks as well.

So it's not something that's overly sweet or it's not really too boozy or you know, a patio pounder, if you will sort of thing.

- What's the thing, I don't know.

Maybe I'm getting older.

It's when I go out, you know, you only got so much time to go out, right?

When I go out and I get a drink, I want to enjoy the drink.

I don't want it to be some swill or something like that.

- Right.

- I have been to The Missing Zither and I can guarantee you that your drinks are not swill.

Your drinks, it's fantastic.

- Yeah, my college bar days are behind me as well, I think so.

You know, we decided to do something like that, where it kind of, you know, pairs well with what we're doing in our coffee shop and has that sort of attention to quality and detail.

- The Missing Zither.

Okay.

- Yeah.

- What's that?

- Zither is a form of like a German harp kind of instrument.

I couldn't even guess how many strings, I think it's like 20 something strings on it, but it's like a little harp.

- It's the one in cartoons that the guy would play when they were doing the poems and that?

- Almost, it's got a sound box to it, but it's kind of like a half guitar, if you wanna think of it that way.

- Like a beat box.

- Yeah guitar without the neck.

Really, it's just got like a sound box with some strings across the hole.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it's that's interesting.

You and I must have watched different cartoons, yeah.

I did, it was like the Mr. Peabody remember that?

Yeah, they always did the, where they had a zither I didn't know what it was called then, but when I Googled it anyway, I interrupted you The Missing Zither where's it at?

- We don't know it's missing.

- Still?

- Yeah.

It's actually a story from Kelly's childhood.

Yeah, she's not a very musically talented person, although she tried.

So she took a lot of pride in this one instrument that she could play, which was the zither.

So she had this old German zither and she used to play it because she could slide the notes paper, right underneath the string.

So you knew where to pluck at the right time.

- Oh.

- So that was kind of like a little childhood.

Just like cheating, like writing test answers on your.

- Right, right.

- And she has misplaced, you said zither?

- She had that as like, a nostalgic childhood memory type of thing and left it at her parent's house, and when we were moving my grandparents out of their home, they were getting rid of a lot of things, and she said, "I'd love to keep the zither if I could," because we were given the opportunity to sort of say what things we'd like.

And they live in Canada, so we don't get up there very often.

But by the time we got there, they'd already kind of cleared out a lot of stuff.

And my mom was asking where's this zither at.

And my grandmother was like, well, it's down there somewhere, you know?

- Knowing that she sold it.

- Yeah, and finally she fessed up that she had sold it.

And so it kind of became this inside joke of my family.

- What town in Canada was that?

- It's Fort Erie in Ontario.

- Okay, so.

- Right across the border.

- Happen to be watching this from Fort Erie in Ontario, which I promise you, nobody is, and you bought, is it zither or a zither or what is it?

- A zither - Yeah and it's black and has a nice floral ornateness to it.

- I know you might like it and means a lot to you, but there is a family here in Peoria that really misses it, and is willing to change the bar's name if you get it back.

- Yeah.

- Would it be the found zither?

- Possibly or just the zither you know.

- Did your mom use it in like the marching band or where would you play a zither?

- I would liken it to maybe a more sophisticated version of your childhood xylophone type of thing.

You know, it's not something that you play.

- Well you can play the xylophone, you know, the marching mans do that.

I'm trying to think where you play a zither at all, ever.

- Maybe like a folksy, you know, renaissance fair type thing or yeah.

- Okay, you got me there.

- I'm not sure I was new to a zither as well.

- Okay, for getting off a little bit.

Is there a big difference between running the CTX coffee and The Missing Zither?

Are the basics the same?

- It's interesting, I thought they'd be a lot more different and certainly there are some key differences between running the two different business models, but ultimately you are working with liquids, you are extracting them in different ways.

You're creating different mixes of those things.

And we pay high attention to ratios and measurements.

So a lot of the skill sets are the same.

In fact, we've had some baristas come over and start working in the bar as well.

- That's cool.

- So I think a lot of that's the same, the customer service is slightly different, but they require sort of the same types of skill sets as well.

- Sure.

- And so - You went down and you saw where your coffee was being grown.

Tell me about that.

- Yeah, we were recently invited to go visit one of the coffee producers that we buy coffee from in the Dominican Republic.

It's from the Jarabacoa region, which is sort of in the central Dominican Republic, mountain ranges there.

And Jarabacoa itself is a small town of about 20,000 people or so.

And the farm that we buy coffee from is about an hour's drive into the mountains on a beautiful mountain side.

So lots of windy roads, pretty dangerous cliffs.

- Did you drive?

- I did not drive.

- Is that a good thing?

- Yeah, I'm sure it would've gone off some very perilous cliffs if I was driving.

- There's a joke in farming that like different types of farmer and the coffee farmer was always one that had one leg six inches shorter than the other.

'Cause always on the steep.

Was it like that?

- Yeah, so we went into the coffee farms and it was very steep.

And the guys that work in that environment are first of all, hilarious.

They're just out there singing, just belting out loud and everything always have a smile on, it seems like so.

That was really fun, but they're fast and they're quick and they're very nimble on those mountains.

- How do they harvest.

- By hand everything is picked by hand.

- Really?

- Yeah.

And it's tricky because the coffee fruit in general ripens at different times on the same tree.

So they have to make several passes through the same plantation and picking at different times.

So they're all picking the red cherries off of the tree.

- That's work.

- Yeah that's a lot of work.

- Like more men type of stuff.

- Right?

- Yeah.

- Is there anywhere that coffee is harvested mechanically?

- There is some farms in Brazil, but that gets into sort of that commercial grade that we were talking about.

Yeah, exactly.

You're getting a lot of coffee where it's mixed.

You have some nice red berries, then you have others that are like green or just rotten.

And it all gets thrown into the same mix with all the sticks and rocks and everything.

So it's basically like a shaker device that goes through and shakes the trees and all the berries fall.

Yeah, so it's not ideal if you'd like to have a flavorful cup of coffee.

- I mean, I have not been to CTX right?

I'm going to assume that like, if I go there, the coffee's gonna be more than I would pay at my local diner's coffee cup, right?

- Yes, it will be a couple dollars.

I think our eight ounce coffee for example is $2.50 cents but, - Is that it?

- Yeah.

- Really?

For a drip coffee yeah.

And for like a 12 or 60 ounce, we have like three and three, 50 I believe.

- How come every time I go to Starbucks with my wife, I end up like taking out alone.

- Well, that's a different style of drink.

That's what we call our lattes and cappuccino, and that kind of thing.

So you're introducing more products with that.

You're introducing flavoring syrups and milk and sometimes alternative milk.

That can get a little bit more expensive, yeah.

- What do you think your top seller is of the CTX?

- It's definitely gotta be the latte, the flavored latte.

Caramel latte, vanilla latte, those are probably our top sellers.

- So do you have a lot of people that come in and just want like straight black?

- Yeah I would say that's our second most popular.

- Really?

- Yeah so we do a really nice cold brew as well.

So we get coffee and we do basically 12 to 16 hour extraction on that and it comes out really nice.

We keg it and serve it on tap.

- Do you have to pay attention to the water?

- Yeah, absolutely.

You just use from the tap.

- We have some filtering that goes on, but water is a very, very important aspect of coffee.

In fact, if you over soften or filter your water, it's gonna come out tasting really bland.

So the water minerals will actually, when you're brewing the coffee, some of the flavor will actually attach to certain minerals within the water.

Calcium and potassium are big ones.

- Gotcha.

- If you have a coffee that you roast and brew here, it'll taste different with coffee that you brew in the west 'cause of with their water.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- So taiper that's the animal that's got the elephants now, by the way, it just.

- Yeah, it just, yeah.

- Just pops into my mind.

What was your word?

- Oh, terroir.

Terroir.

- Yeah.

- You could see where those would.

- Yeah I could see it.

- If people want to find out more.

How about CTX coffee or The Missing Zither?

Where do they go?

- So they can go to our website at Cxt.coffee or they can find us on any of the socials.

We're on Facebook and Instagram at CxT Coffee.

- Yeah or just stop by.

- Or stop by.

- Have a drink - We'll be glad to have you stop by.

The baristas are really knowledgeable and they can explain anything, even if you don't think you know much about coffee, you'll be surprised how much you like.

- Yeah, there is a hidden passage way in The Missing Zither that's that's really cool.

Is that general knowledge or did I like tell a secret?

- I don't think we keep it too much of a secret.

- I don't think so, when you're walking in and out of it.

- Yeah, we have a little hidden bookshelf door.

- Yeah that we use to enter The Missing Zither from our production roasting facility.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Working with family, I mean, are you happy?

If you had to go back and redo this all again, are you happy with everything?

- Absolutely, in my case, working with family is the best.

I mean, we have that sort of inherent and implicit trust in each other.

We know that our motivations are and our desires are all kind of aligned and everything.

So that just is a big mental relief when you're trying to build something and start from the ground up.

That said, I think what really helps us a lot is that we do have the different sort of parts of the business that we focus on where we're not stepping on each other's toes all the time.

- That's good.

- There's a lot of handoff that happens between my invoicing and accounting versus Tristan's order fulfillment and that type of thing.

- Well, very cool.

- Yeah.

- One thing we didn't mention, we're about end of time, but this is the hat from the coffee farm, right?

- Yeah, so it's from our friend, Eddie Ramirez down in Jarabacoa, they have their staff and roasting facility and their processing facility there, and all their employees wear these hats.

And so they gave us these hats when we were leaving.

- Very cool.

- Yeah.

All right, Mitchell Popadziuk - Popadziuk, yep.

- Yes from CxT Coffee and The Missing Zither.

Thank you so much for stopping and talking to us.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.