(rock music) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag."

My name is Rob Sharkey, I'm a fifth generation farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

It's something that fuels this country.

It's something that we cannot live without.

It has started wars and it has made peace.

What am I talking about?

Of course, coffee.

(chuckling) Today we're talking with Sam George from Danville, Illinois.

How you doing?

- Doing good, Rob.

Thanks for having me.

- Do you agree with my assessment?

- Yeah, and coffee is one of, if not the most important beverages, drink, in the whole world.

- Yeah.

What's funny is it'd probably be tea in this country, except we wanted the British outta here.

- We got those Brits outta here, so we made sure it was coffee.

- So we went with the bold choice of coffee.

- Coffee's actually the most drank beverage in the US, behind water.

- Really?

- Yep.

- What about the world?

- It might be true in the world, I'm not 100% sure, but it's definitely, in the US, it's true.

And in a lot of the world, it's definitely true.

- A lot of tea, I don't get that.

- Yeah.

A lot of tea.

But in a lot of the countries, actually got a chance to go to India about 15 years ago, and China, and both of those countries are actually, and Britain too, are actually moving more towards coffee.

And a lot of the older generations are actually upset because tea is part of their culture, and a lot of the young kids just want their lattes and their coffee.

- Yeah, they're figuring it out.

- Yeah, they're joining us with the right choice.

(laughing) - All right, you are the owner of Mad Goat Coffee.

Now, one of the firms that our Shark Farmer Media works with is called Giant Goat, and that's the name of their company.

And I asked him one time, I'm like, "What's the deal with Giant Goat?"

And he said, "Well, the founder looked out her window, and she saw two goats, and one was bigger than the other."

That's why they call it Giant Goat.

So I'm hoping the story of your Mad Goat has an equally impressive story behind it.

- Yeah, there's kind of two parts to it.

One is the origin story of coffee is that it was discovered in Ethiopia about 1,000 years ago by a goat herder.

And he noticed his goats eating these little cherries and getting all hyper and frisky, and decided to see if it gave him some energy and noticed it did, it had lots of caffeine in it.

And eventually they started eating it.

They started mashing it up, and pouring hot water over it and making tea.

And then eventually they started roasting it and making coffee.

So that's kind of one side of it is the origin story.

The other side is, I just thought that goats are kind of cool and went with a kind of a goat theme, and then I just started throwing different adjectives in front of it, Gray Goat, Happy Goat, Sad Goat, Mad Goat.

Mad Goat, that sounds good, and we went with that.

- That's it?

- That's it.

- That's it.

Okay, great story, Sam.

(laughing) All right, you're from Danville.

That is, it's south of here on the Indiana border.

- Yeah, south and east over by Indiana.

- [Rob] Home of Dick Van Dyke.

- That is true, and he's still going, I don't know how strong he is, but he's 90 something.

- He doesn't live there though, does he?

- No, he visited a few years ago, but he probably lives in LA or something.

- Wasn't there an astronaut from there too?

- Yes, oh my goodness.

His name escapes me and my Danville fan, or crowd, is gonna be mad at me.

Joe Tanner, I believe it is.

- Good old Joe Tanner.

I don't know.

- I think.

- So you could say.

- I think that's it.

- Yeah, my sister lives there too, Mary Ellen Frickey.

- She's probably been in Mad Goat.

I hope I've served her a good cup of coffee once or twice.

- Funny, she's never mentioned it.

(laughing) - Maybe she hasn't.

- Your grandfather was a farmer, but you did not grow up on a farm.

Really no ties to agriculture?

- My dad grew up on a farm, so I got lots of stories from him about how I had it lucky, and he had to wake up early and go milk cows before school, and all of that stuff.

- It's all a lie.

Literally, all of us that grew up on a farm, we say the same thing, we never did it.

- I was the city kid who just thought, oh man, that sounds rough.

- You went to U of I.

What'd you study?

- I studied economics and business.

- Gotcha.

Is that where you met your wife?

- Yeah, so my wife and I met through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and she was a education major, early childhood education, and she was from the Chicago area, and I pulled her down state, and the rest is history.

- Most of the people we interview, you ask 'em where they meet, they say a bar.

So it's nice to meet some people that aren't of ill repute.

- Yeah, we met above a bar in a Christian fellowship.

(laughing) And we may have went down for a drink afterwards.

I don't know.

- So what was your plan?

When you were in college, what were you gonna do?

- I had no idea really.

My dad was kind of an entrepreneur.

He'd started some businesses, some had failed, some had not.

I went into economics 'cause I thought it was interesting and I kind of was good at math.

- You thought economics was interesting?

- Yeah, I'm kind of a weird guy who likes math and numbers.

- I agree.

(laughing) - But I had zero clue what I was gonna do with it.

And I graduated in '07, which was kind of a rough, that was right during the financial crash.

And being new into the world, trying to find a job was hard going.

But I kind of made my way.

- So was it always a plan to go back to the Danville area?

- No, no, I grew up in Sidell, which is south of Danville, little town of like 500.

Danville was about 20, 30 minutes away, and Champagne was about 30, 40 minutes away.

So Champagne was just a little bit further.

And so where I lived, we all would go to Champagne and make fun of Danville.

So that was kind of, my growing up attitude towards Danville was not a very good one.

And I never thought I would end up living there.

- It does have a bit of a rough reputation.

- It does.

It does.

But I ended up moving back there for work, and my wife got a teaching job at Oakwood, which is nearby.

And we, at first, I think when we first got married, we probably thought we'd just be there for a few years.

But as time went by, we decided that we loved it, and we found a house that we loved, and at church that we loved, and friends.

And we realized that if we moved, those are the kind of things we'd be looking for.

And we love that Danville has lots of nature around it.

It has like state parks, and county parks, and lots of rivers, and fun stuff.

- Yeah, and it's got the big steak house right across the border that everybody goes to.

- Beef House.

Yep.

- The Beef House, yeah.

It's famous.

- Their rolls are the best.

- Is it?

- Yeah, their rolls are amazing.

Their steaks are okay, but their rolls are amazing.

- Well, you're just making friends left and right.

(laughing) Okay, so you go back there.

This is a time where the housing was, that was '08, right, when it crashed?

- Yeah, it was like '07, '08.

So yeah, it was a tough job market, but if you got a job, it was a great time to buy a house.

We were actually, just got married, we were living in an apartment, and we were out for a walk one day and we walked by this old kind of rundown, foreclosed house, but for whatever reason, we just kind of fell in love with it.

It had what we thought were good bones.

We had no idea what we were talking about.

We were like 22, 23, we didn't know what that meant.

- Is that what the realtor said?

And you just went, "Good bones, oh yeah."

- It reeked of cat urine inside, so that was a selling point.

We bought it 'cause we were naive, and we had never done any kind of project like that together, Which I guess could be a make-or-break situation for a young married couple.

- Yes.

(laughing) - But we survived, we did, we tackled it together.

We'd come home from work, we didn't have any kids at the time, and we would, we sanded and re-stained the floors, and painted, and gutted the bathroom and the kitchen and redid it all, and kind of made it our home.

- [Rob] While you were living in it?

- For the first few months, we were still living in our apartment, but eventually we moved in and, yeah, were kind of doing it while living in it.

- [Rob] That's a whole new fresh of hell, isn't it?

- Yeah, it's something, I'm glad.

- Always to give advice for newlyweds is never wallpaper together.

- Yeah, we avoided that, we just painted.

- Yeah, that's a smart move.

(laughing) - At the time, wallpapering was not in fashion.

It's kind of coming back into fashion.

- [Rob] It should be outlawed, honestly.

- I have no interest in ever doing it.

- All right, so tell me how we started the Mad Goat.

- So yeah, we ended up, we're back in Danville, and at first we thought we'd be there for a few years, but after time, like I said, we were like, hey, maybe this is our home, maybe we're here for the long haul.

And I'm the kind of guy who wants to invest in my community and try to make it better.

I also love coffee and I really wished that Danville had a really good coffee shop, and at that time it just simply didn't.

- [Rob] They have a Starbucks?

- Nope, there had been one previously, but it had closed.

There was some other little shops, and they were okay.

But there was one, like by the courthouse, but it had weird hours.

It closed early at like 2:00 PM and it opened at like 8:00 AM, so it just wasn't very convenient to go to.

And there just wasn't really something like I was looking for.

And as I chatted with friends, a lot of people felt the same way.

And for me, one of the kickers was my wife had some friends over one evening, and I wanted to get outta the house, so I go to McDonald's and I was, I think, taking a class or something at the time, and I was on my laptop, and I got a cup of coffee and I sat down, and like five minutes later, a whole bus load of volleyball, like junior high volleyball girls come in, and I'm just like, oh man.

- Sounds awful.

- I'm like, I wish there was somewhere else I could go.

- Anywhere.

- Anywhere.

- Please, Lord.

(laughing) - And so, yeah, and then I decided, you know what, maybe we could do it.

My sister and brother-in-law, who are Hannah and Drew Landis, who helped out with Mad Goat, they had previously owned a coffee shop in Bloomington-Normal called Coffee Nation, from like '04 to '06, I think.

And it was tough.

Owning a small business is always tough.

And they worked long hours, and barely paid themselves, and it kind of eked by, and they eventually sold it to someone else and said, "We would never do that again."

So then I'm like, "Hey, remember when you said you'd never do that again?

How about we do that again?

And I think it'll be different this time."

And they agreed, but I was the point person.

But we all were like, we think this'll work.

We think Danville's ready for this.

We think there's a need in the market.

But just to be safe, let's all keep our day jobs and kind of run this as a side gig and see how it goes.

- That's safe, instead of going all in.

Are you gonna make us some coffee?

- Yeah, I would love to.

- Okay.

All right.

Let me, we'll get this stuff here cleared off.

So the process that you're gonna do, tell me about that.

- So this is just a pour over of coffee.

A lot of people think this is kind of a high-end, kinda sometimes a little bit snooty way of making coffee.

But it's really good.

It's a great way, if you're just making it for yourself.

It's not great if you're making for a whole party of people.

- Get off film.

Interns, you gotta.

(slapping hands) - Thank you.

- Beat it.

- So it's pretty simple.

I just, I ground some coffee.

I have hot water here.

- Whoa, whoa, whoa.

We're going too fast now, 'cause, or can I tilt this?

Can I pick this up?

- You can tilt it to a certain point.

- That looks finer than like what I get with Folgers.

- Yeah, so for a pour over, you do want it to be a little bit finer.

And if you do, have you ever seen like a French press coffee where you kind of?

- I have, yeah.

- So those, you grind that coarser.

And the trick with coffee is you want to control how long the coffee and the water are interacting.

Coffee, if it interacts with the water for too long it, it can become bitter.

(sniffing and exhaling) Does that smell good?

- I'm having a moment over here.

- Yeah, there you go.

I think you're enjoying it, I hope you're enjoying it.

- Ah, that's a little bit.

Why does that smell so good?

I mean, 'cause generally, at the farm, we get that Sanka and that smells horrible compared to this.

- I just ground it like 10 minutes ago.

So freshly-ground coffee is always gonna have a better aroma to it.

We just roasted this two days ago, so it's really freshly roasted.

So freshly roasted, freshly ground, you're just, you're gonna have a better aroma, and you're gonna have better flavor to it.

- Okay.

Are we gonna get to actually drink this?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Sweet.

- So just gonna pour some water over here.

- Are you supposed to, does clockwise or counterclockwise?

- You want to just get it, either way, it doesn't matter.

You just wanna get it fully saturated.

You don't wanna end up with any like dry clumps of grounds that didn't get any water.

So I'm just gonna let that sit for minute.

- Do you ever use that percolator?

- The problem with percolators is the, like I was saying before, the big thing you wanna control for is how long the coffee and the water are interacting.

And that's why grind size matters.

So if your grind size is too fine, then the water is just gonna sit in there and not run through it, and then you're gonna end up with bitter coffee, over-extracted.

If it's too coarse, the water's gonna flow through too quickly, and you're not gonna get a strong, robust flavor of coffee.

The problem with percolators is the water and the coffee interact for too long and you end up getting kind of a bitter coffee.

- But that's a nice thing about the percolator 'cause you could literally start that like at 8:00 in the morning, and you still have that coffee, nice and warm at about 9:00 at night.

- It's convenient in that way, but it's gonna cook any of your good flavors outta your coffee unfortunately.

- [Rob] I didn't say you could actually drink it.

- Yeah, yeah, it may not be good, but it'll still have the caffeine if that's what you're looking for.

If you're looking for like good flavor, that's not the way I would recommend.

- Is this Peoria water?

- No, I brought this.

This is filtered water from my coffee shop, so it should.

- Oh, it's like refined, huh?

- It should help the flavor.

I'm not sure what Peoria water's like.

- Most of it's outta the river.

Lot of Asian carp droppings in it.

- I don't know, does that help the coffee flavor?

- Well, it depends on what you like.

You know what I'm saying?

- If you like a little extra Asian carp addition to your coffee.

- Yeah.

- This is a process.

What do you.

- My scale timed out, so I'm just turning it back on.

We're about halfway there, so I'm just gonna do a little bit more here, and then we'll be ready to drink this.

- So if someone comes into the Mad Goat and says, "Hey, I want a cup of Joe," this is what you do?

- We can offer this.

But we also just have coffee that we batch brew into a pot.

- Yeah, the percolator.

- Well just in a, not a percolator, but just like a batch brewed pot of coffee, just going through the filter and ending up in our carafe to serve.

- That smells fantastic.

- Thank you.

I think you're gonna enjoy this, once we have this all ready here.

We're about 75% of the way there, so almost finished up.

- Do you do like the, I don't know, the Ribbon Crunch, and all that stuff that the kids like, the iced coffee?

- Yeah, so we do like cold brew.

We have a bunch of different syrups and flavors, and so yeah, we do the lattes, and the frappes, and all of those things.

And we try to have stuff for everyone.

So you have people who don't like coffee, we have teas, we have smoothies.

We want to be appealing to a wide customer base, and we want to be a space where people can hang out and get together with friends or family or whatever and enjoy coffee, if that's their thing, but if that's not their thing, we got some other things that hopefully they can enjoy too.

- This is "A Shot of Ag," and you're in Illinois.

Do you ever think about putting Everclear in it?

(laughing) - Maybe a little Baileys from time to time.

- That what, you can, I guess.

Everclear would get you there a lot faster.

What is this thing called that you're dumping into?

It looks like a cup.

- So this is a, it's called a, I mean, this whole setup's like a pour over, but this is called like a V60, and it's just kind of the brand of thing.

The cone shape helps with some of the flavor and extraction, more than like a flat-bottomed filter.

- What's the scale?

I mean, to how much water you're putting in?

- Yeah, so a lot of people say that.

- That's precise.

- Yeah, a lot of people say the ideal ratio, I mean there's some disagreement, but roughly like about 16 parts water to one part coffee.

So if you have like 100 grams of coffee, you'd want about 1,600 grams of water.

- Okay.

- All right.

We're all ready.

- Are we?

- Yeah.

- It's still dripping.

- Still dripping a little bit, but I think I can pour us a little bit if you wanna try some here.

- Nice.

- You wanna get the other cup there?

All right.

- You would have thought the intern would've got that.

- I'll set this right down here.

- I dunno, they don't like when I talk to 'em, but hey, here we are.

So do you cheers coffee?

- Yeah, we can cheers coffee.

Yeah, why not?

- Nice cups.

(slurping) I've been drinking crap.

(laughing) This doesn't even taste like what I generally drink.

- You don't need to add any sugar, or creamer, or any to it, just black.

It's got nice flavor and a little bit of sweetness.

- I feel like Folgers has been lying to me my entire life.

- Yes, they have, I'm here to tell you they have.

Like with any, I mean, like with all sorts of products, you have your kind of base level and then you have premium.

- I don't think they want to try any.

It's like, it's so good, you need to to share it.

- Yeah, we can make some for them later, if they don't wanna come, or they can try it now.

- It's best you not talk to 'em.

- Oh, that is pretty good.

- Yeah, too bad you don't have a microphone.

(laughing) Ah, that's my daughter, by the way, I can do that.

That is, I'm surprised.

I'm surprised it's that much of a difference, I guess, because that is fantastic.

Those are nice, aren't they?

- Yeah.

- WTVP.

Yeah.

So what are you selling, mainly, in that shop?

Is it the coffee, or is it the foo-foo drinks?

- A lot of the foo-foo drinks, a lot of lattes, and iced lattes, make cold brew, which is basically, we have a big container where we steep coffee actually at room temperature for about 20 hours.

And then you end up with kind of a concentrate that's really smooth and then you can pour it over ice or you can add milk, or sweetener, or syrups to it, and that's really popular.

And then yeah, we're coming into the summer, so we do a lot of blended drinks and smoothies.

We also do a lot of baked goods as well.

- So this is what you get in, right?

The green.

And then you have a roastery.

- Yeah, so we're not just a coffee shop, we also roast our own coffee.

- And this is the same thing though?

- Yeah, so those are literally the same coffees.

This is after it's been roasted.

So we use an importer who brings in coffees from all over the world.

- Oh, that's good.

- So coffee's a tropical plant, so you can try to grow it here, but it's gonna die off.

- I feel like I'm back in sixth grade, in art class with the paint.

I think that's what happened to me, honestly.

- Smelling too much of the paints?

- Yeah, it was a problem for a while.

And this smells not so good.

- Not like coffee.

I mean, just, it smells like some people say kind of grassy.

- Nutty?

- Yeah, a little bit kind of earthy, not like coffee at all.

And when you roast it, it actually, it loses some water weight.

So if we start with like about like 10 kilos in our roaster, we'll lose about 15%, so we'll end up with only about 8 1/2 kilos out.

And it also puffs up like popcorn.

So you'll notice the green coffee beans are smaller and more dense.

These are bigger and less dense.

So if you try to bite into these, the green coffee, it would, it's like raw cards, it's like biting a pebble.

But you can actually bite into those, they're a lot softer.

- [Rob] But that's what the goat herder.

- That's what they ate, yeah.

(laughing) I'm not sure how they did it.

- How do people find your shop in Danville, or on the internet?

- Yeah, so we have a website, madgoatcoffee.com.

You can buy our coffee or our merchandise there, and we'll ship it anywhere around the country.

- [Rob] Oh, you can buy this in Peoria?

- You can buy it on our website.

I don't know if it's in any shops in Peoria.

- Well, I mean, yeah.

- Yeah, if you live in Peoria, you can buy, go to our website, buy it.

You even have subscriptions.

You can get a bag of coffee delivered to you every week or every month, and we'll ship it out to you.

- [Rob] It's a gift that keeps giving.

- Especially with like graduation coming up for a lot of people.

- Oh, genius.

- Birthdays, holidays, give someone a gift of some Mad Goat Coffee, and they'll love you for the rest of their lives, probably.

I don't know if I can guarantee that, but I feel like I can say that.

- We didn't get a talk about it, but you're in Meijer's too?

- Yeah, so we're all the Meijer stores in Illinois, which I think is 33 or 34, and then some other grocery stores in Champagne and Springfield.

- It's Mad Goat Coffee.

But what, the physical address?

- So we have two shops in Danville.

Our main location with our roastery is 701 South Gilbert Street in Danville, so it's right off the interstate.

If you're on 74, you take the Gilbert Street Exit, and we're literally right, right there off the interstate.

- And you are taking this opportunity to announce that you are opening a shop in Bradford, Illinois.

So, go ahead.

- Well, yeah, we'll see about that, that's news to me.

- We can't even get, they have a dollar store.

Give us, throw us a bone, man.

- That's a hard sell.

(sighing) - Okay.

All right.

Well, Sam George, thank you for taking the time to come and talk with us today.

I appreciate entrepreneurs and someone that starts their own business because it is probably one of the most difficult things anyone ever has to go through.

I'm glad you're having success, and I hope that you have continuous success, with quality of product.

This is the best coffee I've ever had in my life.

- Wow, thanks.

I'm glad to hear that.

- And you made it in a tin cup.

- Yeah, exactly.

(laughing) - So I appreciate you coming today, and all the efforts that you're doing for Danville.

Yeah, it's good to throw them a bone.

- Yeah, thanks Rob.

- Danville has lots, lots of good things to add and Mad Goat is one of 'em.

- Absolutely.

Sam George from Danville.

Thank you everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

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