“This is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever All around me, people are voicing the same thought, hands wrapped around white stoneware mugs, eyes on the line at the counter; yet another person walks in the door. The Bull Run Coffee Bar has been open exactly 90 minutes. The tables are unfinished. Some of the furniture hasn’t been delivered. There’s not even a sign over the door. And yet, somehow, the place is completely abuzz.

“This is the power of social networking,” says owner Greg Hoyt, looking delighted and a little amazed. “I sent out a couple tweets letting people know we were opening today. I’m 43—I’m just learning about this stuff. My baristas Facebooked and Twittered about it too; not because I told them to, but because that’s what these guys do. And it works!”

Maybe Twitter brought all these people in today, or maybe it was something more primitive—and much more powerful: The smell of baking bread. Bull Run shares a space with the also-new Rustica Bakery, and the ovens have been roaring since the wee hours. When I arrive in the Calhoun Village parking lot, I am immediately greeted by the bewitching aroma of baking bread. Sweet yeasty steam is in the air, and I am pulled right to the source.

Rustica bakes handcrafted European-style breads, cookies and exquisite pastries. Bull Run sells exceptional coffee, brewed one cup at a time on equipment like the siphon brewers (available nowhere else in Minnesota). Side by side, these two epicurean businesses are nearly irresistible, and if the opening minutes are any indication, the pair will be a rousing success.

Then again, we are in a recession. And there are 30 other places to get a cup of coffee within a mile of this spot. Seems like a crazy time to open a coffee shop. But there’s no other place in town to get a cup of coffee like this one.


A Whole Latte Love
Greg Hoyt is passionate about coffee. When the Edina resident talks about coffee, he loses his ability to describe it using words, and resorts to gestures that suggest otherworldly ideas. “Why are we waiting for the recession to end? We want to be part of making it end, and coffee like this can change lives,” says the entrepreneur, who is creating jobs here in Minneapolis, and hopes to open a second location in Edina.

Bull Run Roasting Company has operated as a small-batch, wholesale coffee roaster since 2000, and if you’ve had coffee at Lord Fletchers, Oceanaire, Vincent A Restaurant, Spoonriver and other fine dining establishments around town, you’ve already tasted Hoyt’s beans, sold as the house brew.

“Everybody says they have the best coffee, but our wholesale, private label coffees are really special—very carefully selected and roasted just enough to bring out the nuances in the flavors,” he says.

In his travels to coffee-producing regions, Hoyt sought out small farms and worked directly with families to offer better than fair trade pricing for better than usual beans. In Africa, he encountered beans so special or rare that he could never sell them wholesale. “There is this Ethiopian bean, produced by a woman-owned mill, that is absolutely out of this world. There was no way we could sell it to our businesses, because we’d be paying so much for it that it was financially impossible,” he said. “But if we sold it directly to the customer on a per-cup basis, we’d only need to charge as much as we’d need to. We could make a real difference in the lives of the people growing the beans. And we could offer coffee drinkers an experience they couldn’t have anywhere else in town.”