Chad Sutherland turns coffee roasting into a growing Bemidji business

BEMIDJI — Chad Sutherland started roasting coffee three years ago as a hobby in his garage nestled among the pines just east of Bemidji. He just wanted to make fresh coffee for himself and his wife, Jen.

Fast forward to today, and Sutherland has a rapidly growing company on his hands.

It’s called Butler Beans Coffee Company, still operating out of that same garage, but with a lot more equipment, some friends to help out, and orders coming in from around the country.

Sutherland, 44, still has a full-time job managing fiber optic installations for J. Carlson Services of Shevlin. But in the evening and on weekends, you can find him back in that garage, where the tantalizing smell of coffee fills the air.

“This was going to be a hobby,” Sutherland said with a smile. “It was just going to be for us to have fresh-roasted coffee. It doesn’t matter if it’s my coffee or someone else’s, the fresher you can get it the better. A lot of times in the store it’s maybe six to eight months old by the time you get it.”

Chad and Jen built a new home on the property in 2020, complete with a three-stall garage to make room for a boat and an all-terrain vehicle. But a year later Chad started thinking about taking up a new hobby that had nothing to do with coffee.

“I originally wanted to learn how to brew beer,” he said. “I got to looking at that and realized that’s going to take a lot of equipment. So I was like, ‘I wonder how coffee is roasted.’ I decided to go down that road.”

He started with a small machine that could roast about half a pound at a time. Then Jen urged him to make enough to give as Christmas gifts.

“After 11 hours of straight roasting I knew I needed a bigger roaster if we’re going to do this,” he recalled. So he bought one that would do up to three pounds at a time, all the while honing his skills by doing online research and watching videos.

“Then after about six months that one was too small,” he said, “so we upgraded to the Roasted Right roaster that can do 14 pounds.”

That led to the official beginning of Butler Beans Coffee Company in April 2022. It started as a cottage food producer business, then became a certified commercial food wholesaler, which meant upgrading the former garage stall into an enclosed room with proper sinks and a hand wash station and passing a Minnesota Department of Health inspection.

Sutherland orders pallets of coffee beans from two main suppliers, Royal New York and Cafe Imports. Butler Beans also offers a variety of teas and chocolate candies.

Sutherland uses a fluid bed roasting method, where air is heated first and then blown through the roaster bed, eliminating the need for a heated drum.

“It works like a popcorn popper, so it blows air up through the beans, and there’s chaff that comes off of the beans, which can cause the coffee to be bitter and acidic,” Sutherland said.

It’s clear his efforts have been successful. Butler Beans has retail customers throughout the region, including several on Minnesota’s Iron Range. And its espresso blend is now used to make Espresso Stout beer at Bemidji Brewing.

Tom Hill, the brewery’s co-owner and brewmaster, was looking for a local coffee roaster after Wollman Coffee moved its operations out of Bemidji. He was happy to get connected with Sutherland.

“We really connected right away,” said Hill, whose Espresso Porter is available September through December. “Chad really takes a nerdy engineer approach to coffee roasting. That’s something that really spoke to us, just that technical nature of it. So we started exploring some coffees from him, and we liked what we were tasting.”

Butler Beans Coffee also is available at Fiddlesticks Fiber Arts, a new downtown Bemidji shop that opened on Friday, Nov. 1, at 509 Beltrami Ave. NW.

Sutherland graduated from high school at Pine River-Backus. After serving in the U.S. Navy, he worked in heating and air conditioning at Peterson Sheet Metal and Higgins Heating in Bemidji, then joined Team Industries before landing his current job at J. Carlson Services.

Before moving to Bemidji, Sutherland lived in Bagley, where he ran a storage unit business on his property.

The name for his coffee company goes back to Chad’s high school days, when he used to help out on a farm owned by his grandmother’s brother near Middle River, Minn.

“One day I was sitting in the living room and some family friends came over with their kids,” he said. “The kids came into the living room and ran back out because they didn’t know who I was. They asked my grandma’s brother who I was and he said, ‘Oh, that’s my butler.’ That’s what they’ve called me ever since. So my storage units were Butler Storage, and I just carried that name on to Butler Beans.”

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