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Mammoth Lakes, CA - Looney Bean CoffeeshopPage 1 | Page 2 I discovered the Looney Bean on my own, soon after moving to Mammoth, and I immediately noticed the cheerful aura and sense of community that seem to seep through the walls and affect everyone inside. The place sparks your curiosity. Laurel Stanford's paintings (on sale) line the walls, along with autographed posters of professional snowboarders and rock climbers and portraits of Mammoth residents in foreign countries posing with their Looney Bean mugs. Everybody seems to know everyone else (or soon will), and it's not uncommon to spot someone tucked away into a corner with a laptop working on who-knows-what. Only later did I find out from people who have lived here most of their lives that this is a big local hangout. I ask Brent what the deal is, why so many people hang out here all the time. "The majority of our business is local business," he says. "That's what we thrive on. The tourism is the overflow that definitely pays the bills, but we thrive on taking care of the locals, and the locals take care of us. Last spring we had a free coffee day to stoke out the locals This year we're trying to think of something different, like maybe if you bring your receipt from the morning back in the afternoon, we'll give you a free cup. Or we might do a free day again. We'll see."
Achieving and Maintaining IndependenceThe drive to keep the Looney Bean local, rather than sell out to a franchise, was the intention of the original owners all along. Joe and Chris Walker opened the Looney Bean in 1992, and Bonnie Kennedy began working for them as a baker. Brent had just come into Mammoth from Bishop the year before, looking to make some money shoveling snow in the winters and roofing in the summers. He sold insurance for a while, then worked as a manager at Mammoth Sporting Goods. "Then," Brent says at our table on the deck of the Looney Bean, "I just got talking to Joe and Chris, and said, 'Hey, if you ever want to sell that place, just let me know.'" Brent didn't have the money to buy it. Then a couple months later Joe and Chris told him they were ready to sell it. They liked Brent and Bonnie, and they wanted it to stay local. Brent scrambled to get a loan. Banks wouldn't consider him, so he tried to get a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan. "It took forever," he says today. "Then after doing the whole business plan and jumping through all the hoops you have to jump through to get an SBA loan, they said they don't do coffeehouses, because they're a dime-a-dozen now and they're all going to fold." Time was running out. Joe and Chris Walker were going to go public with the fact that they were selling the shop soon, so Brent started talking to everyone he knew, feeling them out to see if they were interested in giving him a loan. "My first big loan came from Paul Schaat," he says. "He loaned me a big chunk of money. A lot of people would look at that as competition, but he was a friend, and still is." When people saw that Schaat had lent him money, others felt comfortable lending him money. Uncles, aunts, grandparents. He got half the money, and Joe Walker agreed to carry the rest. That was three years ago this July. Every three months Brent drives to San Francisco, to the Port of Oakland, to pick up more coffee. He loads nearly 30 150-pound bags of green, raw beans--4,000 pounds of coffee--into the back of his pickup and drives it back to Mammoth to be roasted. The beans remain fresh until they're roasted. Once that happens, they have a ten-day life. Coffee at the Looney Bean is generally four days old. Brent invites me inside to watch him roast. The roaster is called "The San Franciscan" and is a big, ridiculous-looking hunk of metal, pipes, belts and motors that remind me of something from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Brent says the man who makes these roasters (the Looney Bean's is the sixth ever made) lives in Fallon, Nevada, and often comes into Mammoth to deliver fishing supplies. Because of this, getting replacement parts is not a big deal. The beans inside are heated by a flame and pop and expand like popcorn kernals. When roasted, Brent empties them into a huge bowl four feet around, then stores them in giant buckets until they're ready to be brewed. It's near closing time and only a few people remain in the Looney Bean. Among them are two men, friends of Brent Kennedy. Like close friends, the three men begin picking on each other, each trying to one-up the other's sarcastic remark.
"This guy is the richest guy in Mammoth for his age," one of them says,
pointing to Brent, who smiles. Page 1 | Page 2 Tags: california mammoth tourist |
