Northeast Shores Development Corp Archives

coffee at Six Shooter Cafe

Euclid, Ohio, and the Collinwood neighborhood are both full of businesses that support one another. Six degrees of separation. Jerry Schmidt, welding artist of Waterloo 7 Studio, is a customer of HGR. After interviewing him for a blog post, he introduced me to Larry Fielder of Rust, Dust and Other Four Letter Words who also is an HGR customer. I did a blog post about Larry then commissioned him to create a two pieces of industrial art for HGR’s new offices. Larry took me over to Six Shooter Coffee Cafe to see the bars and lamps he had made for the space and introduced me to Pete Brown, Six Shooter’s owner, and to some of the best coffee I’ve had.

Pete moved to Cleveland in 2013 and started roasting coffee in the basement of the place in which he lived for his personal use. Since he was 16, he had worked as a barista in a variety of coffee shops in Columbus, including a roasting company, where he learned a lot about the process. His friends started asking for coffee, and in 2014 he formed a limited liability corporation, and the business took off. His first client was The Grocery on Lorain Ave. In 2016, he opened his first coffee bar on Waterloo Road in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood.

Six Shooter Cafe sign In case you’re wondering where the name Six Shooter came from, President Lyndon B. Johnson used to serve coffee on his ranch in Texas. His coffee was said to be so strong that it could float a revolver. Pete likes strong, smooth, flavorful coffee!

Currently, he uses importers from which he buys his beans. Each country produces beans with different flavor profiles, just like wines from different regions. Six Shooter carries beans from Papua New Guinea, Columbia, Brazil, Peru, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Sumatra. Pete roasts them in-house at the company’s roastery located in the Tenk Machine & Tool Company’s building on the West Bank of Cleveland’s Flats. Pete hopes to get to the size where he can buy directly from the producers.

Six Shooter roasts 250-300 pounds of beans per week, 52 weeks per year. He has a 5 kg roaster and can roast seven pounds of coffee in 11 to 13 minutes. These beans are used in the coffee bar and sold wholesale to grocery stores, cafes and hotels. On May 20, Six Shooter’s second coffee bar is opening at the roastery’s location in The Flats, and the location in Collinwood will be extending its hours from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday to 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

When asked about his life prior to coffee roasting, Pete says that he went to school for education and was substitute teaching and working in a bar, “I was exhausted and broke; so, I decided to work for myself and be exhausted but not broke.” He decided to open shop in Collinwood, where he also lives, because, “I believe in furthering a community, which is why I went into education. I also am on the board of directors for Northeast Shores Development Corporation. It’s about collaboration and being part of a community. BRICK Ceramic makes our mugs. The Beachland Ballroom is a client. Larry Fielder made our furnishings. We use each other’s products.”

Six Shooters provides a unique beverage experience, including monthly specials, such as the lavender honey latte. It serves its own bourbon barrel-roasted cold-brewed coffee, as well as a toddy brewed with hops on nitro. It’s a cold coffee that pours creamy like a Guinness ale. Both of those coffees are nonalcoholic and have higher caffeine content. The coffee bar also has kombucha on draft. He says, “I have a passion for making coffee accessible to people and giving people a good experience and good customer service.”

He works fulltime out of the roastery location, while his wife, Tara, and store manager, Sarah, run the café. Pete and Tara were married in 2016, two months before the shop opened. When they’re not working Pete and Tara of Six Shooter Coffee running the coffee business 60 hours per week, they enjoy camping, working out and rugby. Pete played rugby in high school, at Ohio University and on three men’s teams after college. He coaches the Shaker Heights High School rugby team.

Sammich ribbon cutting — l to r: Sheila Gibbons, Euclid Chamber of Commerce; Randy Carter, Sammich’s owner; Kirsten Holzheimer Gail, Euclid mayor; Camille Maxwell, executive director, Northeast Shores Development Corporation

On May 8, 2017, The City of Euclid, Euclid Chamber of Commerce and Northeast Shores Development Corporation hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the grand opening of Sammich, 651 E. 185th Street, Cleveland. Mayor Holzheimer Gail opened the ceremonies with a few words about the ongoing 185th-corridor improvements followed by Camille Maxwell, executive director of Northeast Shores, and Sheila Gibbons, executive director of Euclid Chamber of Commerce. Randy Carter, Sammich’s owner and owner of Jack Flaps breakfast and luncheon bistros, says, “We are proud to support the neighborhood and help the community grow to make it a better place for everyone.”

After the ribbon cutting, members of the community started ordering sandwiches. Um, I mean sammiches. And, these aren’t your average sammich. Definitely not Subway. Carter uses local, fresh ingredients and cures and smokes his own meats in-house, including house-made sausage. I tried the HOT pickled vegetables with cucumber, celery, Spanish onion and carrots, as well as the cucumber salad made with Spanish onion, red bell pepper and dill. My sandwich was Sammich’s version of Vietnamese bahn mi called Cung Le. Since I don’t eat bread, they made mine as a lettuce wrap. It was amazing — huge and full of Vietnamese sausage, roast pork, cilantro, fresh-sliced jalepenos — seeds and all — and house-made kimchi. The sandwiches are wrapped in butcher paper and usually served on fresh-baked Orlando hoagies. I was going to take a picture of my food but I was so busy wolfing it down that I forgot. So, how’s this for testimony as to how good it was?

Sammich leftovers