When Tyler and Mary Stastny purchased Neutral Grounds in November 2023, they had no previous experience in the coffee business. But that didn’t stop their ambitions of creating a destination coffee shop.
They had a lot of help along the way—“people are super open in this business,” Tyler Stastny said, who described a fellow coffee-shop owner giving him free advice. “We’re not competitors, he just wants me to be successful. I was so appreciative.”
One of the goals for Neutral Grounds has always been to not just create quality coffee, but “to elevate the roasting side of it. It took us a good year to really understand the roasting process,” Stastny said.
Neutral Grounds roasts all of its own coffee beans, which are used not just in their drinks, but are sold wholesale and to customers as well.
“My wife, she does a really excellent job,” Stastny said. “She does all the scheduling and she creates all of our drinks. I’m just the official taste-tester.”
To roast their coffee beans, Neutral Grounds has used a roaster that can handle just under 5 pounds of beans at a time. As the business has grown, the Stastnys realized they were maxing out their roaster’s ability to meet the demand for quality roasted beans.
In a major step for the business, they recently purchased a new roaster that can handle 18-20 pounds of beans at a time, quadrupling their output.
But this milestone has come with its own challenges: the new roaster weighs nearly one ton. When Stastny got the call that the roaster was being delivered, he didn’t know how he was going to get it into the shop, so at the last minute he called Seward Lumber and Soflin Construction for help.
“Talk about community support,” Stastny said, “unbelievable—they dropped everything with a phone call and came up to Neutral Grounds, and their first words were ‘What are we going to do? How can we help you?’”
They got together at 5:30 a.m. before morning traffic picked up and blocked off a section of the street before running into another challenge: the roaster was too big to fit through the door. In a blessing in disguise, the front window had been broken during a windstorm two weeks prior, and Stastny, with help from Seward Lumber and Soflin Construction, was able to maneuver the roaster through the window into the shop.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t have them,” Stastny said.
Whether it’s local businesses helping move the new roaster or customers visiting the shop, Stastny expressed how grateful he was for the community that he’s experienced through Neutral Grounds.
“When I come in here, it’s guaranteed that I’m going to be wrapped up for an hour because I’m going to talk to so many people,” Stastny said. “It’s definitely a joy to own this business.”
