The new Sugar Browns location on 67th and Indiana (photo by Barrett Bergez)
Since the start of the pandemic, businesses across the county have been hit hard by the pandemic leading many to close their doors for good.
In spite of the circumstances, Sugar Browns Coffee was able to launch their new location on 67th Street and Indiana Avenue.
Taylor McAlpine, general manager, said the idea for the new location began about a year and a half ago when the majority owner of Sugar Browns, Mo Sbeiti, began his search for the new space.
Once the location was settled on, construction began. McAlpine said it was a slow process because as the process began, the pandemic hit.
Sugar Browns on Indiana under construction in 2020 (provided photo)
“Every time I saw it, it was a shell,” McAlpine said, “We weren’t making progress, internally, for quite a while.”
Keaton Crane, head roaster at Sugar Browns, said the roastery based out of the Indiana Avenue location was the first part that was operational in January of 2020.
“Really hard to put into words how helpful it was,” Crane said.
Crane said having the roasting section of the shop up and running gave him a space to keep all of his supplies in a local space. Prior to the Indiana Avenue location becoming available, Crane was driving to Amarillo to roast the coffee used by the shop.
Crane said the delays between the roastery opening and the coffee shop were due to permitting and construction issues.
Annie Jenkins, assistant manager, said the main location off of 19th Street had been the headquarters fo prior to the Indiana Avenue location, and the plan was to keep both spaces–along with The Lobby located on Broadway inside the McDougal building in downtown Lubbock.
“I think part of the reason it took so long was that city workers were not working as many hours, are working from home, so everything was just like taking way longer,” Jenkins said.
Due to a disagreement with the landlords, Jenkins said the 19th Street location closed causing the company transitioning to work out of The Lobby.
Jenkins said effects of the pandemic lead Sugar Browns to operate out of a single location for much of 2020.
“We did regain most of our customers there, but honestly I don’t know that it would have made a huge difference,” Jenkins said.
McAlpine said the soft opening for the Indiana Avenue location was about five weeks ago. This event was to help the staff understand the volume of customers there would be, and to understand how inventory management would look like in the new location.
McAlpine said the coffee shop was also waiting on equipment shipments that were delayed when the winter storms hit in February.
“The hardest part was predicting sales here,” Jenkins said, “which we vastly underestimated how busy our soft opening was going to be.”
Annie Jenkins working behind the bar at the 67th street location (photo by Barrett Bergez)
Jenkins said moving forward, the hope is that the new location becomes a family-friendly shop that caters to the new neighborhood.
Jenkins said that while there are still students that come to Indiana Avenue, the staff has noticed there are a lot of young professionals that use the new location for meetings and as a space to get work done outside of their homes or offices.
“Something I’ve been really excited to see it’s just like the number of families that come to the shop,” McAlpine said
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