North Country at Work: Running Lowville's jailhouse cafe - North Country Public Radio

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Nov 30, 2023 —

Ana Williams-BergenNorth Country at Work: Running Lowville's jailhouse cafe

Vanessa and Scott Gilbert in front of their business. Photo courtesy of Vanessa Gilbert

Most people love pastries, and many of us need coffee to function. The cafe is a natural combination, especially for one Lowville couple: a baker and a coffee roaster.

Vanessa Gilbert and her husband Scott own St. Drogo’s. They also run Tug Hill Artisan Roasters, where they roast specialty coffee in the same building.

Scott started roasting coffee in 2016, working out of a two-room shed. Around the same time, Vanessa was baking out of their kitchen and selling at farmers' markets.

Gilbert says she loved baking, and it was something she could do as a stay-at-home mom. 

They wanted to merge the businesses and open a cafe, so they started looking for a space. In 2020, they found the perfect place: the old Lewis County jail.

It’s a big, two-story brick building built in 1864, and Gilbert says it’s a great location - right in Lowville’s downtown core, with a big lawn and lots of parking. 

Gilbert says "it was a little bit of a process to figure out if we could even purchase the building just because it was full of lead and asbestos. So thus began the long journey of grant writing and trying to figure it all out."

After lots of repair work, the lead and asbestos are gone, and they finally moved in last February. Now they have a commercial kitchen for baking, a roasting setup, and the cafe space. They’re still working on renovations - only about ⅓ of the building is finished. 

"It would certainly be a lot easier and cheaper to build from scratch. But we really want to see an old space being used and given new life."

The ultimate vision is a full-service cafe with sandwiches, plus commercial space for other businesses. 

They’re keeping a close eye on their carbon footprint, with an afterburn system that eliminates roasting emissions. They plan to add a heat pump and a high-speed EV charger in their parking lot, which could help bring people traveling through to their business.

Vanessa Gilbert in the bakery at St. Drogo's Cafe and Bakehouse. Photo courtesy of Vanessa Gilbert

Gilbert says that it "takes some creativity to be able to run a small business in a small town." Diversity has been a big part of their success. In addition to the cafe, they have a mobile coffee truck and do lots of wholesale - picture sheets of pastries and kegs of cold brew. 

It helps that their products are pretty rare in rural Lewis County. Vanessa Gilbert bakes fresh sourdough, a dense, dark Russian bread, and gluten-free loaves, all of which are hard to come by in the area. 

Scott Gilbert in Tug Hill Artisan Roasters. Photo courtesy of Vanessa Gilbert

The coffee they roast is specialty grade, which means it scores high on a quality grading system. There’s also a big emphasis on direct trade with growers.

That way, Gilbert says, "you have less middlemen in between where that seed is coming from and where it's being roasted.

Gilbert describes her husband as a “forever student.” With coffee, there’s always something new to learn or perfect, like the exact roasting time a bean needs.

She says "when you're getting a really high-quality bean that has been harvested very carefully and processed in unique ways, you want to roast it in such a way that all those unique flavors are coming out." They mostly stick to light or medium roasts, because "the longer you roast it, the more you essentially cook out of it."

In the bakery, Vanessa Gilbert is also big on improving her craft. She said that "laminating croissant dough has become a passion and an obsession. I love butter, and everything with pastries is so much better with butter."

Gilbert's favorite part of baking is seeing people react to what she makes. She wants to share that passion with people through St. Drogo’s Cafe and Bakehouse, which is "kind of like we're opening up our home to people." The public space is right in the middle of where Gilbert and her staff bake bread. 

"You can look over and you can see a loaf of challah being braided, or you can see the sourdough rising."

Vanessa Gilbert says that for her, that relationship between the producer and the consumer is at the forefront.

Funding for this story was provided in part by the New York State Department of Education

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