“I’ll meet you in the pool,” is not a phrase you expect to hear at a coffee shop, but it makes perfect sense at the Chatham location for Three Fins. After operating out of a West Dennis storefront since 2017, the company expanded to a former health club in February.

“The first time we looked at this place, we saw the pool and said, if we buy this place, we are keeping the pool,” said co-owner Catherine Bieri. “We will make this work. It’s going to be super special.”

The pool is the dominant feature of the new outlet, a semi-subterranean gathering spot with room for a dozen or so tables, accessible via steps and a ramp.

There were several reasons why owners Ron Reddick and Bieri needed a second location. Within three years of opening in West Dennis, they felt like they were outgrowing the space. When they decided to begin roasting cacao beans and making chocolate, in addition to roasting coffee beans, they knew they required more room.

“Originally we thought West Dennis was such a big space,” said Reddick. “It looked like a cavern. Then you start putting stuff in and now we’re bursting at the seams.”

The two met about 30 years ago when he was working for a consulting company in Chicago and she was the IT director.

“She was my boss, but I convinced her to go out with me,” he said. “I took her to see lightning bugs and have a cheeseburger up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We’ve been together ever since.” The two worked for several tech companies over the years, which often meant lengthy assignments away from home.

“It was fun until it wasn’t fun anymore,” he said. In 2016, the couple, who’d owned a home on Cape since 2004, began to think about other options. “There were certain things that we missed from Europe and the café culture, having a place to go hang out with your friends with great coffee and great pastries. There weren’t many places like that in the U.S. and especially at that time on the Cape.”

They began making coffee at home, and soon friends were coming over to hang out on the patio, have cappuccinos and talk. But they were uncertain about the viability of a year-round coffee shop.

“It’s a very difficult business model,” said Reddick. “What could we do that would make this more sustainable? Doing our own roasting, developing our own brand, making really great coffee accessible and affordable made a lot more business sense. We can sell to other cafés and wholesale customers. It drives our cost of goods down a little bit because we’re the manufacturer and we have better control of our quality. If we want to do a winter blend, we sit down with the beans, we play around, we taste it, and we go, yeah, we like this. We launched the business in 2017 in West Dennis and haven’t looked back since. There have been challenges, but it’s been fun.”

Right about the time they opened the Chatham location they introduced a new product line: Three Fins chocolate.

“We’d been experimenting in our home chocolate factory for about a year,” said Reddick, who had seen a few articles in Roast magazine about coffee roasters who were branching into chocolate.

“We’ve been talking about what else we could do for years,” said Bieri. “What complements what we’re doing? Like coffee, chocolate has flavor profiles. There are hundreds of flavor compounds in coffee, and you’re roasting to get the best flavor out. Chocolate is a very similar thing. They have the same tasting wheel.”

“If you look at coffee, wine and chocolate, their flavor wheels are almost identical,” said Reddick. They’re affected by the climate where they’re growing and the minerals in the ground. If somebody’s become adept at tasting coffee and picking out the flavors, then they’ll also appreciate good chocolate.”

Of course, there was a learning curve, but they said things came together quickly. “I think roasting coffee for years, you start to grow a good palate,” said Reddick. “I kind of had a leg up for understanding how cacao reacts and how you roast it and how you develop those flavors. When we started developing our chocolates, there weren’t too many errors. It was more learning the process and being comfortable with it. Tempering chocolate is a very temperamental process. It’s very humidity-sensitive and temperature-sensitive. It varies by a lot: is it a dark chocolate, the amount of cocoa butter in the bean, no two beans have the same percentage of cocoa butter, how much sugar you’ve added. If you’re making a milk chocolate, it tempers at a totally different temperature than dark chocolate. The viscosity acts differently.”

The pursuit of the right beans, whether it’s coffee or chocolate, comes down to working with the right importers. “The coffee industry has matured quite a bit over the last 30 or 35 years,” said Reddick. “The Specialty Coffee Association, which is a global organization, works with growers throughout the world to help them improve their farming skills and how they process and take care of their fields. Cacao is, I would say, 30 years behind coffee.”

“It’s in its infancy now,” said Bieri. “There are organizations that are out looking at the farm level to help them look at practices that will make their cacao better and more powerful and more sellable.”

“This has been driven by a few leaders within the cacao industry who have started working with these farms,” said Reddick. “How do you ferment? How can you improve your growing environment to try to up the quality of the cacao? We’ve got one direct trade with a woman in Colombia who I went to chocolate school with. Her family has a cacao and coffee plantation, and we buy directly from them. They have great coffee and great cacao. It’s nice actually knowing the family.”

Prepping coffee beans is easier than making chocolate, they said. “You sort the coffee beans, roast them, let them age for a day, and they’re ready to go,” said Reddick. “We’ve got our profiles that we’ve worked on for our core roasts year after year, a little bit of variation from crop to crop. That’s fairly straightforward.”

It takes about a week and a half to create chocolate, he said. “You roast the beans but then they need to age a couple of days and let the bean harden back up. Then we’ve got to break the shell and then we press it into like a cacao butter to create a paste. That goes into a melanger, which has granite rollers and a granite basin, and it just goes round and round and round. It might go two days or five days. You add sugar in here, trying to get it super smooth and have good mouth appeal.” The line-up of chocolate ranges from the lighter milk variety (including an oat milk version) to dark. There are a number of dark options depending on your taste with some up to 85% cacao. “The darks have just two ingredients, cacao and sugar,” Reddick points out. Their options continue to grow, as well. A new crowd favorite has been a dark chocolate with sea salt added.

Adding the chocolate-making equipment was a “huge investment,” Reddick said, but it’s a good fit with the company’s established wholesale base (which includes cafés, restaurants, offices and grocery stores). “We’ve got an established brand name.” Making their own chocolate, which is sold in two-ounce bars, also allows for more quality control with Three Fins’ pastries, which are prepped by a full-time pastry chef. “We do different things to showcase our chocolate,” said Reddick. “We make our own chocolate croissants. I always felt chocolate croissants never had enough chocolate. We make our own chocolate-chunk cookies with sea salt and chocolate cinnamon buns with cacao nibs.”

The ordering station at the Chatham Three Fins location is in what used to be the health club’s reception area. While waiting to pick up their orders, customers can look through glass walls where a gym with Stairmaster and weightlifting equipment used to be to watch the chocolate-making process. “We wanted to keep this open for people to really understand what goes on in making craft chocolate,” said Bieri. “We want them to see there’s this whole process that has to happen by hand.”

“It’s like Willy Wonka,” said Reddick. “You can see the roaster and see the stacks of beans. When the melanger is going, it smells like brownies. It’s just incredible. People are just fascinated. They’ll ask questions and they’re just nose to the window.”

While they employ some staff year-round, they inevitably have to train employees who will be with them only for a summer. Everyone starts on the register, learning the drinks, the modifiers and the options.

“Hopefully during that time, they spend some time tasting our different coffees and learning the flavors,” said Reddick. “Our customers will be looking at beans going, ‘Oh, what do I want?

What do you recommend? What do you like? What don’t you like? What’s your favorite.’ They need to know how to answer. Then by the time they transition over to learning how to become a barista, they’ve got some basics on our coffees.”

Reddick compares becoming a barista to graduating from prep cook to line cook at a restaurant. “There are a lot of techniques. You can take the best coffee and ruin it in seconds if it’s ground wrong. Like today with the high humidity and so much moisture in the air, you’ve got to go a little bit coarser. Otherwise, you’ve got so much moisture in the coffee, and it won’t flow through. On a dry day when we’ve got air conditioning running but with the door opening and closing, that’s going to change what they do. You try to keep the environment a little bit stable. We used to keep the windows open in the summer and if you’re trying to make espresso, it’ll drive you crazy because the humidity and temperature keep changing. So, there’s a lot of training that we do in-house, even with people who have some experience.”

Finding employees who possess an attention to detail, along with a knack for customer service is important, according to Bieri. “You kind of have your lane, but you also need to be able to help everybody out,” she said. “We do a lot of cross training. Somebody who’s flexible and adaptable doesn’t have to stay up front. They can help with manufacturing chocolate, fulfillment or purchasing and logistics.”

The company’s name comes from the couple’s mutual love of the ocean. Reddick started surfing while he was in Ghana on a work project in 2015. Bieri, who grew up in California, said she’s been a beach bum since she was a child. Part of the Three Fins secret for success is the couple’s division of labor.

“I’m the techie, so I install the espresso machines, work on the brewers, roast coffee, roast chocolate, do a lot of the work in the chocolate area,” said Reddick. “We do have a full-time roaster who does some work on the chocolate. I do some of the baking. It’s more the back-of-house stuff to keep things running. Both of us work shifts when people want time off or get sick.”

“I focus on operations, keeping everything running, training and scheduling staff, paying the bills, working with suppliers,” said Bieri. “We work on product development together. What is the new offering going to be? Maybe we should look into this origin for coffee beans. Maybe we should look into this country. Same thing with chocolate. We work together on branding and marketing. “We see different things and we have different strengths, so it works out really well,” said Reddick.

Their love for coffee and chocolate comes through clearly, and if you can catch them in a rare slow moment, they’re happy to answer questions. Maybe you can even ask them to meet you at the pool.

Bill O’Neill got his start in the communications industry delivering the Cape Cod Times on his bicycle. When he was a bit older, he was the lifestyle editor at the Times. As a freelancer, he writes about healthcare, pop music and other topics. He lives in Buzzards Bay and enjoys biking, hiking and kayaking.

Todd Marcus started taking photos as a kid in the ’70s inspired by his dad. His career in professional brewing led to the founding of Cape Cod Beer in 2004. Todd has since transitioned from amateur to professional photographer with more opportunities to keep his childhood passion alive and growing again. A proud father of two sons, Todd lives in Centerville with his lovely wife Beth.

Three Fins Coffee Roasters

Three Fins Coffeehouse & Cacao Factory
251 Crowell Road, Chatham

Three Fins Coffeehouse & Coffee Roastery
581 Main Street, West Dennis
threefinscoffee.com