Cup & Kettle reopens production on Bloomington’s west side, eyes Indiana-grown tea

Cup & Kettle is selling tea again.

For now, that does not mean the return of the downtown tea shop that Jessica Messmer ran for years on Walnut Street, next door to the old Princess Theatre.

The new version is smaller on retail and bigger on production. That means blending tea, packaging it, and filling orders placed online or by customers who stop in.

The new home is at 1331 W. 11th St. One way to get there is to head west on Kirkwood Avenue to Adams Street, north on Adams to 11th Street then west on 11th about 200 yards—it’s on the south side of the street, set back off a long driveway. It’s not far from 615 N. Fairview St., where Friendly Beasts and Cicada Cinema are moving into a building near the B Line Trail.

That puts Cup & Kettle in a setting very different from its old Walnut Street storefront. It’s less a café and more a tea production facility.

It has been operating out of its new home for just a few weeks. On The B Square’s visit, Messmer arrived at the new shop location straight from work on one of the gardens that are becoming part of Cup & Kettle’s next chapter. “I would hug you, but I’m sweating and I’ve been gardening!” she said.

After a rough end to Cup & Kettle’s downtown life, being back in business at all counts for a lot.

For long periods over the last couple of years, scaffolding was set up for work on the neighboring Princess Theatre building facade. That made the Walnut Street shop harder for customers to see and reach. When the scaffolding would disappear, business picked up. When it returned, it fell off. In the later part of last year, when the scaffolding came down for good, Messmer told The B Square that Cup & Kettle had hit a sales goal for the first time in months.

Then, early this year, the shop flooded. A significant, unexpected water leak caused serious damage and disruption. That forced Cup & Kettle to give up the storefront and shift back to online sales while Messmer dealt with the aftermath.

Messmer’s sense of humor during that period was intact. A sign on the door blamed the closure on “angry water spirits.”

Adam Nahas knew some of that story. In May, Nahas organized an online fundraiser called “Help Jessica Recover After Water Damage.” But he also had a new space to offer.

Nahas owns the building where Cup & Kettle has now set up shop. It’s not the first time Nahas has played the role of nurturing a small local business. He’s the founder of Artisan Alley, which he envisioned as a kind of small-business incubator for artists.

“I’m just kind of wanting to reinvest and want to reconnect, and try to build something again,” Nahas said. The timing happened to line up with Messmer’s effort to find a path forward with Cup & Kettle.

The first phase will be simple enough. Cup & Kettle has brought back the loose-leaf teas that customers knew from the old store. There are roughly 50 blends, with more being developed. The business is moving more deeply into custom blending. They’ll cater to someone who wants a particular blend for a wedding, or just wants a tea that tastes exactly the way they want it. “It’s becoming more of like a blending business,” Nahas said.

The space serves as the place where the tea is blended, packaged and shipped, with a small retail corner. Customers can come in and buy tea, but for now this is not meant to replace the old café. Maybe later there could be space for people to settle in over a steaming cup and nibble on one of Messmer’s matcha cookies with butterscotch morsels.

Messmer and Nahas are also looking at possibilities for retail sales in other locations, even if they are leaning way more on wholesale accounts and online orders than the old shop did. The longer-term idea could include educational tours of the facility, where people can learn the basics about tea and blending.

Getting the new location open required a bit of land-use housekeeping. The property is in a mixed-use employment zoning district, and Cup & Kettle needed conditional-use approval from the city for the artisan-manufacturing use.

Aficionados of the city’s unified development ordinance (UDO) know that means a review by the city’s hearing officer, which was scheduled for Nahas and Messmer in mid-July. That ended with an approval. The approval was tied to some site work that still needs to be done, which includes laying some asphalt, and striping it for accessible parking.

Artifacts from the old Cup & Kettle location are still visible. Among the shop’s previous sidewalk sandwich signs was a riff on a lyric from the iconic Lionel Richie song: “Hello, is it tea you’re looking for?” The sign looks a little beat up, with indications of wear that are more than just the patina of age. Messmer said somebody once threw it into Walnut Street, where she had to rescue it.

The Walnut Street shop was not just a place to buy a tin of Moroccan Mint loose leaf. It hosted tea parties, workshops and community events, including comedy nights. Messmer built a place where people could stay awhile.

The new operation is not trying to recreate that all at once.

Instead, Messmer is taking Cup & Kettle in a direction that could literally ground the business in local dirt. She has begun working with Indiana University’s Hilltop Garden & Nature Center, where Cup & Kettle has a garden plot. The plan is for Hilltop to serve partly as a demonstration and educational garden, with herbs and other plants used in the company’s botanical teas. Hilltop itself has a long-standing educational mission built around gardening and already includes tea and herb gardens.

But Messmer is also working on plans for a larger tea growing operation outside Bloomington, closer to Martinsville.

And she does mean tea, not just herbs and botanicals steeped in hot water.

Cup & Kettle now imports tea from farms in Nepal, Thailand, China and Japan. But Messmer wants to try growing actual tea plants in Indiana, along with the herbs and botanicals that go into other blends. The larger growing operation is still in the planning stage, with hoop houses planned to help create the conditions the plants need.

Messmer has grown tea plants here before, but not on a commercial scale. She knows of a tea farm in Michigan, she said, which gives her some confidence that the idea is not as improbable as it might sound.

For now, there is plenty of unglamorous agricultural work to do. At Hilltop, Messmer and a group of IU volunteers recently spent a day removing gravel from the garden plot, loading it by shovel into a wheelbarrow so the ground underneath can eventually be tilled and planted. “I never knew I’d be a farmer,” she said.

There is still plenty of non-farming small-business work, too, like filling orders, making the blends, shipping the packages, and putting the final touches on the new space.

The two business partners are good sports. They will go along with a request from a news photographer to put one arm akimbo, and bend the other arm in a spout-like curve. Because surely everybody knows the old children’s song about the little teapot—short and stout.

Messmer and Nahas have already been tipped over. And out has poured a new location for Cup & Kettle, ready for Bloomington to drink it in.

Photos: Cup & Kettle