During one of their daily drives to Omaha — where a Mill Coffee & Tea is set to open its first store outside of Lincoln next month — Tamara Sloan, riding shotgun while husband Dan drove, reached for her cup in the center console.
She took a sip of what she thought was tea and recoiled in disgust, realizing immediately she had grabbed Dan's cup and, in doing so, had taken a swig of his coffee.
"It's a good thing we were at a stoplight," she said, her face showing her animation as she told the story of opening her door and spitting it out — a tale that also forced her to admit to a little secret.
Tamara Sloan, Lincoln's first lady of coffee, doesn't drink the stuff.
"It’s lovely that people like it," she says. "It’s just not my thing."
That's not to say she knows nothing about coffee. Like anybody with a proven business acumen, she knows the ins and outs of her product.
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The Iowa State University graduate with a degree in apparel design can speak passionately about "the amazing flavor profile" of the Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee available at any of the Mill's four Lincoln locations.
She raves about a process that is nearing completion that will make the chain the only roastery in Nebraska with an organic certification. And she dares to ponder a decade from now, when she can foresee as many as 10 locations — five in Lincoln and four more to join the Omaha coffee shop that is set to open at 31st and Leavenworth streets on March 1.
"You can sell anything you can gain knowledge on," said Sloan, who in another life was a high-end fashion retailer, a career that had stops in San Francisco in the 1980s and Newport Beach, California, a decade later. "I listen to people talk and I learn."
The coffee itself might be the product, but there are so many more details, many of them initiated by Sloan, that make the Mill an institution in Lincoln.
The people, she contends, make or break most businesses. She says she can teach someone to make coffee, but people skills often can't be taught and those traits, she says, are what make the Mill special.
"We ask each year how we get people to walk through the door and give us money," she said. "Why do we deserve that? What are we doing right?
"These are people coming in our doors and we have to welcome them and appreciate that they are here."
She calls it creating welcoming spaces, be it a place to study, a place for an afternoon escape from the office or a place for people of all ages, colors and lots in life to gather and share fellowship.
That's what makes the Mill different from other coffeehouses, the Sloans say.
"We feel like we roast amazing coffee and we make great drinks, but it’s all about the community and the connections we make," Tamara said. "We hope everything here is great, from the service to the coffee."
Eventually, the coffee, without ever crossing her lips, came to mean something — everything — to Tamara.
After divorcing in 2009, the mother of five, who had relocated to Lincoln and had been a stay-at-home mother for 17 years, needed to find a way to pay the bills.
"I had to get a job," she said, taking a position as executive director of the Meadowlark Music Festival, a gig that might have had a big title but paid next to nothing. "You start at the bottom. You pick your feet up and keep yourself going."
She was headquartered in the Historic Haymarket — on the second floor of the building that houses the Oven — and as a courtesy, the Mill, located across the street, would store the Meadowlark table and literature that was deployed on Saturdays to share information about the music festival to the public.
That was her introduction to Dan. He invited her countless times across the street for a cup of coffee, but, unbeknownst to him, that wasn't her thing.
"She would turn me down flat," Dan said. "I’d say, 'You want to go get coffee?' No! After four or five of those, I might have been a little slow on the uptake. I didn’t get my feelings hurt."
He thought she wasn't interested until a few months later, when he got a call from Tamara, and she asked him to take her to dinner. Dan agreed, but was confused.
"I've been asking you out," he said. "She said, 'I wasn’t turning you down. I was turning coffee down. If you would have said tea, I might have given you a different answer.'"
There's some irony in all of that. They've been together since that first dinner date and when they married in 2013 — a ceremony and party held on a Saturday in June, fittingly at the Mill in the Haymarket — she finally said yes to coffee, the business, that is.
They've spent the past decade growing the Mill into Lincoln's most prominent homegrown coffee chain.
Expanding into the Telegraph District and onto Nebraska Innovation Campus in 2017 turned those parts of town into destinations, while growing the Mill's reach even further.
Over the years, the Mill has opened shops in relatively quiet places and with time transformed neighborhoods — and the businesses around them. With so much foot traffic, most surrounding shop owners have seen an uptick in business.
In 2018, the city of Lincoln presented the Mill with a Mayor's Arts Award, which confused the Sloans because art is not one of their endeavors.
The award they received was for urban design. More specifically, they were honored for the environmental impact in areas wherever they've opened a store.
That's the impact they hope to have in Omaha, where they are moving into a well-developed area that has potential for great commercial growth.
"We have a lot of high hopes for what that neighborhood is going to do. The density there for housing is pretty incredible," Dan said. "There is a good bit of commercial real estate there that is available, and I really think it’s going to develop."
Tamara calls her husband a visionary, the guy who can look at a district or neighborhood and see what it might become.
He laughs at that notion. He says he has no knack for predicting how an area might develop. Still, it's more than coincidental that there's been a neighborhood boom at all four Lincoln locations.
It all started back in 1988 with the Mill's move to the Haymarket — a forced move when the coffee shop was booted from its location across the street from the Zoo Bar to make room for a bank and a parking lot.
Back then, the Haymarket was a desolate place with ample parking, the Oven and a few dive bars.
With the new location came an espresso machine and the origins of the Mill's ability to get people to gather. The coffee shop became a destination, and business was pretty good.
"The rent was right," says Tamara, who at that time was still living in California, years from realizing her Lincoln dream.
In 1990, Dan, who worked for the Mill as a student bookkeeper a dozen years earlier when the first store was in a hippie bicycle shop, bought equity in the company and became part of the three-man ownership group that included Duane Krepel and Dale Nordyke.
A decade later, the College View location opened and they watched a revival of the area around them.
By 2017, developers tried their best to bring the Mill to their commercial projects, knowing the impact the business would have on the area.
The Sloans are slow to jump at every offer, but now and then, they see something that makes sense.
The Innovation Campus coffee shop opened in the spring of 2017, while the Telegraph District location opened its doors in December of that year, both to the same kind of success.
"We’re what Telegraph needed," Dan said. "They needed a place for people to kind of gather. Innovation Campus called us the game-changer because when we were building that store out there, at 5 o’clock you could shoot a cannon in any direction and not have any chance of hurting anybody. It was a ghost town.
"Now there are things going on. It really did change things."
Reach the writer at 402-473-7391 or psangimino@journalstar.com.
On Twitter @psangimino