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SANDPOINT - The first coffee-roasting machine Stephan Diedrich built nearly burned down the coffee shop where it was installed.
"It was a miserable failure," confides Diedrich, who coowns Sandpoint-based Diedrich Coffee Roasters with his wife, Becky.
He says, however, "I built (the customer) another machine, and that second roaster is still in operation" more than 20 years later.
Now, Diedrich Coffee Roasters is one of the biggest manufacturers of coffeeroasting equipment in the U.S. Its gleaming roasters come in sports-car colors and in sizes ranging from a tabletop model to an industrial system that can roast up to 640 pounds of coffee every 15 minutes. The company's work force of 27 builds its roasters by hand in Diedrich's plant, at 24 Emerald Industrial Park Road.
The machines cost anywhere from $7,000 to $230,000; and the company makes about 115 of them a year, Diedrich says. Its annual sales range from about $3.5 million to $4 million.
"We are a little bit more expensive (than the competition), but our principal belief is to build the highest quality," Diedrich says, adding, "We are the Mercedes-Benz of coffee roasters."
A coffee connection
Stephan Diedrich has a family coffee history.
His German grandparents grew coffee beans in Costa Rica, and his father was in the same business in Guatemala until political unrest there put an end to the family's coffee-growing enterprise in 1982. The family shuttled between Guatemala, California, and Western Washington while Diedrich was growing up, he says
A brother, Martin Diedrich, took over a small retail...