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Published On: 10/27/16

Berlin Coffee House closing as owner decides to retire

Originally Posted on Bayside Gazette
 (Oct. 27, 2016) After seven years of running what was, for many in Berlin, the coffee shop where “everybody knows your name,” 68-year-old Peggy Hagy is retiring at the end of this year.
When it opened in 2009, the Berlin Coffee House on 17 Jefferson Street filled a major void in a town that had yet to be properly caffeinated.
Hagy, who operated the shop with her son, Jason, aimed to remedy that. A Baltimore native, Hagy and her family moved to the area in the early 1980’s. At the time, she was working as a graphic arts director.
Her road to becoming a respected barista and businesswoman was nontraditional, to say the least.
“When Gannett was buying up all the papers in town, I was working for The Independent and I thought, ‘this is getting nuts,’” she said. “So I quit. And I ended up working for Kate Patton when she had the Globe in 2000. I’d never done food service and it was a ton of fun – I totally enjoyed myself.”
She became the kitchen manager there, and her duties included ordering and making coffee.
“When she sold [the Globe] in ’05, I decided to retire,” Hagy said. “My husband had a car accident and was killed, and I thought I would just retire and stay home.”
Then, in 2008, “things fell apart” economically and Jason’s business began to suffer, Hagy said.
“Jason and I needed to do something together, and people had been constantly saying, ‘You know what I miss about the Globe? I can’t just go in and have a cup of coffee.’ People always feel obligated to buy a meal,” Hagy said.
She called Patton, who gave her the idea to talk to John and Michelle Fager.
The Fagers had recently taken over operations at the Atlantic Hotel. Would they also take over the small, vacant building behind it?
“They said ‘Sure, sounds great’. Start a coffee house. That’s actually how it happened,” Hagy said. “There really was a hole in town at the time – there was no place to get just coffee, or to get a good espresso.”
Berlin Coffee House opened on April Fool’s Day, 2009. Hagy said she took about 10 percent of what she learned from working at the Globe, and the rest came “by the seat of [her] pants.”
“When we decided to open, I said the one thing we needed to do was find fresh, roasted coffee beans,” Hagy said. “We went up and down the shore, Jason and I. We drove around all of March and we ended up in Lewes, Delaware.”
There, they discovered Notting Hill Coffee at the Lewes Bakery, run by Amy Faulker.
“She’s a genius when it comes to coffee beans,” Hagy said. “She roasts right there, so we saw the fresh beans and every time we went up there she always had something new to tell us about. Jason would come with tons of questions every time he would go up and pick up beans, and she would show us more stuff on the espresso machine than even I knew. That was a biggie.”
Seven years later, the shop still buys its flavored beans from Notting Hill.
“Nobody can match Amy,” Hagy said. “That was really our beginning, and actually we won the first two awards from Maryland Life based on Amy’s beans.”
Berlin Coffee House also features local ice cream from Chesapeake Bay Farms in Berlin, which Hagy called a “godsend,” as well as bagels from A Bagel And in Ocean Pines, which are picked up fresh each morning.
“That’s my holy trinity,” Hagy said. “We couldn’t do without any of them.”
She described the ambiance at the shop as “eclectic, but comfortable,” usually low-lit with strings of Christmas lights hung in the rafters, overhead. The walls are adorned with some of Hagy’s original watercolor paintings and colored pencil drawings, a handful of tables and chairs are scattered to the left of the front counter, and two large bookshelves fill out the modest space, one of which features items from other shops based in Maryland.
The coffee house just predates the great Berlin “boom,” when the formerly economically depressed town suddenly grabbed national attention as it was officially deemed “cool.” Hagy remembers former Berlin Economic and Community Development Director Michael Day pitching the idea of entering a nationwide contest that would cast a spotlight on a single small town.
What made it all work, she said, was how well all the business owners worked together, going so far as to feed each other customers.
“Robin at Baked Desserts and Heather at Bungalow Love and Jen at the Globe – we had always helped each other,” Hagy said. “Robin has a smaller area for seating and people would want an espresso, so you would get your desserts and come over here. I still send people over there.
“We all worked with each other – everybody did that – and I think that’s what visitors to the town always saw, was the fact that we were so open to sharing our customers,” Hagy said. “I think that’s what did it – it had to come from the business owners. There’s nothing that a local government could have done. The visitors had to like it in order to vote for it.”
Some of that magic, Hagy said, had been lost.
“Things have changed since then,” she said. “We were all so individual back then.”
Jason offered a pair of theories.
“I think the main thing, in the beginning, was that all the businesses were run by the owners,” Jason said. “When the customers came in, they actually met the owner of the shop, which gave them more of an intimate feeling. And every single store was so individual and different that you could spend the whole day finding new things.
“I think having shops come in and selling the same thing that a store down the street is selling really hurts the town,” he added. “If you have three shops selling the same exact stuff – whether it’s retail or food – you’re not going to have the same cool, all-day adventure where you don’t know what you’re going to see in the next store. I think it’s going to be very hard to get that back.”
During her second retirement, Hagy said she would spend more time making art, perhaps do a little design work on a freelance basis, and volunteer around the town whenever she could. She has already offered her services at the new Berlin library, which could start construction next year.
“I told them, whatever you all do I want to be a part of it,” she said. “Not as an employee, but I’d like to help with all the fundraisers and stuff. That’s going to be really cool.”
She said the decision to close the shop was partially based on frustration, partly on a down sales year, and partly because Jason was moving on to another business endeavor.
What she’ll miss the most, she said, are the people.
“We’ve had such wonderful people come in here, and I have sent coffee mugs around the world – Shanghai, Germany, Italy,” Hagy said. “I sent bags of coffee and two coffee cups with this couple in Finland. They wanted her mother to have some, but she didn’t have room in her suitcase, so I sent them.
“It’s been grand. It’s been an absolute surprise,” she added. “I never dreamed that it was going to be as successful as it was. We won the Coastal Style award every single year except one, and that went to the Pemberton Coffee House, who are friends of ours.
“I have groups of people that come here every year,” she said. “They come here first, they get their coffee, and then they go off to Assateague, Chincoteague, Ocean City or wherever, but they stop here first. And John’s guests from the hotel – to see them standing outside my door at 6:15 in their pajamas waiting to get coffee – I’ll miss that.”
She also said she would miss the relationships she has built with many of the other business owners in town, several of whom got their start in the coffee house, including Atlantic Retreat and Cupcakes in Bloom. Bungalow Love owner Heather Layton and Zenna Wellness Studio owner Chrissy Ehrhart are both former employees.
“When people found out we were closing, everybody came in here and it’s just been an enormous response that I never expected. People came out of the woodwork,” she said.
Hagy laughed when recalling some of the stranger things she’s seen while running in the shop, from customers asking, “is your coffee any good?” to watching four-axle tractor trailers, given a bad route by their GPS systems, try and navigate the narrow confines of Jefferson Street.
“It’s been a joy. I don’t regret any of it really. And I’ve learned so much business-wise,” she said.
“We feel like we’re getting to leave on our own terms,” Jason said. “We saw an opportunity and we thought it was the best judgment on our own to leave at this point – that’s really what it was. And our patrons have been more than gracious.”
The shop will stay open until Christmas, and Hagy said she planned to use the following week to move out.
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