Madeleine Coles
Life Editor
Pocatello is cornering the market of under-caffeinated college students with new coffee shops popping up all over town. Two new coffee shops have opened in Old Town in the last three months – The Bru House and A Different Cup.
The Bru House, located on Main Street, opened its doors in early May and has been growing steadily.
Owner Sandy Madrid is a Pocatello native who always wanted to own her own business in her hometown, although she originally planned on opening a boutique.
However, after a year and a half of building and planning, Madrid and her family finally opened the Bru House.
According to Madrid, her coffee shop is different from others in Pocatello because of its “eclecticness, differentness, and the different atmosphere provided.”
In addition, the Bru House offers many different juices and milks, including coconut, hemp, soy and rice milk. It also features a variety of healthy food options.
“I really want it to just be a grab-and-go type of place,” Madrid said.
Aside from being a coffee shop, the Bru House also has a small boutique in a back room with local goods such as jewelry and artwork.
A spacious front room is currently doubling as a Pilates studio on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and Madrid hopes to use the area for an open mic night.
The coffee shop is a hotspot for a wide range of customers according to Madrid.
“There’s about twelve professors who come in here all the time. We have a book club, a knitting club and a chess club that hold meetings here. It’s primarily an older genre of people, but I am trying to market to ISU students,” Madrid said.
She hopes to expand the shop even further and add more seating as well as an open deck.
A Different Cup also opened in May. Owners Heather and Brandon Wilcox, who moved to Pocatello from San Diego earlier this year, always planned to open a coffee shop when they moved.
Mrs. Wilcox said they moved to Pocatello for the recreational opportunities and to raise their baby in a smaller community.
In contrast to the many options offered at the Bru House, A Different Cup focuses purely on the coffee.
“We really just want it to be about having the purest, raw coffee,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “We don’t offer multiple milks, but we do have some syrups.”
In addition to hot coffee, A Different Cup offers cold brew coffee on nitro.
Coffee is cold brewed using frozen nitrogen and served through a bar tap like a beer. According to Mrs. Wilcox, it is a style popular in many big city coffee shops.
“We get a lot of transplants,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “A lot of people come in from Seattle, Portland and places like that because in those big cities you have coffee shops on every street corner, and they’re looking for a little more with their coffee.”
Although A Different Cup focuses primarily on pure coffee, Mrs. Wilcox said they will be featuring made-from-home seasonal drinks such as pumpkin lattes and Christmas flavored drinks.
They also hope to plan a grand opening soon, as they never had one when they first opened.
So whether it’s cappuccinos and lattes with any kind of milk imaginable or just pure coffee, students are sure to have their coffee needs covered.
