If you are in downtown Ashland Kentucky at the SkyTower business complex, you can find Jason Crum and his wife Carma at Sky37 Bistro brewing an amazing cup of coffee. “It’s been a long way to get here,” Jason said. “We worked a lot through the pandemic, and since it was difficult to find people to work we did most of this ourselves. But it was kind of a labor of love, and we are glad we’re open. And the reception in Ashland has just been great.”

There has been, as in many things, and evolution of ideas, he said. “We started down one path,” Jason said of the initial idea. “At first, we were just going to sell coffee, some pastries, and the normal café type of stuff.” That changed, he said, when everyone got wind that his wide’s cooking was “pretty good”. “So the next thing I knew, we had a menu,” he added to customer smiles from behind him as we talked just before lunch. “And we’ve not had a bad meal go out of here,” he added, again to smiles and nods of his patrons.

Crum said that his intent was to have a place where people could slow down and come in for a while, which is why he chose the pour over method of coffee brewing, and they also make the pour over kits for customers to use at home. “The standard pour over kit is sort of the camper’s way of making coffee,” he explained. “If you have access to hot water, all you need is some coffee grounds and a cone filter and you pour the water through it. Ultimately that creates a couple of cups at a time.”

“It brings out the flavor, and ours is unique because there are channels in the holder that holds the filter better and extracts flavor from the coffee better,” he said. The coffee itself is also specialty coffee that Crum purchases directly from the farm, and then it is roasted at their facility in Lloyd, Kentucky. “So everything is local and we have very fresh coffee all the time.” Crum said that he has introduced Bourbon coffee, and will also be introducing Cachaca Coffee, or Brazilian Rum flavored. “Anything distilled in Brazil has to be called Cachaca, because they aren’t allowed to call it rum,” he said.

“We cast the cones in the kit out of a food grade resin.” Jason said of his choice of coffee “brewer”. “That way if they are knocked off the counter they will just bounce or roll across the floor. They’re very robust, and they will last well,” he said. The wire framework stand that holds the cone in place for brewing is of a heavy hand shaped copper wire. The entire kit, he said, from top to bottom is hand crafted and extra durable. “If you break one of these, you really had to work at it,” he added with a laugh. Crum said that there has been a good response to his method and the kits, with quite a few customers purchasing them for home use.

“That’s another reason I chose this method, because people can do this at home. It’s not like if I had bought a 30-thousand-dollar expresso machine that people could have it at home. This way you can take our coffee – or anyone’s coffee – and have it in your home and get the same results that we do here. But it forces the coffee to be better coffee, and really gets the flavor out of it. Here I play with the grind a little bit, because I have some customers who want a stronger cup of coffee and some who want a weaker cup of coffee,” he said.

The dining room of Sky37 has a big screen television over a fireplace, and what Crum describes as a rustic theme. Clocks and bourbon barrels, as well as handcrafted tables all sit beneath lighting fixtures and Edison bulbs, most of which were crafted by Crum himself, evoke an industrial modern feel. “Lighting and furniture was actually how we got started,” he said. “We started JC Mercantile in Lloyd and carried Brazilian made furniture, and a lot of what we do is with reclaimed wood. We didn’t want to cut any trees down, so what you see in here, every piece is part of a barn we had taken down. Some of it is from a Lexington horse farm.