Tim Harty, The Business Times 

It had to be Monumental.

Landon Balding didn’t have to think long about what to name the coffee shop he and his wife, Jackie, now operate at 575 32 Road in Clifton.

He started a deejay business as a student at Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and named it Monumental Sound Machine. Post-college, he started an event-promotion business, Monumental Events, and ran it for about 25 years.

Now, it’s time for coffee, and you can guess the name: Monumental Coffee Company.

Balding said Monumental Coffee is a craft coffee shop that gets its coffee beans from Olympia Coffee Roasting Co., based in Olympia, Wash. He and Jackie made a conscious decision to get beans from outside the area for a couple reasons.

“One,” Landon said, “is we feel that there’s some really great local roasters already. Like Kiln (in downtown Grand Junction) is roasting their own, Best Slope (in Fruita), and they’re two of my favorite roasters. We kind of decided that we didn’t want to carry their beans, because then we’re really not differentiating ourselves from them.”

So, they looked to the Pacific Northwest, where Jackie is from, and chose Olympia Coffee, whose Fair For All philosophy (learn more at www.fairforall.coffee) resonated with the Baldings.

“And then the other thing was just the variety that they had that was going to be consistent for us,” Landon said.

He said Monumental Coffee currently carries 12 different varieties of “really good coffee” from Olympia Coffee, which “we wouldn’t be able to do if we roasted it on our own, because I think the roasting side is a specialization all on its own, and I’m not there; none of us are at this point.”

Monumental Coffee offers the traditional coffee drinks available in most coffee shops, and it provides pastries that are baked in-house and empanadas from The Argentos Empanadas on the Front Range.

When Landon and Jackie started talking about savory food offerings, they knew one thing for sure: They did not want to do breakfast burritos, because everyone else does that.

Landon said he suggested breakfast tacos, but Jackie nixed it, because “she really wanted to have something that was different, and she came across these empanadas as an idea. And we were looking at getting empanadas from all the way in New Jersey or something, because we couldn’t find anybody local.”

A chance encounter changed that proximity issue when the Baldings were traveling and looking for a coffee shop in the Silverthorne area.

“I got lost, and we pulled into this shopping center, and all of a sudden there’s this Argentos Empanadas place,” Landon said. “And we went in there and ate these empanadas, and Jackie’s like, “This is what I want. I want these empanadas.”

Once customers get their coffee and food, Landon hopes they’ll stick around for a while.

“We really want to bring kind of that ’90s coffee shop vibe back, where you go to a coffee shop to hang out and connect with your neighbors and your friends,” he said. “We just want people to come in and put their phones down and hang out and have meaningful conversations with each other.”

To that end, Monumental Coffee has a turntable set up in the seating area and vinyl records on the wall for customers to play, or they can bring in their own vinyl to play.

Landon thinks eventually he’ll display a guitar and post a sign that says, “If you can tune it, you can play it.” And a plaque underneath will add the caveat: “Don’t suck, and no Stairway.”

There already is covered, outdoors seating and plans to enhance the outdoor amenities.

Landon said the lot can accommodate three food trucks, and he foresees outdoors events becoming a regular occurrence. He said Monumental Coffee will start small with events every few weeks, but his long-term vision is for them to become a staple.

“I don’t know what we’re going to call them, but let’s just say some type of a caffeinated type of event, where it’s outside, we have music, we close the parking lot, and we have a couple of food trucks, and maybe you put out some cornhole,” he said. “We’re encouraging people to come in and hang out and go outside under the pergola, and by the end of the summer hopefully we will have all of our shades and stuff up. … We’re really going to focus on it, growing outdoors.”

Location and Hours

Monumental Coffee Company is located at 575 32 Road in Clifton. It is open seven days per week, and summer hours are 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

People Are Finding Them

Monumental Coffee launched on May 27 with a soft opening, and co-owner Landon Balding said the grand opening is scheduled for Aug. 9.

In the meantime, marketing has been limited mostly to social media, but customers have figured out there’s a new coffee shop in town.

“Our mornings have been pretty busy,” Balding said. “The weekends have been really busy for us, Saturday mornings especially.”

Midlife Coffee Crisis?

Asked what led him and his wife, Jackie, to open Monumental Coffee, Balding said, “Gosh, it’s just a crazy impulsive decision, to be honest.”

Actually the coffee-shop idea had been brewing for a while.

“My wife and I have talked about a coffee shop for years,” said Balding, who turns 50 years old in August. “I actually have been really into the idea. Back in 2007 – seven or eight – I went to a barista school in Seattle and kind of had this idea that I was gonna start up a coffee shop back then. And just the timing wasn’t right.

“And we always kind of had this, I think, this retirement plan or this dream or idea that we would retire on a beach somewhere and have a little coffee shop with a SCUBA rental, you know.”