CRe05: Sky37 Bistro - Charlie Romans

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. The lady who owned it called and said she had an old barn, her horses were getting hurt in it, and she just wanted it off here property.”

Sky37 is also filled with “slab” tables made from a single piece of wood. “That is actually from an old cherry tree that had fallen down,” he said, pointing at one table. “We slabbed it out at about 2 inches thick. And that,” he said, indicating another, “is from an oak that had fallen and we slabbed it out too. We have access to a sawmill, so any time we see trees fallen over after a storm we’ll clean it up. And if I see that it has a pretty decent log to it, we’ll cut it out and set it to the side. We never cut down trees,” he stressed. “Because there’s just so many in our area that fall down, and people will call. Then we go out and help them clean up.”

The counter where Crum brews the coffee and the counter where the register sit are both made in a slab fashion, though in these instances there is an added benefit. These are coated in resin, and in the resin are Jason Crum’s signature coffee beans floating suspended. “On the one counter you can see the beans really floating out,” Crum laughed. “That’s because we didn’t know how much the beans would float. So when we started pouring, the beans started taking off on us. We got a little smarter on the second one and glued the beans down before we poured the resin.”

Crum said that Sky37 was originally invited in to be an amenity for the tenants of the building. “They had just demoed offices on the 7^th and 8^th floors,” he said. “And at that time they hadn’t sold any of the condos, so we were working here while they were working on those,” he said. The building itself has transformed, he said, with offices, condos, and an Air BnB. “SkyTower is kind of a hybrid,” he said. “There have been a lot of changes just since we’ve been here, including new elevators.” Crum said that a lot of their customers are from the building, but over half are city residents who enter from the external door. And Crum said that he has plans to make that even more convenient.

“We’re working on a drive through option,” he said. “And that will be huge for us. We’re getting the permits and we’ve purchased some equipment, so we are trying to make that happen as soon as possible.”

But Crum said that the main thing is for people to know they are welcome to come in and stay as long as they would like, and the Wi Fi password is posted on the wall. “We’ve had people come in, have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and close us down,” he said. “And it’s a good place to conduct meetings. And when kids come in I just hand them the remote. They’ll sit on the couch and watch tv, and you’ll see them with their feet propped up because they’re home. And that’s what we want. We even keep stuff like ice cream for the kids, or macaroni and cheese or chicken nuggets for them. And if adults decide they want chicken nuggets, we can do that for them too,” he laughed.

“We have a menu that is on paper, then we have what our customers call our “underground” menu. That’s when they come up and ask if we can make something like any omelet. We can and do, we just don’t advertise it,” he said. “We’ll pretty much make whatever you want. If you leave out of here and feel like you got your money’s worth, and maybe then some, that’s what it’s all about.”

Sky37 is open 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the menu can be viewed on Facebook, where they update specials and let the community know what’s new.

Sky37 Bistro can be followed here on Facebook