Roasterie owner Danny O’Neill talks in plane truths

Underneath a plane,” Danny O’Neill says, “I feel closer to God.”

The Roasterie owner is gazing through a wall of windows, looking up at the underbelly of a 1943 Douglas DC-3. O’Neill last month installed the refurbished aircraft (minus its heavy engines) at the top of the company’s West Side coffee plant. A line of 72 blue string lights trails the plane like a runway.

“It’s the spirit of inspired adventure,” he says. “Maybe I was a DC-10 pilot in another life.”

In this life — the past two decades of it, anyway — O’Neill has been a businessman, the hands-on leader of a homegrown success story. Painted on the plane’s tail is 5931, O’Neill’s Brookside house number. He and his family still live at 5931, the home where, in 1993, O’Neill started the Roasterie. (The airplane imagery has been a constant from the start, reflecting his lifelong passion for aviation.)

His latest venture is the almost finished café space where he’s standing now, inside Roasterie HQ at 1204 West 27th Street. (In a few days, H&R Block is booked here for a corporate gathering.) Steel and dark wood have been trucked in daily to remake this six-year-old space. O’Neill rests one hand on a coffee-bean-shaped counter and, with the other, mimics a plane taking off as he gestures toward the spot where a 767 engine cowling, dragged from the Mojave Desert, is going to gird a manager’s desk.

Dressed all in black, he moves toward the adjacent event space. Roasting and packaging equipment and bags of green coffee sit behind a sleek wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. “We wanted to be literally transparent and really open up this space,” he says.

A plane sculpture, fashioned by the artist Stretch from the awning of the Roasterie’s former Cherry Street location, hangs on the wall over the coffee roasters. The new cupping room is next to the event space, tucked behind garage doors. A bank of shelves the color of milky coffee holds cabinets where beans can be kept away from the light and air that would change their aroma or taste.

It’s by the loading docks that O’Neill talks about his public pursuit of the former Folgers manufacturing plant, at 701 Broadway. He met with the plant’s managers in the summer of 2010, a few months after J.M. Smucker announced that the plant would be closed and production shifted to a roasting operation in New Orleans.

“Boy, did I love it,” O’Neill says of the downtown building, which covers two city blocks.

An initial walk-through excited him, but he began to have doubts about making an offer to buy the space.

“The second time we looked at it, I wondered how come we didn’t see the concrete pillars every 12 feet,” O’Neill says. “Then I realized: The first time, we were up on the roof and we were seeing the same thing that Lewis and Clark saw, the confluence of Missouri and Kansas.”

The spell broken, O’Neill walked away. (The Folgers plant stopped production in March of this year and is in the early stages of being transformed into a mixed-income residential development by the Alexander Co.) Still, he didn’t leave empty-handed. He purchased a packaging machine, and he picked up some Folgers metal bin hoppers, which are being fitted with wood tabletops and arranged throughout the new event space. “We’ll keep the original tops in case anyone wants to reuse them,” he says. “It’s the same thing with the plane. If you could get it down and get an engine in it, that plane could fly again.”

Each fitting and piece of furniture here seems to come with a story, showcasing O’Neill’s startling recall. He gestures to a battered yellow forklift parked next to pallets of Voodoo and Super Tuscan coffee.

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“We got this from Boulevard in 1996,” he says. “We traded them for some coffee. I thought that would last them awhile, but they were back six months later for more coffee.”

He pauses the history lesson often to acknowledge the people who walk past. O’Neill calls such conversational reroutes “flights of thought.” He teases the UPS driver about left turns, compliments an employee on how the equipment is running. He hails and praises Anton Kotar, who designed the Roasterie’s new event space and is in the process of opening his own restaurant on Main Street. Kotar slips away, down toward what everyone here refers to as “the Green Mile,” where shelves of bagged coffee await roasting.

One of the Roasterie’s two warehouses is dedicated not to coffee but to items that O’Neill has accumulated over nearly two decades. “I’m a horrible pack rat,” he says. “They say you’ve got to free up space to clear up mental space. I’m going to dial it back.”

He happens upon a piece of the building’s original sprinkler system, removed during this renovation. It’s a J-shaped pipe attached to a metal valve that probably weighs a ton — an oversized version of the kind of part left over from a home bathroom makeover. “I’ll paint it bright red and place it out on the patio,” O’Neill says. “And then they’ll say, ‘You know what? That pig farmer knows what he is doing.’ “

The man who grew up on an Iowa pig farm descends a short flight of stairs into the former storeroom, which has been converted into what the employee at the front desk calls the boss’s “man cave.” Altimeters and airplane gauges — design touches for the café and event space — are laid out on a table, near a red-and-orange-striped couch of no recent vintage. A bottle of Dizzy Three, a recent coffee-flavored-spirits collaboration with Good Spirits Distilling (the Olathe distillery best known for making Clear 10 Vodka), waits next to three rolls of tape on the desk.

“There are three colors of tape: dump, donate and give away,” O’Neill says. “I’ve got 20 pallets to go through.”

O’Neill keeps a cubicle near his employees, but it’s in here that he paces the green-and-white linoleum floor and hashes out the future of the Roasterie.

For instance, he’s licensing a coffee shop in the Corinth Square Hen House (at 4050 West 83rd Street, Prairie Village) and make it the first of several branded cafés. O’Neill is also testing several coffee-infused ketchups (habanero, Super Tuscan and hickory-smoked are his early favorites) and is partnering with Jameson to market his coffee with that company’s whiskey later this month.

O’Neill opens a side door and leads a reporter to this tour’s end — where it started, under the plane. He tells one more story. A couple of weeks ago, O’Neill crammed his employees into the basement of his Brookside home, where he started the Roasterie for $17,000. He gave a speech about the eight months that he spent lugging 154-pound bags of coffee down the stairs to be roasted. The company, he pointed out, has outgrown its quarters three times so far.

The speech no doubt stirred his crew. But he says it was someone else there that day who really seemed to understand what’s happening at 1204 West 27th Street: O’Neill’s 6-year-old son, Terry.

“Dad, are we ever going to move again?” the boy asked as O’Neill drove him to school last week.

“Well, if we outgrow the factory.”

Terry thought for a minute and then asked his real question.

“But we’re going to take the plane, right?”