Beginning Friday, November 11th, you can sip an earthy wine like a pinot noir while you spin an earthy stoneware bowl on a wheel at Belltower Coffeehouse & Studio. You’ll have a choice between red white, rose, and sparkling wine.
Or you can relax with a cocktail, including the Tropic of Capricorn, which is made of dark rum, Old Dominick Tennessee whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters.
And you can eat. Belltower will open its wine and cocktails bar with a special menu.
“We’ve entertained this idea for a long time,” says Micah Dempsey, 24, who co-owns Belltower with Christopher Galbreath, 25.
Now, Dempsey says, they’re “in a position to do it really well. We’re always looking for a way to better activate our evening hours. Cater to our community in ways they will enjoy. People have been asking us to do this for a while.”
And, he says, this is “a perfect fit.”
They will utilize the same bar and coffee shop area for the wine bar, Dempsey says. They’ll close the coffee shop at 5 p.m. and open the wine bar with a variety of wines, cocktails, and a limited menu.
“It’s a very fun food menu. Not a full meal menu. It’s more of a board base: appetizer and charcuterie base.”
The “Snacks” will include hummus, broiled elote fondue, roasted olives and burrata, and roasted cauliflower and lemon tahini. The “Boards” will include “Hearty,” which consists of sausage, gruyere and cotswold cheese, grainy mustard, crackers, and house-made pickles. Desserts will include caramel apple cheesecake, creme brûlée, German chocolate pie. They also will have a s’mores bar. The s’mores, made with chocolate and marshmallows, will be served with ice cream.
They hired Samya Shawa Foster as kitchen manager, Claire Arrison as wine bar manager, and Stacy Hinkle, who put together the dessert menu.
The room, which by day will be the coffee shop, will not physically change at night. But, Dempsey, says, “The lights are definitely dimmer. A classier setting.”
And, he says ,“We’ll have table service. We’ll have a wait staff going from table to table.”
Customers can still order coffee at night, Dempsey says. “We will have a small coffee menu. Not as robust as what we serve throughout the day, but we will have several coffee options.”
And, yes, potters can sip wine or coffee as well as eat while they work on their creations. “All our pottery class instructors are ABC certified and able to serve this menu.”
Belltower originally opened in 2016 in a storage unit, Dempsey says. “We launched our actual retail location the summer of 2017. That was Minglewood Hall for three months. We moved to 549 South Highland that fall.”
But everything came to a halt during the pandemic, he says. They were closed from March to August 2020. “We decided to permanently close for a while. It was crazy rough on us. I got a job at FedEx and started throwing boxes. And then the opportunity to move down the street presented itself and we moved about five doors down. We closed down the other one and expanded this.”
Now Belltower encompasses three addresses: 525, 529 and 531 South Highland Street. “The coffee shop, restaurant, and wine bar is all in the first space. Our community pottery studio and teaching pottery studio is in the second space.”
Their “handmade production facility” is in the third space. This is where Belltower’s production team makes handmade mugs “for companies nationwide, across the country, for all kinds of businesses and nonprofits to retail, gift, and fund with.”
The mugs feature the company’s logo on the side, Dempsey says. The team of 10 potters make 400 pieces a week. “We get some customers who buy 1,000 mugs plus.”
They offer five different forms of mugs, which are made of stoneware, and 33 different glaze combos. “Everything starts with a ball of clay. A mug is made in one day. It’s thrown on a wheel, the logo is stamped and the handle attached.”
The mug then starts to dry. It has to be fired twice “to get its glaze color.”
It takes about three weeks from start to finish to complete a mug, Dempsey says. “We sold out through the end of the year in August.”
A large mug order will take about 20 weeks. “We hired three people in the last three weeks just to keep up with that awesome demand.”
So, where did the “Belltower” in their name come from? “It’s a throwback to a business started by college students. Bell towers are prominent on college campuses. [It’s] a tribute to the fact that we started in college. So, it’s really a tribute to our beginning.”
And, Dempsey says, “We want to be prominent in our community as well.”
MIles Kovarik 
MIles Kovarik 
MIles Kovarik