The tiny Colorado Springs downtown coffee shop with a big back story

There are bigger coffee shops. In fact, about every other one in town is bigger.

The reason that Story Coffee is small — like, tiny house small — goes back to an epic family road trip. Don Niemyer will tell you about it, if you have time, when you walk into his strikingly small coffee shop in the heart of downtown Colorado Springs.

First, he’ll say, it doesn’t really start with the road trip.

“Like every great story, it all started as a love story,” Niemyer likes to say.

The love story began on Halloween night in 2002, when Niemyer walked into a coffee shop in Dallas. He was visiting from Colorado Springs and noticed a barista dressed as “a saucy little hippie.” Her name was Carissa. The two spent a couple of days together and at the end of the weekend, he asked Carissa if he could call her when he got back to Colorado. She said yes. They were married seven months later.

Coffee was important in this love story. They love the drink, sure, but they really love the community around coffee shops. At 31, Niemyer quit a corporate job to work at a Starbucks in downtown Colorado Springs. They dreamed of something more.

The couple moved to Oregon and opened up a few coffee shops. And they had a couple of kids.

As their daughters grew up, they again dreamed of something more.

“We knew we wanted to come back to Colorado to be closer to family and we knew we wanted to do something with coffee,” he said. “But we didn’t know what that looked like exactly.”

They decided to sell their coffee shops and take a couple of weeks to travel to Colorado in a Volkswagen Rialta, which they bought on Craigslist. After selling their first two shops, the family sold their house and moved into the Rialta to speed up the process.

But then there was a twist. It took two years to sell their final coffee shop.

So that meant two years of living in the Rialta, a 100-square-foot space, on the streets of Portland.

“That was an accident,” Niemyer says. “We accidentally became experts at minimal living.”

When the last shop finally sold, the Niemyer family was ready to take off. At first, they planned on visiting a few extra attractions on their way to Colorado.

“It started off as, ‘Let’s stop a few days in different places along the way,” Niemyer said. “And what coffee shops can we check out while we’re there?”

It turned into what he calls “a national coffee crawl.” They visited 45 states and more than 200 coffee shops over several months.

As they explain on Story’s website, the couple “talked with everyone who would take a minute, did some consulting along the way, judged a few barista competitions here and there, reported on the experience for Barista Magazine,” all while home-schooling their girls.

They took notes about the coffee shops they were visiting.

“We learned what we wanted and didn’t want in our next place,” he said. “We loved these huge, gorgeous places, but we also loved the minimalist thing we had been doing.”

Niemyer had an idea: What about making coffee inside a tiny house?

The result was Story Coffee, which resembles a little wooden cabin and serves craft coffee brewed by Niemyer. It opened in 2015 in Acacia Park.

Its design, inside and out, is so impressive that Architectural Digest named Story Coffee as the most beautiful coffee shop in Colorado.

“What stands out to me is there’s literally not anything else exactly like it,” Niemyer said.

Customers notice, when they order a drink from the walk-up window or sit inside one of two high-top tables. Like other coffee shops, regulars are greeted by their first names. If you’re new, the one or two baristas working will ask how you’re doing.

But no other coffee shops come with a story exactly like this one.