The Wise Bean

After serving as one of the main hubs for community members in historic Bethlehem for 15 years, the Wise Bean has changed hands. The previous owners, Bill and Joan Young, have wisely passed off the baton to two new young owners ready to live out their legacy. So here at the Wise Bean we serve organic coffees, fair trade coffees, blends mostly, some single origin blends. My husband and I, Luke Santana, we took over, reopened the Wise Bean coffee shop. Luke and I both met at Starbucks. I started working there in 2008. So we fell in love at a coffee shop, real fairytale story, working together just fell in love. And then so that was a dream. Let's try to open our own coffee shop one day, but we didn't know how that would come to pass. We have Main Street here in Broad Street where there's All the new shops coming in and the restaurants and we're hoping to kind of partner with the city and the community. We've met some people that work for the Chamber of Commerce in Bethlehem and just kind of putting our name out there as the Little Wise Bean, but So hopefully in the future open up to community events. Our faith is a really big part of what we do. So Luke and I are both born and raised in Bethlehem, both born in St. Luke's. I grew up on Linden Street, he grew up on High Street, he went to Liberty. So we know the community well and we love just how it is, the Christmas city, the life, the Christmas, all of that. It'still close to the city if you want to get to the city, but I just, again, it's a very familiar place for me. So the legacy of the Wise Bean again began with Bill and Joan. 15 years ago they had a vision of bringing a coffee shop to the Lehigh Valley to Bethlehem and they did an amazing job with building this foundation and we just, when we heard it was being sold, Because again, we kept a lot of the roasters and a lot of the pastries very similar to what they had. But again, they had a vision for community, they had a vision for Bethlehem and for people to come together and we just want to carry the baton and continue that for the community. We are in walking distance of Main Street, we're right off of Broad Street, and there's a couple local colleges. So Moravian is nearby, Lehigh is not too far as well, so College of Business is more than welcome. Free wifi so you can come and get your papers done. And we've actually also had work meetings, so people that might be in the offices coming out and just needing a space to So we're here for. Come out to the Wise Bean to see how the new generation of business owners nurtures the needs of historic downtown Bethlehem. If you enjoyed this episode of a Boutley High Valley where we love to live, work and play, please subscribe, hit the bell button so you get notified the next time we post an episode.