Olympic Mountain owners lose sleep to make their top-shelf ice cream

For Olympic Mountain Ice Cream’s Karl and Bev Black, life is sweet — busy, but sweet.

Their small ice cream factory, on the same forested property as their home near Shelton, is a bit like something out of a storybook — maybe Willy Wonka meets the cookie-baking elves. It is staffed by bandannaed family members and friends who on a recent day were spreading layers of soft, whipped cream-like ice cream and blackberry sorbet in big tubs.

The Blacks have been in the ice cream business for 33 years, and they’re still passionate about making it — and eating it. But the cold reality of running a not-so-small business is that there’s not much time for sleep. Karl gets up at 4 a.m. and often stays up till 1 a.m.; meanwhile, Bev sleeps in, but is sometimes still working when the first employee arrives at 3 a.m.

“It gets busier and busier,” Karl Black said in an interview last week in the office above the factory. “We’re out here in the country, and it’s hard getting help loading the trucks. Maybe we’d only need somebody for 45 minutes at 1 o’clock in the morning. That’s tough.

“You’re juggling, and you keep adding another ball, and pretty soon you have 45 balls.”

Or maybe more, depending on how you count them.

The Blacks and their staff of about 15 full-time employers — including their sons, Trail and Joel, who both play in the band High Ceiling; their daughter, Alana; Trail’s wife, Maureen; and Alana’s husband, Justin Strickland — make more than 300 flavors of ice cream and sorbet, and they add new ones all the time.

They’re working on a flavor with coffee flour (made from the pulp of coffee cherries) for James Beard award-winning chef Jason Wilson of Seattle.

But the family creates its own new flavors, too.

“Joel came up with caramel blackberry swirl,” Bev said. “And he thought we should do maple with a blackberry swirl.”

How many gallons are they juggling each year? The factory churns out 450 gallons of vanilla every Friday, which adds up 23,400 gallons. Vanilla — the top selling flavor — makes up 31 percent of sales, so the number is in the neighborhood of 75,000 gallons per year.

And as if they weren’t busy enough, the Blacks are working on getting pints into supermarkets.

Though they try to keep their location a secret, the Blacks get plenty of visitors, who are welcomed with cups of ice cream in a random assortment of flavors depending on the day. They keep a few pints and quarts on hand to sell, too, but most of their rich ice cream and fruit-laden sorbet goes to restaurants and scoop shops, from Seattle’s Metropolitan Grill to Olympia’s Grandpa’s and Bayview Thriftway.

Traditions Café has been selling Olympic Mountain ice cream for more than two decades.

“It’s a family-run business that is so personalized,” said Dick Meyer, the café’s owner.

“They’re really nice people, and the quality of the ice cream is great.”

Olympic Mountain’s emphasis on quality starts with the ingredients. They recently switched to a new supplier of ice cream base to get higher quality ingredients, and they make sure to use Northwest fruit.

But it goes beyond ingredients. One reason Bev and Karl get so little sleep is that they pack the delivery trucks themselves — and they have their drivers unload deliveries right into the restaurants’ freezers so it doesn’t sit out on a counter melting.

“Ice cream is a temperamental product,” Karl said. “In a grocery store, it’s hard to see people opening the freezer door before they’ve even picked the flavor. All this hot air is pouring in.”

He described a Seattle restaurant that began storing the ice cream in a frequently opened under-counter freezer. The chef complained that the quality wasn’t the same, and the Blacks convinced him to get a new freezer.

Problem solved.

“No matter how great the place is, if they ruined the ice cream, I wouldn’t want to sell it to them,” Karl said. “You put your heart and soul into it.”

This story was originally published June 13, 2017 at 4:49 AM with the headline "Olympic Mountain owners lose sleep to make their top-shelf ice cream."