Once, coffee was a 25-cent cuppa joe served in a thick ceramic mug at the counter where locals gathered in the morning to hash over everything from politics and the weather to, well, hash with an egg over easy on top.

Not anymore. Coffee doesn’t cost a quarter a cup, and don’t call it joe or java or mud. Coffee is a cappuccino, a latte, an espresso, and whatever its name, the 25 cents doesn’t even rate as a minimal down payment on an individual drink.

Carol Adams of Ashlawn Farm Coffee knows today’s lingo and today’s coffees. And in the part of her store that customers don’t see, there is a large coffee roaster and 150-pound burlap stacks of various kinds of beans waiting to be roasted and blended into the signature coffees that her store sells to thirsty customers by the cup and also packaged, to both individual and commercial clients.

Customers come from many communities in the Valley-Shore area, and commercial clients, including restaurants, originate in New York and Rhode Island as well as Connecticut.

Carol didn’t start out to be a coffee roaster.  She didn’t know anything about coffee shops or anything about roasting coffee.  She simply wanted a cup of coffee one morning and, at first, couldn’t find any to brew.

Searching around, she discovered an old coffee bag that said Cape Cod Coffee Roasters and brewed her morning wake-up.  But the coffee did something more than open her eyes; it left her with a question: What was coffee roasting all about?

The timing of her question was perfect. Carol and her husband were living on a farm and had run a farm stand in summers, but she was interested in a year-round business and now she had an idea: why not coffee?

Over 20 years ago, according to Carol, there were few local coffee roasters not only in the area but in that state.

Carole flew to Florida, to a manufacturer of coffee roasters, learned the basics and came home with a small roasting machine. She painted an old milk room and was ready to open.

There was, she thought, something natural about opening a coffee shop at the farm.

“People stopped all the time. It was like a park. They came by to pet the horses,” she recalls.  “I just put a sign out.”

Soon, she hired a neighbor to help with business and, thinking people would want something to eat, found a local company that made biscotti.

Ultimately, after more than a decade of successful coffee roasting and brewing, in 2013, Ashlawn Farm opened a store in Old Saybrook near the railroad station.

“The perfect location,” Carol says. “I was nervous, but when I opened the doors, people came.”

In 2015, the coffee shop at the farm closed, and Carol focused all her energies on the station location.  She had also opened but later closed a store in Deep River.

“It took too much of my attention away from my main interest, our cafe and roastery in Old Saybrook,” she explains.

Recently, she opened an express area, the Snuggery, for quick-serve coffee. Even so, the regular counter line, on a busy morning, stretches out the door.

Carol still does a lot of the roasting, but now the shop has a manager for the roastery, for the café and for the kitchen.  She started with three different kinds of coffee beans.  Now the shop roasts over 20 different kinds of beans, many coming from a farm in Nicaragua.

She has sent staff from the shop to visit Nicaragua to see how the coffee is grown and meet the farmers. A picture of Ashlawn staff in Nicaragua decorates one wall of her office.  One of the staffers pictured is a now-retired former teacher at Daniel Hand High School in Madison.

“He was my biology teacher,” Carol says.

Carol grew up in Niantic and Madison and graduated from St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. She taught for three years in Thailand and then for several years in Connecticut. But she left to raise her children, now 27, 26 and 16.

Today, with the success of the shop and the roasting business, Carol admits she is “holding a tiger by the tail. It is a question of work-life balance,” she says.

Coming from a family of seven children, Carol says she has had no trouble adapting to the different styles of customers.

She notices the changes that working with the public bring to her staff, “I love to see them develop. Though it is not something I want to take credit for,” she says. “They can be shy kids when they start; I love to see the growth.”

As for herself, she has no complaints.  She does everything from roast coffee to a recent afternoon when she was wiping down tables.

“I realize it’s a hard business; you have to be a workaholic. I am working all the time, even when I am at the beach relaxing,” she says.

For her, the effort is worthwhile.  “I am happy.  I am happy every single day,” she says.

Sometimes she has enough time for her own cup of coffee. Make that an iced maple latte, please.