A New Groove

Malted Vinyl brings unique “listening lounge” concept to downtown Petoskey

By Craig Manning | Jan. 6, 2024

Vinyl records are back, baby, and there’s no better place in northern Michigan to listen to them than at Malted Vinyl, a new bar and “listening lounge” located in downtown Petoskey.

Once thought a dead format, vinyl roared back to life in the 2000s and 2010s, gaining enough steam to account for 43 percent of all album sales last year in the United States. Taylor Swift, the biggest music star of the moment, has even adopted vinyl as her pet format, moving nearly 1.7 million vinyl records in 2022 alone.

The Listening Lounge

The resurgence of vinyl was part of what motivated Malted Vinyl founder Missy Leverett to open a new business in Petoskey, but certainly not the only factor. The vinyl boom, plus a global pandemic and a timely exit from her previous career, put Leverett in the right place at the right time with the right idea, and Malted Vinyl was the result.

“My background is not music at all; it’s skincare and marketing,” Leverett says. “I spent 25 years in corporate America and was offered a buyout in 2021, which I jumped at. In addition, COVID had allowed my family the opportunity to move to northern Michigan; we’d had a vacation place up here forever. Pretty soon, my husband, Jesse, and I were looking at each other and saying, ‘OK, what should we do now?’ I’d been working the same job since before I even graduated college, so it was my first time looking at different opportunities. We started asking, ‘What could the community need?’”

For an answer, Leverett says she looked to her own family. “The one thing that we could all always rally around was music,” she says. “We’d go down to the basement and listen to music and just introduce each other to different types and forms of music through different artists.”

Those basement listening sessions provided the framework for Malted Vinyl, a business inspired by the communal power of music and indebted to “the Tokyo listening lounges of the 1950s.”

The establishment, located at 316 East Mitchell Street in downtown Petoskey, boasts an extensive library of vinyl records, a six-zone high-fidelity stereo system, and a bar that serves up craft beer and cocktails, including both traditional and zero-proof options. Whether you’re looking for a vibey spot to enjoy a night with friends or a welcoming sanctuary where you can really experience the music you love, Malted Vinyl is the place to be.

One of a Kind

Central to the appeal of Malted Vinyl is its novelty. While there are plenty of restaurants, bars, breweries, and other hangout spots in northern Michigan, there’s no place quite like this.

Those unique attributes are creating substantial buzz for the business, which Leverett says has drawn a lot of customers and a lot of positive feedback since opening its doors in August. In the leadup to that opening, though, Malted Vinyl’s outlier status also posed some unique challenges.

Where there’s a fairly well-established playbook for entrepreneurs looking to open their first restaurants or breweries, listening lounges are less well-trod territory. From finding the right space to outfitting their new digs with hi-fi audio equipment and tracking down a well-rounded collection of records, Leverett says she and her husband were wandering without a map as they worked to bring their vision to life.

“The space was probably the hardest thing to find,” Leverett says. “My husband and I thought this was a viable business last October [2022], but we didn’t sign a lease until March. We spent six months looking for the right space. But we’re very happy with where we landed, right down in the Gaslight District. We really wanted a space that would be discoverable while also feeling intimate, and I think we found that.”

The next step was outfitting that space—which is “much larger” than what the Leveretts initially envisioned—with a sound system good enough to justify a business model where listening to music is the primary activity. For that, Malted Vinyl partnered with Waara Technologies of Traverse City to get an “audiophile system” perfectly suited to the size and layout of the space.

“It’s a McIntosh and JBL system, and it sounds great,” Leverett says. “We have six different stereo zones as you move through the lounge, so you can truly be immersed in the music no matter where you are in the building. And it’s loud but it’s not overpowering; you can still have a conversation, because the zones are set up to really envelope you in music, as opposed to just throwing it at you.”

Now Spinning

Finally, there was the most open-ended task of all: Building up a collection of vinyl records.

As any die-hard vinyl collector will tell you, there’s no such thing as a “comprehensive” library. There’s always another white whale to track down, another artist’s discography to complete, another new album that captures your heart and ears and demands to be purchased. As such, one of the most difficult questions the Leveretts had to answer when establishing Malted Vinyl was about which records they’d have on hand for patrons to listen to.

“The core of the collection was my husband’s, who has been collecting for years,” Leverett explains. “When we decided to do this business, the marketer in me kicked in, and I created a giant spreadsheet inventorying everything we had. I was looking not just at the specific records, but also at the genres we had represented as well as the era the music was from. And the takeaway was, ‘OK, we really need to broaden your collection.”

So began a six-month record-buying spree, with the end goal of assembling a more well-rounded collection to serve as Malted Vinyl’s in-house library.

Some purchases were aimed at filling in gaps in the catalogs of artists the Leveretts were sure would be popular among their future clientele. “The Beatles’ White Album is one we didn’t have that we knew we had to procure,” Leverett recalls. Other pickups helped add new genres to the mix (“Country music was definitely an area where we weren’t very deep with Jesse’s natural collection”) or make sure the collection was up to date (“About 60 percent of the collection was ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, so we needed to get some newer stuff”). Malted Vinyl ended up with “just over 400 records” when it launched, with many of the newer acquisitions bought at RPM Records in Traverse City.

Leverett is certain the collection at Malted Vinyl will continue to grow over time, though she chuckles when noting that there are roughly 35-40 albums that seem to be dominating most of the turntable time so far. The house rule is that each customer gets to pick one side of a record to play, and some artists and albums are simply more popular than others.

The most common pick so far?

“Fleetwood Mac is by far the number one request,” Leverett says.

Even if Rumours is getting the most play, though, that doesn’t mean there’s not a diversity of sounds pouring out of the speakers. Every Wednesday, for instance, customers can also bring their own records from home to play over the Malted Vinyl system. And in the future, Leverett says she and her husband want to add special events that showcase their catalog more fully.

“One thing we’re looking at doing is ‘complete listenings,’ where we take an evening and listen to all the albums we have from an artist, from the start of their career to the end,” Leverett says. “So, for example, we have six Elton John albums, and if you listen to them in order, you can really hear the evolution. We think that’s a fun opportunity to mix things up.”

Mixed Tapes and Mixed Drinks

Speaking of mixing things up, while the music is the main course at Malted Vinyl, it’s not the only draw. In fact, Leverett was just as passionate about getting the bar component right, especially when it came to non-alcoholic offerings

“I was looking at the zero-proof trends, and it really seemed like the rest of the world is ahead of [northern Michigan] in that area,” she says. “Two summers ago, we were up in Marquette and there were great zero-proof drinks almost everywhere you went. Petoskey didn’t have that option available yet, so I really wanted to bring that to the table with this listening lounge experience—along with, of course, the kind of great traditional cocktails a lot of places do.”

As for food, Malted Vinyl has limited offerings—“just some small plates and some cheese and charcuterie,” Leverett says—but no plans to add a more full-service restaurant in the future. The goal, always, is to keep the focus on the music.

“We want to be a place where people just go out and hang out,” Leverett concludes. “Petoskey already has lots of fabulous food, and we’re about a block from all the great restaurants. So, what we’ve noticed is that people will come in for a drink and to hang out, then they’ll leave to get dinner and enjoy downtown Petoskey…and then they’ll come back.”

Malted Vinyl is currently open 4-10pm Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays and 4-11pm Fridays and Saturdays.