Michigan Dreaming Bucket List: UP bakery run by monks offers pastries, prayers

• In the 1980s, two men from Detroit moved to the Keweenaw Peninsula to start a monastery
• To support themselves, the monks started selling fruit preserves and baked goods at a shop they named the Jampot
• Today, people come from all over to visit the Jampot, which was voted No. 5 on Bridge’s Michigan Dreaming Ultimate Summer Bucket List

Customers were already starting to line up outside the shop as Father Ambrose, working in the kitchen, sprinkled golden raisins on a piece of rolled-out dough. 

He wore a black-hooded robe, a black cap, and had his long beard tucked up into a piece of fabric. On a nearby wall hung a picture of a devil with a big red “no” sign around it. 

This is the Jampot, a bakery run by monks up on Michigan’s remote Keweenaw Peninsula. 

It landed at No. 5 on Bridge Michigan’s reader-voted Michigan Dreaming Ultimate Summer Bucket List. 

In the peak summer season, every day, hundreds of customers make their way to the tiny shop nestled between Lake Superior and forested land. They come to buy baked goods, candies, coffee beans and jam. 

But the dwindling group of monks who live and work here hope their customers will walk away with something more.

“Some people who have come here as babies, now they’re bringing their babies,” said Father Ambrose, who gave up his secular name when he became a monk, as is the practice. “I think there’s a hunger for something real and authentic.”

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A call to the Keweenaw

In the early 1980s, two friends who had been living in Detroit’s Indian Village neighborhood received what felt like a call from God to start a monastery rooted in the arts. 

They became monks and became known as Father Basil and Father Nicholas. They picked the Keweenaw Peninsula, in part, for its remoteness and started the monastery in 1983.

“I think it was the draw of the winter. It was the solitude, the monastic desert,” said Father Ambrose, who’s now the superior or “man in charge” at the Holy Protection Monastery. Father Nicholas died in 2017 and Father Basil in 2021. 

The monks started the Jampot in 1986 because they needed to support themselves.

“We're not Franciscans. We don't beg for handouts, particularly, so we had to have a steady source of income, surviving by the work of our hands,” Father Ambrose explained.

Back in the 1980s, it was common for locals to pick wild berries and sell jams and jellies. 

“So it looked like something we could do,” Father Ambrose said.

The monks started with thimbleberries, a sweet red berry that grows on the Keweenaw Peninsula and looks sort of like a flatter, wider raspberry. These days, they sell around 60 different flavors of jams and fruit preserves — from pear-cinnamon jelly to apple butter to brandied peach jam — as well as a long list of rotating sweets.

On a recent Saturday, Ashley North came with a friend and bought pumpkin cake, cranberry walnut bread, local honey, blueberry jam, a peanut-butter-and-jelly brownie and a rum raisin brownie.

“It’s just kind of a special spot. I feel like you gotta go,” said North, who was born in the area but was visiting from Pittsburgh. “It's a fun experience to take someone and see how a group of people are living and making things from the land.”

A shortage of men

Father Ambrose came up to the Keweenaw Peninsula decades ago when he was a teenager, with plans to study accounting at Michigan Technological University.

The summer before his freshman year, he started working at the Jampot but decided to skip college and join the monastery instead. Father Nicholas and Father Basil drew him in. 

“They were very holy men, dedicated to the life,” he said. “They were very hardworking, very genuine, very sincere.”

These days, the monastery has three monks. 

Father Ambrose wakes up around 4 a.m. and prepares the chapel for morning service. Morning prayer lasts about two hours. The monks eat breakfast and then, in the summer, they start their days at the Jampot around 9 a.m. They get help in the shop from four secular staffers.

Jammaker Matthew Kezele is one of them. He said that, when he got the job, he expected the monks to look and act like ones he’d seen on TV. He thought they might have taken a vow of silence and have “the bald head with that one ring of hair around.”

What he found instead was “just a bunch of great, normal people that you can laugh and joke around with.”

Father Ambrose said that, ideally, they’d have about four more employees and five additional monks.

“We’re severely understaffed right now,” he said. “It's just a hard, hard time to find workers and actually men who want to dedicate themselves to the monastic life.”

A larger mission

At the register, a customer asked one of the other monks, Father Sergius, about Gordon Ramsay. The famous British chef stopped by the Jampot to hang with monks while filming a “Yooper Cuisine”-themed episode of the National Geographic show, “Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted.” 

“So when Gordon Ramsay came, did you all get to see him?” the customer asked.
“It was during COVID. He never actually came in the bakery because they didn't want him getting near anybody that they had not COVID-screened. We all had the chance to, but I didn't want the COVID screen so I passed on it,” Father Sergius admitted. 

Then he explained with a hearty laugh: “I think I've been in the monastery long enough that I didn't really know who he was!”

Father Sergius describes himself as an upbeat guy. But, back when he was in high school, he felt depressed leading up to a mission trip he planned to do in Mexico. He talked to his dad about it and his dad said, “Maybe you’re not meant to go.”

He stayed home and, during the time he would have been on the trip, he saw a video on TV about the monastery founded by Father Nicholas and Father Basil.

“And it just immediately grabbed me. And so I made a one-week visit,” he said. 

He felt compelled to join the monastery but promised his dad he’d go to college.  But he couldn’t stop thinking about the monastic life. After a year of university, he dropped out and became a monk.

During his first decade at the monastery, he would often volunteer to be the Jampot’s go-to quality control taste-tester. Then his doctor told him “gluten is not your friend” and instructed him to start avoiding it. The diagnosis has been a bit of a blessing and a curse.

“It is challenging when something is hot, fresh out of the oven and you’re smelling it and thinking, ‘I’d really love to do quality control on that item,’ and you know you can’t or you shouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve had to scale back, which has been good for the waistline.”

The monastery has plans to start operating a separate kitchen devoted to making gluten-free goods, but the shortage of hands has forced them to put that project on hold.

“Many people are coming here because they want cookies or want a muffin, but there's many, many people who come and they're passing on prayer requests,” Father Sergius said. 

He recalled a man with cancer who came in with his wife and asked the monks to pray for him. The couple returned later to tell the monks he was cancer-free, and thanked them for praying for him. 

“There's a larger mission to even the bakery,” Father Sergius said. “It's not just here to support us, but it's also a way that we can be praying for people and interacting with people as they travel this beautiful part of Michigan.”