This is the first entry of me realizing my dream. Now that I’m a father, I’m trying to write more things down to leave for my baby girl and all of the other children that the Lord allows me to have. The goal of this blog is to capture all of the moments of this journey to start roasting coffee and hopefully open my own coffee shop in the future. And Lord willing, it’ll be full of joyful, tough, funny, and terrible moments that shed some light on the spark of a dream that hopefully lights up the city of Louisville. I hope that if my dreams come true, it’ll inspire you to pursue yours and find ways to bring light and life to the places you find yourself now. In order to do this journey any justice, I have to start at the beginning. 

My first cup of coffee was in Enid, Oklahoma in the summer of 2005. My parents never drank coffee, and my mother to this day won’t drink the coffee that I roast because “It’s not that your coffee is bad, but all coffee is just gross.” So how did I get a hold of my first sip of this golden nectar? My grandma. My grandparents stayed with us that summer because my dad got a temporary duty placement in San Antonio. I was a military brat for the first 10 years of my life, so my grandma coming in really helped out my mom for the summer when she had to raise two lil’ hellions all on her own (sorry mom!). To this day, I can not think of a single morning where my grandma was not clutching her Folgers instant coffee in her hand. One day I got brave enough to ask her what she was drinking, and if I could have some too. She happily obliged, and fixed me up a cup of coffee that I’ll never forget to this day: it was the worst thing I had ever tasted. But the thing is, I never really wanted or cared about the coffee: I cared about the connection. Every morning my Grandma would sit on the porch with her partner Ron and have their ritual morning cup of joe, and I was just so curious as to what could be so good to arrest their attention for so long as they sat and sipped away. Maybe, somewhere in my 9 year old brain, I wanted some of that peace. Or maybe I just wanted to be a grown up; I guess we’ll never know. What we do know however, is that the coffee was so bad that this would be the first and last time that I ever drank coffee in my childhood. It would take me another 10 years and the perfect persuasion to get me to ever drink that horrid elixir again. 

I think some of you know where this is going: It’s always a girl. Fellas, let me let you in on some free advice: some of the best and most impactful things in your life will happen because of a girl. Usually THE girl. I met my wife in a sleepy lil’ college town in Campbellsville, Kentucky. She had started drinking coffee the year prior to meeting me, claiming that the peppermint white mocha from Starbucks was her “gateway drug” into coffee. It took a lot of dates to coffee shops and a lot of “try this, ooh I think you’ll like this, trust me you’ll really like this” to get me to start drinking coffee. Truth be told- I never did like the drinks she offered to me, but I sure did like her. On and on I tried her coffees, hating every sip of lattes she offered me, but liking her more and more. Then on one fateful day, in her favorite coffee shop in her hometown of Owensboro, she offered me a sip of her latte that I didn’t hate. I can’t remember what it was, but I do know that was the first time that I ever enjoyed coffee. I’m sure that over time, my taste buds just became used to the bitter taste of coffee and decided to enjoy it, but I like to think the time spent with my future wife made the coffee all the sweeter. The sweet taste of falling in love with the love of my life lingered on my tongue with every sip of latte love potion number 9. From there, I began to get my own drinks, trying to find different coffees and flavors that I really enjoyed, and kept coming up short from that perfect cup of coffee.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we’re graduated, married, and moving to Phoenix, Arizona for me to pursue my master of Divinity at Phoenix Seminary. It’s 2018, and coffee and I still have a strained relationship. Coffee to me at this point is strictly utilitarian: I drink it black and I don’t really enjoy it, but it gives me the caffeine I need to continue to study, or not fall asleep at work. I was glad to have the caffeine available to me, but there was something missing that made the experience unenjoyable. Although I didn’t truly love it just yet, I sure did drink a lot of it! At this point in my life, I was working 50 hours a week and taking 5 classes at a graduate level. So believe me when I say that I emptied many a coffee pots that year. 

It wasn’t until the following year that I found what my coffee was missing. My wife wanted to get more involved and serve in our church, and one of the easiest and most fun places to plug in was the coffee shop. Amanda really wanted to learn how to make coffee, and I wanted to be anywhere she was. In the wildest of plot twists, Amanda ends up not liking making coffee very much, and I become obsessed. We even bought an espresso machine for our house that year! It was this spark along with my best friend Zach that really pushed me into specialty coffee. Zach and I connected in a season of transition for the both of us. I had just quit my job, and Zach was transitioning jobs. We met in seminary and got coffee at a local spot right by the school, and we became friends from that moment on. We would meet to study, to talk, to hang out, to be ourselves and to escape the world for a bit in the premier coffee shops in the Phoenix Valley. It was these two events that allowed me to come to the realization: Coffee is best enjoyed in community. Sharing great coffee with great people makes the cup all the sweeter.

It was out of this love for good coffee and even better company that this whole thing was born. I love good coffee, but it’s more than that: I love to share great coffee in community. The beautiful thing about coffee is that it is constantly changing. No two crops even from the same farm are the same: the challenge of coffee is to take the best of what is given to you and find a way to make it beautiful. To draw out the light and life out of every bean. But this whole process is driven by the desire to share what I have found with the people that want to enjoy it too. If you’ve read these ramblings up to this point, you’re probably one of them! I hope that the bag of beans or the cup of coffee in your hand as you read this gives you the fuel to find the light and life in every part of your own life. To do more than consume, but to create. Not just for you, but for your community as well.