(Also, he is best buds with Princess Kate.)
Like most people, I have very humble beginnings in coffee. My very earliest coffee memories are from mornings at my grandparent's house. I really loved spending the night at my grandparents because they would let me sleep in the RV parked in the backyard so it was like having my own fully furnished clubhouse. My grandfather was always a morning person and whenever I stayed there I would wake up early also. My grandfather had an autodrip coffee maker and he would set it up to brew the night before. He used Chock Full O'Nuts canned coffee. I remember being fascinated with this coffee from a very early age because it smelled good and grown-ups drank it so drinking coffee must actually make you a grown-up somehow. I tried it several times, black, with sugar, milk, cream, every sort of condiment combination you can imagine, but the flavor never appealed to me as a child. I distinctly remember the last time that I tasted it as a child and concluding, this just really is not for me.
As I got older, the appeal of coffee arose in my life is two related ways. The first was that I was beginning to be out and about until 3am every night. My nightly activities began to either require coffee to drive home safely or ended at a diner. The second appeal was that because I was out so late, I required coffee in order to be able to function at work the next day. I look back at my late-teen to early-adult life and I'm really not quite sure how I functioned on 4 hours or less of sleep every night. I also began playing music at this point in my life and so coffee became essential for those practice sessions that inevitably went on until the wee hours of the night. Those practice sessions somehow produced some music that allowed me to tour the world for most of my adult life. When I started traveling a lot coffee became absolutely vital to my day to day survival. People in bands who cram themselves in vans, sleep on floors or in the van because you have an 18 hour overnight drive and do not drink coffee are not human.
All of this time I had no real concept of quality coffee. Coffee was coffee. At the time I was working in the produce section of Whole Foods and traveling a lot and often when I got home from a tour I would have to scramble a bit to secure hours or a steady position while I was home. As fortune would have it, I came home from tour one day and could not get any hours for the job that I had and so I applied for a position at another store. That position was Coffee Buyer. I thought, well, I love drinking coffee, this sounds great. I got the job and I was pretty much immediately immersed over my head in all this "new" coffee. I read whatever I could find and just drank everything that was available to me. For someone who was accustomed to drinking "just" coffee, being suddenly privy to all these new flavors and aromas was really fun and exciting. I literally could not believe that there was so much variety and that it was all right under my nose this whole time.
I took to my new job very well. My newly developing passion for specialty coffee was paying off huge in the form of sales. By the third month I had somehow won an annual trip to origin that Allegro Coffee does. I was going to get to visit a Co-op in Costa Rica. This was really incredible but at the time I was still a bit too new to the industry to really understand how huge this was. It was not until I actually saw the Co-op in action that it really sunk in with me. So basically, a lot of my foundation for knowledge and interest in specialty coffee was born at origin. That's wild!
Seeing coffee being picked and processed and talking to producers was one of the most life changing events of my life. It was almost overwhelming to have that sort of experience so early in my coffee career. What I took home most from the trip was that there are people working very hard to produce these coffees that I loved. It was no accident. I felt like I had a commitment to make sure that their hard work was carried through on my end of the supply chain and to try to translate that to consumers.
About a year after my origin trip Whole Foods sent me to Allegro's roasting facility. This was my first time seeing a roastery and it left a huge impression on me. I didn't want to come back home. I wanted to just start working there immediately. Shortly after this i was invited to take a tour of George Howell's roasting facility and the presentation that he gave left me absolutely floored. His passion for great coffee is something you can literally feel in the air surrounding him and it comes without any of the egotistical trappings of an expert. What really struck me about that visit was the idea that coffee is beautiful, but the potential has not been tapped. I think about that idea a lot to this day.
Eventually I stopped traveling so much and I thought, I would really like to have a coffee specific job and not a coffee related job in a grocery store. I actually emailed Gerra about a job out of the blue. I had no idea New Harvest was actually hiring. At the time my friend and also future Harvista, Rory was living with Devlin. I was at their house one day and I was tired and Rory jokingly told me to ask Devlin to make me some coffee and I jokingly replied "ask Devlin to get me a job at his work". I had not actually seen Devlin that night but I thought about how that sentiment was not really a joke. I really did want a coffee gig. I emailed Gerra the next day and the rest is history.
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