DoubleShot Coffee Company

Mother’s Day, for me, has always been one of those Hallmark holidays celebrated with greeting cards and church ceremonies, maybe appreciated more by moms than moms being appreciated. I don’t know if this Mother’s Day will be different for me or not, but I certainly have a different appreciation for my mom and for mothers in general.

My mom sent me coupons for cereal and other dry goods when I was living hand-to-mouth, value shopping the bottom shelves for store brand calories to keep myself alive. She supported me when I was a vagabond, spending more time playing and exploring than working. She allowed me to move back into their house when I ran completely out of money at age 30, despite the fact that my dad was very unhappy about his son becoming a lazy, good-for-nothing bum. She hoped for the best but nurtured me through the worst.

She helped me get started in business with the DoubleShot. Neither one of us knew what we were doing, but my mom knew bookkeeping and navigated all the many government licenses, taxes, permits, fees, certificates, and filings. She worked through the complexities of all our insurance policies, payroll, IRAs, invoices, bills, accounts, debts, assets, and my never-ending quest to further complicate matters with new ideas.

She cooked dinner on Sunday and invited us kids over, always. Roast, rice and gravy. That’s what we eat on Sundays. She loved to cook and entertain. When we were growing up, my mom watched Julia Child on TV, and would write down recipes to make in her own kitchen. Sometimes that worked out and sometimes it didn’t, but she was never afraid to try. She read to my brother and me from Emily Post’s Etiquette and the NIV Bible, hoping to instill manners and morality into our hearts and minds. I came away with her desire to provide a place for people to break bread together, her sense of exploration, and a determination to stick to a code of ethics (however sloppy I’ve been in its execution), and my want of manners was not for lack of effort on her part.

The relationship between mother and son can be complicated. She wants to mother her child even when he is an adult, and I think it can be hard for the mom to let her son make mistakes and learn from experience and failure. My mother and I got into an argument about changes in the early days of DoubleShot that ended in us parting ways for a couple years. It ended with me saying things that a son should never say to his mother. And in her absence I made a terrible mess of all the things mentioned above that she so meticulously kept in order. We eventually reconciled, me apologizing and paying her back the money she’d loaned me and her telling me she forgave me (and, thankfully, coming back to work at DoubleShot).

In some way I didn’t think much of that forgiveness, maybe because I didn’t feel like a mother should hold a grudge against her son. After all, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. But forgiveness is a gift. A mother forgives her kids like she would never forgive anyone else. And a mother’s forgiveness is like none you’ll ever receive from anyone else.

Of course, I realized this too late. My mother died a month ago. Before she died she told me she loved me so much. She apologized for not being a perfect mother. She said she did her best but knew she’d failed at times. I apologized to her for being a terrible son. I should’ve begged her forgiveness, but I knew that she already forgave.

I went on a trip last week to Nicaragua. I got on the plane early in the morning and grabbed my phone to text my mom, like I always did. And again in Houston. And again when I landed in Nicaragua. I took photos I knew my mom would enjoy seeing. I remembered stopping at a Catholic Church in Sebaco last year to buy her a beautiful rosary. I looked around the airport for chocolate bars she might like. Of course, this time I didn’t send a text and I didn’t stop at the church and I didn’t buy any chocolate bars. And I realized I’m all alone. I realized those text messages weren’t just for her, they were also for me. It reminded me that someone out there cared where I was and worried that I was ok. And this new feeling of aloneness reminded me that no one in my entire life has ever loved me like my mother loved me, and probably no one ever would. She didn’t just love me for my good qualities and the things I did for her. She loved me despite the fact that I could do some really terrible things. To me, it goes back to that forgiveness. It’s easy to love someone when they’re nice to you. My mother loved me when I was mean to and dismissive of her. She loved me when I was too busy to give her the time she wanted and needed. She loved me when I caused trouble. She loved me when I failed to secure a long-term relationship with a woman, and even bought me a turtleneck and a cat calendar in support of what she must’ve thought was an alternative lifestyle. She even loved me when she yelled at me and scolded me for going behind her back to try and get her help when she was sick. It’s one thing to know it at the time. It’s quite another thing to realize the depth of it after she’s gone. All too late.

I’m reading a book right now written by a man about his time in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII. He talks about the dreariness and misery of camp life. Then he talks about a time when he started thinking about his wife. He talked to her though she wasn’t there. And he imagined her, loved her. And he looked up onto the mountainside and saw a light come on in a cabin, piercing through the pre-dawn darkness. He writes that a bird landed on the pile of dirt he’d dug out of a trench, and it stood looking at him for a long while. He seemed to take these things as signs of her presence. He didn’t know if his wife was alive or dead, but it didn’t matter. What I think he was saying was her love for him, regardless of the circumstances, was enough to buoy his spirits. The knowledge that real love exists within oneself, whether it manifests in someone else or not, is what religious people talk about when they speak of God. I know that feeling. I’ve known it for a long time, but I took it for granted.

Make no mistake, the DoubleShot wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for my mom’s help, hard work, forgiveness, and support. I brought a knowledge, curiosity, and desire to do things differently. But she pedaled while I steered. She’s gone now and we’ve spent the past couple of years learning how to operate without her. But just like love kept that man afloat in the concentration camp, there’s a spirit within the business that will help us in time of need. My mother’s life and all the foundations she helped build over 20 years at DoubleShot are part of its DNA. She birthed me and we birthed it.

The ensuing months and years will be different. Not just for me, but for all of us. You don’t know it yet, but current events will trickle down until it becomes a torrent. Now it’s time for me to ask your forgiveness. Of my seemingly erratic behavior and hopefully not-too-oft outbursts. And I ask for your support. Support to get through the coming months, and to help us continue to live out my life’s work: providing you a space to live your life, providing jobs and security to so many staff, providing a source of pride and profits to so many coffee producers. And creating a community that connects you to the staff and the origins of our products. It all seems very important. And now it’s not just my legacy, it’s indelibly connected to my mom.

I listened to a podcast yesterday that featured the astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He talked about the possibility that life is all a simulation created by a higher civilization. It begs the question of life’s purpose if this may or may not be real. And in the end it doesn't matter what is, only what we think is real. Then he said something insightful:

Live life so that the world is better off for you having lived in it.

I know my mom did that. Now it’s up to me.

Happy Mother’s Day. Thank you moms for being the kind of people who have the capacity to show us what unconditional love actually is. Amazing.

When I was ten years old, I designed a mansion. It was really more of a castle, but when I took drafting class in high school, I fleshed it out into my dream home — something akin to the mythical Wayne Manor.

I was born with an affliction: a poor kid with expensive taste. I remember, at around thirteen years old, going on a shopping trip to the mall with my mom to buy a pair of khaki pants. I found a pair that I loved, but they were way out of our price range. So we spent the rest of the day going from one department store to the next trying on less-expensive khakis that I’m sure were perfectly fine. But I’d already made up my mind. And apparently I was a brat.

After I started my first company out of college and transitioned from football to adventure sports, I decided I needed a four-wheel drive SUV. So I hightailed it to the Land Rover dealership to purchase the safari vehicle of my youthful dreams. During the two years I spent out west before returning to Tulsa to open DoubleShot, I basically lived out of that Discovery. I saw some amazing places and learned to live a simple life, but I still harbored the dream of being rich. And famous. My business plan boldly forecasted rapidly escalating sales, following a path I predicted in my early-20s: that I would be a millionaire by age 33.

From 2004-2007, I lived very primitively. And by the end of my thirty-third year of existence, despite expectations for my life’s fortune, I was destitute. I’d grown intimate with poverty, dodging debt collectors and the repo man. Still to this day, my fight-or-flight instinct kicks in whenever my phone rings. But I’ve subsisted by escaping into the wilderness or a good book, making things instead of buying them, self-reliant in all things, finding pleasure in simplicity and nuance.

I spent a couple of years peering into that other world. My girlfriend at the tail end of my 30s lived in a mansion, took airlines instead of long drives, and opted for luxury accommodations in her travels. She didn’t think twice about dining at expensive restaurants and could easily afford extravagances I’d only dreamed of. I’d learned it was difficult to be happy when you can’t pay the bills. But during that period of my life, I discovered that satisfaction comes from earning, and there’s more delight to be found in small luxuries than extravagant ones. 

I can spend hours in a creek bed picking up rocks. Sit in front of that wonderful Moran at Gilcrease staring off into a painted landscape that takes my imagination on a meandering journey to a place of freedom and serenity. I cherish a good book more than a night on the town. And an amazing cup of coffee … I wouldn’t trade it for the best wine in the world.

“Affordable luxuries,” we call those. Even the most expensive coffees we’ve ever sold don’t hold a candle to the price (per milliliter) of many folks’ everyday wine. We have an idea of what coffee should cost and it’s not the same as our idea of what things like wine should cost. Wine almost always comes in the same size bottle, so at least you can compare one to another. Coffee bags have gotten smaller, with most companies selling 12-ounce bags or the new trend of 10 ounces, usually for the price of our 16-ounce bag of coffee, if not more

Oftentimes when I drink wine, I think all winemakers must’ve gone to the same school. It’s like that in coffee too, but our school sucks. Roasters tend to be baristas who got promoted (like a bartender being promoted to vintner) or business owners who got the automated system (I don’t know if there are wine-making machines that you can dump grapes into and then let the computer do the rest). Roast profiles all copy each other, probably letting AI do the job, and produce a bunch of coffee that might taste good to some judge at a Coffee Quality Institute event but doesn’t taste good to me.

It’s a tough business, I’ve learned. Now, I’m not in it for riches. I gave up that dream a long time ago. I don’t want a boat or a membership at the country club. You don’t have to worry; I won’t show up at your cocktail party. (I wouldn’t even have anything to wear.) No, I do this for an entirely different reason. I do it because I actually love coffee and everything it stands for.

But let’s take a step back.

Coffee grounds are simply smashed-up coffee beans, which are the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. They grow on trees in the tropics, and the best ones are at high elevation on mountainsides in places like Boquete, Panama and Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. It’s even grown inland from some of your favorite tourist destinations in Mexico and Costa Rica.

Until global warming creeps up into the Rockies, we’re probably going to have to continue buying coffee from the tropics. Except for Hawaii, the United States is not in the tropics. So, apart from over-hyped Kona blends, we aren’t able to grow our own coffee. I travel to places like Colombia, Nicaragua, and India in order to get to know the land and the people who are responsible for the broad range of coffees I roast. Like the people who grow the coffees, each one has unique characteristics, bringing the aromatics from these exotic origins to your morning cup.

You probably don’t pay any attention to the commodity markets. Or tax rates. When a vote comes around for a third-penny sales tax, you probably don’t even know or care what a third-penny is. So I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you don’t know what tariffs really are, and you might even think the US government is levying these taxes against other nations.

Maybe you like the idea of tariffs. Maybe you think we can bring manufacturing back to the US if we make imported goods really expensive. Everything you see at Walmart could be produced in our nation's factories, built by American hands. Perhaps you’d like to have a job on an assembly line. Probably pays pretty well, right? Maybe then we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and create a homogenous society like the pilgrims always dreamed of.

Tariffs are taxes charged to people in the United States who import goods from other countries. I pay tariffs when I import coffee from producing countries. I’m paying tariffs on The Coffee Purist book, which is being produced in China. When I buy coffee from other importers, they pay the tariffs. But guess what. That increases the cost per pound, so they charge me and I charge you. Trickle-down economics, Reagan might call it. We haven’t felt the full impact of tariffs yet because we’re all still selling through pre-tariff inventory, but little by little it’s creeping in and you’re going to take it on the jaw.

While the commodity market (a financial market that speculates in oil, minerals, agriculture products, etc.) plays a large role in the price of commercial coffee (think big brands like Folgers, Maxwell House, Starbucks, etc.), those traders only occasionally provide a base for differentials in higher-end specialty coffees like mine. I happen to be friends with most of the producers I buy from, so I pay them more-or-less what they ask, which is often double what the commercial market is paying. As the commodity market has risen over the past year, the high price of commercial coffee has driven up the costs of these big brands, and the rising tide lifts all the boats. Thank goodness alcohol consumption is on the decline. Perhaps we’ll collectively have the budget to spend more on coffee. (See graphic.)

But beware. Do your research and you’ll find that nearly every coffee roaster in the US claims to have relationships with the folks who produce their coffee. I’m not sure if everyone is simply using the same AI bot to write the “about us” section on their website, or if they lack the integrity to tell you the truth about their “ethical” sourcing. But very few have actually been to the places where their coffee is grown and even fewer know the people who grow it. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t hide behind names like “Southern Weather” or “Monarch.” Perhaps they would write the name of the producer on the bag. Or some other foreign word that causes you to try and pronounce it in your head over and over again, e.g. Lah Mee Nee Tuh, Bam Bee Toh, Moan Tay Leen, etc. (Those are farm names.)

With escalating prices, due to tariffs and commodity markets, a lot of “specialty coffee” roasters are choosing to buy lower-quality coffee in order to keep their prices in check. That’s an easy thing to do, particularly when you’re not friends with the producers. I could simply call one of the big importers and ask them to send me samples of a few big commercial lots, and even though the coffee wouldn’t taste as good, most consumers are price sensitive and care less about quality than value. If you look around at any coffee shop (mine included), you’ll see that most people are consuming coffee with milk and sugar and flavorings. (We only have chocolate — and even though most people prefer it, ours isn’t chocolate-flavored syrup; it’s actual chocolate). Milk and sugar and flavorings mask the taste of bad coffee. Bad coffee is the result of laziness, ignorance, or prioritizing money over quality. If our “specialty coffee” roasters continue to pay low prices and purchase low quality coffee for their production roasts, blending to hide the defects and the farmers, the small producers around the world who are trying to elevate their craft will have no incentive to continue striving for quality. And that will be a HUGE loss.

I do my best to honor the farms where the coffee comes from and the people who work hard to produce the coffees. I’ve tried like hell to develop relationships with people around the world who I trust to produce excellent coffee and who believe in the same ethics of quality, hard work, and integrity. I love the craft that coffee can be — using our hands to care for the coffee plants on the farm and to pick the coffee cherries off the trees when they are ripe. To feel the coffee on the drying bed or the fermentation tank to determine its readiness. Hand-sorting coffee beans for quality, removing those beans that might taint our delicious brew. Even loading the coffee into bags at the mill and carrying those bags on men’s shoulders to load into a truck or container. My hands turn knobs and push levers, pulling the trier to see how the coffee is progressing through the roast. I roast by hand and I use my fingers to comb the quakers out of the cooling bin as it spreads hot beans over a high-speed fan. I love a good hand-made pourover. It’s the way Juan Ramon makes me coffee when I’m at his farm (Montelin) in Mosonte, Nicaragua. That’s how I make my coffee every morning when I wake up, even using a hand grinder instead of electric. It’s the manual nature of it all that draws me to it. I’m blue collar through and through. But I have expensive taste.

When people tell me they don’t like coffee, I say I don’t either. Because I can guarantee that the same coffee they didn’t like, I also don’t like. I’m not sure where a good price point would be for that commodity coffee. I suspect most producers are breaking even around $2 per pound, so for sustainability’s sake, it must be higher than that. But with the commodity market fluctuating around $4, it’s pushed specialty coffee prices into new territory. Specialty coffee is not commercial coffee. We are not Starbucks or Folgers. So what is the right price for specialty coffee? Right now, I’m paying a huge range of prices for coffee. Frankly, the cost of living is different everywhere I go. That’s part of the reason Hawaiian coffees are so expensive and Vietnamese coffees are so cheap. Living in Panama is not the same as living in Nicaragua. Hell, I could live like a king in Bolivia. So each producer asks me for a different price. I want them all to be successful and continue improving their quality each year. So I pay it. Do I think specialty coffee prices are too high right now? No, I think we’re used to paying too little. We all need to get accustomed to the idea that inexpensive coffee is not good coffee.

We have no way of knowing what’s happening on the local level for coffee producers, but I can tell you that exporters and cooperatives have power over small producers. So even when you see the C-market soaring, that may not trickle down to the farm level. When you buy coffee, whether you like it or not, you’re making an impact by supporting either low quality or high quality, either commercial or specialty. When you support low quality, you’re feeding into a system that doesn’t care about people, only about money. If you care about people, I’d suggest you carefully consider your purchases. (If you’re reading this, ignorance is no longer an excuse.)

Coffee bean prices at DoubleShot are going up. I’m paying more money to producers than I ever have. And since I’m not rich and privy to loopholes in the tariff assessments, we’re going to have to continue paying extortive taxes to the federal government. But I don’t see these prices ever coming down. Even though it pains me to have to charge my customers so much more money for excellent coffee, I’m happy that the farmers are finally making the profit they deserve. Our coffee has gotten better over the years because of access to better beans, acquisition of better equipment, and more experience roasting different types of coffees from all over the world. I’ve just gotten better at it. Better equals more value, and more value costs more money.

It’s still an affordable luxury.

Nowadays it’s mostly my own madness, but we used to have art shows at DoubleShot. Way back when we were just single-wide, I mounted steel rails high up on the walls that held rods where we hung rotating pieces from local artists. My friend Candice was in charge of contacting artists and scheduling each show. During this time, I learned that many artists spend a lot of time on their works and become very attached, to the point that they put price tags on paintings that almost guarantee they won’t have to part with them.

I’m not like that. If you even considered me to be some sort of artist, I’d say I’m a production artist, at best. I design things that I want people to take home. I create pieces that are temporary and curious. My work isn’t supposed to be perfect, just interesting. I took a page out of Shepard Fairey’s book (of which I have a few) when it comes to posters. I started noticing his OBEY signs around Nashville when I was visiting friends there in 2003. I read Shepard’s manifesto. And I brought that ethos into the DoubleShot when I started creating my own works. It’s about asking questions. It’s about piquing curiosity. We want our customers to ask questions so that we can share what we know and what we do. So if you ever see something in the DoubleShot and ask yourself, “I wonder what that’s supposed to mean?” I did my job. Now go ask a barista.

Art is subjective. Even the definition of art is subjective. Mark showed me that some guy duct taped a banana to the wall and a collector bought it for some ungodly price. Methinks Scotch tape and a coffee bean could be next. But I remember once when a show went up on those 18th & Boston walls, I puzzled at the art and told Candice, “I could’ve done that.” To which she replied, “But you didn’t.” And that’s the rift. Some art is fantastical. Some art is simple. And just because you feel it’s beneath you doesn’t mean it isn’t art.

People just like us (only way tougher and more capable) scratched stick figures of people and longhorn sheep, bears, boats, snakes, and all sorts of things into rock walls thousands of years ago. Sometimes they used ochre and other times they tapped the rock in paleo pointillism like Seurat’s ancient ancestors. Today we put ropes and stanchions around these images to protect them from being defaced by bored teenagers, and park rangers lead interpretive talks about the people who lived and made art and died in these places.

To some, the geology of the walls is interesting enough, but to most of us it’s the art on those walls that draws our attention. Were the paleoindians defacing the cliff walls by making petroglyphs and pictographs up and down the desert corridors? Some primitive form of graffiti? Perhaps they were, but now we protect it as if it’s a Banksy stencil on a London flat.

If you look at the definition of graffiti on the internet, it’s defined as a form of vandalism, which is “willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property.” But graffiti artists aren’t painting in order to cause harm to someone, and in my opinion they aren’t “spoiling the appearance” of austere, grey concrete walls or decrepit, decomposing factory facades. A lot of these guys are really talented and invest a significant amount of time and money for specialized spray paint to decorate the undersides of our infrastructure. You may not like it because you can’t read it, and when you can, you don’t like what it says. You’re confused by Rebop, Mango, Swank Tabu and the like. And you don’t like being confused. Because, just like Shepard Fairey’s OBEY posters, you might have to actually think and consider the fact that mega-corporations are bombarding you with words and symbols every day in public spaces trying to entice gratuitous consumerism. Words like Nike and Pepsi and those ubiquitous golden arches are so prevalent that you barely even think about it any more; they’ve bored deep into your subconscious.

I’ve never been a big fan of paid advertising. It seems like a promotion lacking creativity when there are so many ways of getting your message out for free. Way back in the early 2000s, I’d put DoubleShot stickers in places they might not necessarily belong. And then a customer named Jonathan showed me how to cut stencils into corrugated cardboard with an X-ACTO knife. So I started spray painting the sides of empty Solo cup cartons with the word COFFEE and some with a primitive-looking DoubleShot logo, and zip tying them to telephone poles up and down Riverside Drive. People would see a sticker at, say, Turkey Mountain and then follow my kraft blazes down the river to our front door for coffee. Once, a city worker came to DoubleShot with a big stack of my cardboard signs and told me it was against the law to put them on city poles. I was thankful that he returned them, comped him a cup of coffee, and promptly went back out to zip tie them on poles that our governors have no authority over. Then I discovered the stencil burner and mylar plastic sheeting.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember that most of the DoubleShot tshirts, hoodies, and trucker hats from the early years were painted by my dad and me with stencils I cut in plastic. We had a lot of fun airbrushing multi-layered stencils, and the designs were only limited by our imaginations.

My dad and I started restoring vintage cruisers and I created a new company called Native Bikes. We would disassemble each one and fix whatever might be wrong, sandblast the frame, and I would dream up a theme and paint scheme, oftentimes using stencils for flames, names, and patterns. The logo I’d created for Native was cut into an aluminum head badge, which branded the front of every one of our bikes, including my own racing bike.

I took that Native moniker with me on many mountain bike journeys. We painted my bike frame a metallic grey and baby blue with flames on the top and down tubes, and I named it nemesis. That bike and I felt like the nemesis of many cyclists, and our go-anywhere approach made us the antagonist to customs, regulations, and laws across the American West. The name stuck, and when I took to the streets with stencils in hand, it felt only natural to bring it with me. But I’m a minor figure (even a non-entity) when it comes to art.

I did attend a liberal arts college, where I was required to take an art participation and an art appreciation course. So I chose hand built clay (which found me crafting slab bowls and animated statues) and “Classical Gods and Heroes” (which introduced me to The Odyssey and all manner of other Greek mythological characters). In most forms of art, I’m better at appreciation than I am at participation. So I admire the 3,000 year old rock art in the Colorado river valley outside Moab. I appreciate the genius of renaissance painters whose work dangles on museum walls. I gawk at massive, corpulent black statues in Botero Plaza in Medellin. And I marvel enviously at the skill of people with aerosol paint cans who create whimsical, colorful, intricate designs in the nooks and crannies of public spaces, most of which you wouldn’t dare to go.

Like the Hindu rangoli designs on the doorsteps of homes I visited in India, street art is temporary. Government employees and citizen vigilantes are constantly blocking those colorful concrete paintings in drab grey and brown overcoats. I admire the art until it disappears, and then I wait for creatives to redecorate on some moonlit night. Like discreet billboards, our street artists are painting their tags in places you might have to look for. Oftentimes they won’t block out your view of the countryside, but peek out from the buttress of an overpass. That’s the way I like it. Art only found by the curious and observant.

And since I love free advertising, I’ve taken this opportunity to borrow my favorite Tulsa tag for a new line of products. Fittingly, this comes from my other company, Native Design, through an off-color project I call nemesis.

Over the years, I’ve ripped off some of the best. Shephard Fairey, Banksy, the paleoindians, Maurizio Cattelan, Johannes Vermeer, Bob Bernstein, Rube Goldberg, Magritte, Gainsborough, Vettriano, Picasso… Boost.

I am the nemesis, after all.

More on the BOOST lineup at purist.coffee.